Objective
"Mental health problems are associated with variation in the brain and genome. The mechanisms underlying these associations are extremely hard to discern because they are subtly distributed across thousands of genes and not specific to neural processes. Meanwhile, a focus on biology tends to induce feelings of helplessness among those affected by mental health problems, as biology is typically seen as deterministic. I propose that both our mechanistic understanding and the sense of personal agency will leap forward if we consider modifiable, heritable social and lifestyle factors (i.e. ""environment"") centrally within the causal chain from genes to brain to mental health.
Environmental factors are known to be heritable, yet a bottom-up gene-brain causal model prevails due to its intuitive and practical appeal. Standard methods are limited to pairwise associations between the many relevant genetic, brain and environmental variables. The heritable environment is thus hard to account for, let alone embrace as an opportunity. We developed a new multivariate method that can identify patterns of shared genetic effects across thousands of variables. By combining this method with genetically informed causal models and family designs, we will reveal the overall explanatory power and pervasiveness of environment-mediated genetic influences on brain and mental health. We will further characterise these to identify which environmental factors are potential mediators of genetic influences on brain and mental health, when they emerge, and if and how they are personally modifiable.
The goal of EM-POWER is to lay empirical foundations for a new non-deterministic biological paradigm, that leads to new mechanistic insights of environment-mediated biological mechanisms, within this project and beyond. The future outcome is that people know the potential of personal control over biological factors and can break causal chains from genetic vulnerability to mental health problems."
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
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Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsHost institution
6525 GA Nijmegen
Netherlands