Improving mental health in young people through harmonised collection of data
Poster C122, Wednesday, October%2010, 11:30%20am%20-%201:00%20pm, Essex%20Ballroom
Suzie Lavoie1,2, Kelly Allott1,2, Paul Amminger1,2, Maximus Berger1,3,4, Michael Breakspear5, Anjali Henders6, Rico Lee7, Ashleigh Lin8, Patrick McGorry1,2, Simon Rice1,2, Lianne Schmaal1,2, Stephen Wood1,2; 1Orygen, the National Centre of Excellence in Youth Mental Health, 2The University of Melbourne, 3Australian Institute of Tropical Health and Medicine, 4James Cook University, 5Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital, 6The University of Queensland, 7Monash University, 8Telethon Kids Institute, The University of Western Australia
The current international trend is to create large datasets with data already collected and/or deposit newly collected data into repositories accessible to the scientific community. These practices lead to better transparency of the data and enable more efficient data sharing. In Australia, to facilitate data sharing and collaborative opportunities, a group was created, namely the Neurobiology in Youth Mental Health Partnership. This group brings together specialised researchers from around Australia to work toward a better understanding of the cross-diagnostic neurobiology of youth mental health, and the translation of this knowledge into clinical practice. One of the mandates of the group was to develop ways to harmonise the prospective collection of data across research Centres in the field of youth mental health. Four key domains were identified: clinical assessments, brain imaging, cognitive tests and collection of blood samples. A core set of assessments/data collection has been selected for each domains and developed into Standard Operating Procedures, which will be presented and open for discussion at the conference. The use of this protocol will facilitate the pooling of psychopathological and neurobiological data into large datasets allowing researchers to tackle questions requiring very large numbers. This transdiagnostic approach will hopefully help the research community towards a better understanding of the mechanisms underlying mental illnesses.
Topic Area: Translational Research