Project description
How childhood stress results in harmful behaviours in teens
Adults engaging in risky behaviours continue to pose significant social problems, but there is still a lack of understanding of how stress affects physiology, emotions, and behaviour in the long term. The ERC-funded LIFECOURSE project aims to pioneer a longitudinal study that combines information on personal, social and biological features of young people’s lives. It seeks to uncover how these multiple factors interact to influence the development of harmful behaviour such as substance use, self harm, or delinquency. By combining retrospective, longitudinal data from registry sources in Iceland, LIFECOURSE will use a multilevel developmental framework to identify individual and collective level variables in research on the independent and interactive effects of determinants. It will enable improved policies to address harmful behaviours of adolescents.
Objective
The overall objective of the proposed research is to improve our understanding of the interplay between biological, environmental, and social factors that influence the development of harmful behaviours in adolescents. We propose to conduct the first multilevel cohort study of its kind that would combine biological, behavioural, and social data from before birth through adolescence for an entire population birth cohort of adolescents. The program is based in Iceland due to a unique infrastructure for the collection of health and social registry data as well as available access to a whole cohort of adolescents. We will extend our previous work using a multilevel developmental framework to identify both individual and collective level variables to study the independent and interactive effects of biological, environmental, and social determinants of adolescent harmful behaviours, with special emphasis on the influence of stress on substance use, self-inflicted harm, suicidal behaviour, and delinquency. Our retrospective longitudinal database will include existing registry information on maternal, child, and environmental determinants of adolescent harmful behaviours, measured prior to birth, at the time of birth, and during the infant, toddler, preschool, middle-childhood and early adolescent years, for the entire 2000 year birth cohort. We will prospectively measure biomarkers in human saliva and use an existing social survey infrastructure to add to the registry database. We have acquired all necessary ethical and organizational permissions and have carried out a preliminary study that shows registry data compliance of over 90% for all variables we intend to combine. This is a fundamental research project, examining unchartered territory. The results of this project will stimulate international research but more importantly, an understanding that will lead to better policies, planning and quality of life for young people in Europe and beyond.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
ERC-COG - Consolidator GrantHost institution
102 REYKJAVIK
Iceland