Descripción del proyecto
Comprender los vínculos entre el estatus socioeconómico y la salud mental de los niños
El estatus socioeconómico de los padres y la calidad del barrio son factores que pueden ayudar a determinar la salud mental y el rendimiento educativo de un niño. La infancia es un período vulnerable y el aumento de la desigualdad afecta a la forma en que los niños crecen. En el proyecto GeoGen, financiado con fondos europeos, se propone un paradigma innovador que generaliza los niveles de inferencia temporal, espacial, social, genética e individual para entender cómo y por qué la posición socioeconómica en los primeros años de vida se asocia con la salud mental y el rendimiento educativo. El equipo del proyecto estudiará a niños similares desde un punto de vista genómico que crecen en familias diferentes en lugares diferentes y en épocas diferentes para evaluar de forma conjunta las hipótesis sobre la selección, la causalidad y los factores de riesgo y protección de la salud mental y de los resultados académicos. En GeoGen, se utilizará la genealogía completa y datos de eventos anuales de Noruega desde 1940.
Objetivo
Surging inequality is a defining feature of the world children grow up in today. The neighborhood they live in stages a primary developmental context where this feature of our present time plays out. Children’s demographic and socio-economic status (SES) is given by the status of their parents. Parental and neighborhood SES is associated with child mental health and educational performance, and childhood is a vulnerable period. To understand how and why early life socioeconomic position is linked to mental health and educational performance, I propose a groundbreaking paradigm generalizing temporal, spatial, social, genetic, and individual levels of inference. I will do this by having genomically similar children growing up in different families at different places at different times. These multitudes of counterfactuals will allow me to jointly evaluate hypotheses on selection and causation and risk and protection factors for mental health and academic outcomes.
The GeoGen study will render a new understanding of (a) how transmission of risk is transmitted across generations, (b) how early mental health is an antecedent of academic failure, (c) the interactions between genetic risk and protective contextual factors, and (c) characteristics of schools and neighborhoods that are optimal for children’s psychological development.
I will use Norway since 1940 as a laboratory (n=8 400 000) with registries giving full genealogy and year-by-year event data on place of residence, indicators of SES, mental health, and educational performance. Within this, I will nest a population-based cohort study comprising genotyping of families (n=240 000 in 110 000 families) and a wide array of survey data, such as non-cognitive skills. The combination of having data on all people in all schools and neighborhoods over time allows me to do an unprecedented study on the gene-environment interplay between risk and protective factors for mental health and academic outcomes.
Palabras clave
Programa(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Régimen de financiación
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsInstitución de acogida
0313 Oslo
Noruega