Project Details
Supervisor
Project area or title
Mapping brain circuit changes to understand resilience to depression in children and adolescents
Description
The project will use advanced multimodal brain MRI from the imaging-rich, well phenotyped ABCD cohort in children (images are already available) to characterise circuit-based brain signatures associated with phenotypic data and recorded events indexing resilience and conversely vulnerability to depression in childhood.
This involves the extraction and refinement of imaging-derived brain phenotypes in brain circuits known to be dysfunctional in depression and building and testing a prediction model. Explorative mechanistic analysis will include putative causal factors, such as adverse life events in the ABCD dataset. There is the option to establish further evaluation if the relevance of the identified brain circuit signature by establishing a local dataset of at risk adolescents studied during heightened risk of stress in a naturalistic design in first year students.
Theme
Common Mental Health
University
University of Nottingham