Identifying Depression Early in Adolescence
Depression is a leading cause of disability in adolescents worldwide and a major risk factor for suicide, the third most frequent cause of death in adolescents globally. A barrier to developing more effective interventions for adolescent depression is that we lack sufficient understanding of how depression develops and how to identify adolescents who are at highest risk. Moreover, 90% of the world’s adolescents live in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), yet most research on adolescent depression has been conducted in high-income countries, leaving a significant gap in our knowledge. Therefore, it is important to ascertain which adolescents are most at risk of developing depression in LMICs to effectively target interventions to prevent its onset. We recently established an interdisciplinary network of researchers and clinicians in Brazil, Nepal, Nigeria, UK and USA: the MQ Identifying Depression Early in Adolescence (IDEA) consortium, which aims to improve early identification of adolescents at risk of developing depression globally to guide the targeting of preventive strategies. This symposium presents the first wave of findings from IDEA: a review of biological markers of youth depression (Mondelli); performance of our Brazilian risk calculator for future depression in other LMICs (Fisher); clinical & neuroimaging correlates of risk in 150 risk-stratified adolescents in Brazil (Kieling); and stakeholder perspectives on implementing adolescent risk screening (Kohrt).
Chair: Helen Fisher
Valeria Mondelli: Identifying Depression Early in Adolescence (IDEA) project and biomarkers of adolescent depression
Helen Fisher: Predicting individualised risk of future depression onset among adolescents in Nepal and Nigeria using a model developed in Brazil
Christian Kieling: Identifying Depression Early in Adolescence Risk Stratified Cohort (IDEA-RiSCo): design, methods and initial results
Brandon Kohrt: Youth and other stakeholder perspectives on public health implementation of a risk calculator for prediction of adolescent depression