PRedictive brain in Early-life: Exploring Mental Health development and Psychiatric Trajectories

Over the last year, a global mental health crisis has severely impacted a generation of children and adolescents, with 20% of EU youth experiencing a mental disorder by the age of 24.

Despite calls by the European Child Guarantee to reduce this burden through early detection and intervention, there are still no reliable biological markers to identify children at risk of future mental health.While mental disorders are usually first diagnosed during adolescence, the brain mechanisms underlying them begin prior to their behavioural manifestations.

Looking at brain development is a promising approach to predict mental health in children, as brain follows typical growth curves during childhood.

However, previous neuroimaging studies have struggled to establish a consistent link between brain development and mental health due to inconsistencies in brain measure and mental health.

The PRE-EMHPT project aims to overcome these challenges by applying standardized measures of brain growth in children to predict mental health in adolescence, and identify the key periods of brain vulnerability underlying these trajectories.

It will harmonize the largest longitudinal brain imaging datasets in children from 24 cohorts, encompassing 18,000 subjects, to generate sex-specific standard brain measures for each age.

From these measures, the applicant will define subgroups of subjects based on the similarity of the growth of their brain regions, and estimate their associations with mental health in adolescence.

The specific periods in time increasing the risk of belonging to one subgroup will be estimated as well as the validity of the results in adolescents and young adults with psychiatric disorders.This work will be conducted over 24 months at Charit Universittsmedizin Berlins Centre for Population Neurosciences and Stratified Medicine (PONS), under the supervision of Prof.

Gunter Schumann.