Transcript
Dr Victoria Powell Hi, I’m Dr Vicky Powell. So I am a Research Associate, based at the Wolfson Centre for Young People’s Mental Health at Cardiff University and today, I’m going to be talking about the effect of parental depression on child mental health. So, a bit about me to start. I did my PhD at Cardiff University a few years ago, looking at the relationship between ADHD, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, in childhood and depression in life. But, broadly, I’m quite interested in, kind of, risk and protective factors for depression in young people and, also, later on in life, as well.
I work mainly from a, kind of, developmental perspective, looking at different life stages, across the lifespan, and I also work, kind of, in a, sort of, epidemiology-focused type way, as well. So, at the moment, what I’m working on is mainly looking at prevention of depression in young people. So I’m working on a clinical trial that I will tell you a little bit more about during the talk today, as well.
I’m based in the Cardiff University School of Medicine, Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Group for research, and also at the Wolfson Centre, as I say. So, this is a research centre that was established with funding from the Wolfson Foundation, and it’s focused on understanding, kind of, causes of youth mental health, thinking about ways we can intervene and help, focused quite specifically on depression and anxiety. But we also look at other things, particularly neurodevelopmental disorders, as well, such as ADHD.
So, what will I be covering today then? The talk is, kind of, covering three different sections. So, I’ll start with a, kind of, broader introduction to depression, parental depression, and impact on offspring, so a bit of a refresher of the epidemiology of depression here, as well. Then I’ll be moving onto talking about some recent work in the EPAD cohort. So this is the Early Prediction of Adolescent Depression study, and I’ll be talking you through some work I’ve done in this study, which is a cohort of the offspring of recurrently depressed parents. And then I’ll be moving onto talking about my current work, focused largely on a clinical trial called the SWELL trial, and this is a clinical trial aiming to prevent depression, or reduce depression symptoms, in young people who are at elevated risk, mainly through having a parent with a history of depression.
This is, kind of, quite a basic, kind of, introduction, but what is depression? So, you’ll probably be familiar, I imagine, with the diagnostic manuals for depression. So, namely the ICD-11 that we use more over here in Europe, but also the DSM-5 that’s used in America, as well. So, these, kind of, lay out a really useful guideline for how to diagnose depression, but perhaps don’t capture, kind of, all the heterogeneity we see in depression presentation between different people. And these are the diagnostic manuals I, kind of, use quite a lot during my research, so when I refer to, kind of, research diagnoses of depression later in the talk, I’ll be using these kinds of frameworks.
These frameworks, or diagnostic criteria, include several symptoms that you’d expect to see in somebody who has depression. So, the key one, kind of, being low mood, also, lack of enjoyment in things previously enjoyed, as well as a few other symptoms, such as reduced energy, appetite change, weight change, sleep problems, suicidal thoughts, plans or attempts, other symptoms, such as difficulty concentrating and feelings of worthlessness or guilt.
What’s important to note, I suppose, that depression doesn’t just present as a, kind of, yes/no, you have the diagnosis, but it’s also a continuous trait within the population. And, in fact, those with subthreshold symptoms, so symptoms that don’t meet the, kind of, stricter diagnostic criteria for depression, still are at an increased risk of going on to have a full-blown disorder later on, and also experience other adverse outcomes.
So, obviously we know that depression is, kind of, classed under this umbrella of mood disorders. It, sort of, has a relapsing and remitting course over time. So, people might experience several episodes during their lifetime, but have other times where they’re feeling perhaps better. And as I, kind of, briefly mentioned earlier, it’s a heterogenous disorder, so it’s not going to look the same from person-to-person, and this is a really important consideration to have when doing research in this area.
The other thing to note is that, sort of, the rates of depression increase sharply during adolescence, and this is particularly true for girls. So this is when we start to see a gender, kind of, difference emerging in the rates of depression. [Pause] And why is depression important? Well, depression is a leading cause of disability worldwide, and has a huge burden in terms of, kind of, days with – lived with disability over the life course. And, kind of, moving onto why parental depression is important then, so I’m based in Wales, so looking from a Welsh perspective, but this is, sort of, true to what we see in the UK, as well.
So, in Wales, 35% of mothers have a history of depression and 18% of fathers or stable males, so a male that was living in the same household, kind of, for a significant period of the child’s life, also have a history of depression, according to findings that look at routinely collected data across the population of those registered with a GP in Wales. And approximately half of young people diagnosed with depression have a parent with a history of depression. So, as you can see, this is actually quite a common group and an important group to consider.
So, in terms of other reasons why parental depression is important, we know that there is an increased risk of mental health problems, particularly mood and anxiety disorders in the offspring of depressed parents. They are two to four times more likely to have depression themselves, and having a parent with depression also affects the severity and course of disorder in offspring. So they’re likely to have a, kind of, more severe presentation of depression. The other reason that parental depression is important is we know from reviews of prevention interventions in young people that prevention techniques that are targeted at high risk populations tend to be more effective. And one of these high risk populations, of course, is the children of depressed parents. So, moving on then to some recent work I led on in the EPAD study, so just to remind you, that’s a cohort of the children of depressed parents. So, I conducted this work, kind of, following the children of depressed parents from childhood to adult life, focusing on mood and anxiety disorders in these children. And the EPAD study followed the children of depressed parents and their parents, as well, over a period of around 13 years, so spanning from 2007 to 2020, and there were four, kind of, waves of assessments.
So, at the baseline, there were about 337 families, with a parental history of depression, who were assessed using, kind of, interviews and questionnaires, gathering really rich data on their symptoms and other related traits. And then they were followed up, the same families again, about a year after that, and then, again, another year after that, and then there was a sort of more adulthood-focused follow-up around eight years later. So, we, kind of, have data that covers childhood, through to adolescence, through to adulthood.
So, to give you some background on this work, the risk of mental health problems, as we know, is increased in the offspring of depressed parents, particularly mood and anxiety disorders. And the transition period from adolescence to adulthood is a period of vulnerability, when the rates of psychiatric disorder increase. And it’s also a time of, kind of, tumultuous social change for individuals, so moving from, kind of, the family home with your parents and becoming independent, maybe going to university or getting a job.
So, this is a really important period to look at in the offspring of depressed parents, but we don’t actually have many previous studies looking at this period in these offspring, particularly using, kind of, multiple assessment timepoints to track this transition. So, the aim of this work was to examine the prevalence and course of psychopathology, namely anxiety and depression, from mid-childhood through to adulthood, so spanning the ages of nine to 28, in this sample of young people who have a parent with a history of depression. And we also wanted to investigate social functioning in adulthood, so age 18 to 28, and how this, kind of, related to prior psychiatric disorder, or current psychiatric disorder, in the offspring.
So, how did I go about this then? So, as I said, we used the EPAD study. So this is a study of 337 families, so 337 offspring, aged nine to 17 years old at the baseline, who were then followed prospectively at four assessment waves, spanning 13 years in total. We mainly used, for this study, this measure called the Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Assessment, and this is a really detailed clinical interview, from which you can derive, sort of, research DSM diagnoses of depression, anxiety and other mental health conditions. And we also used questionnaire measures of other things, particularly the social outcomes in adulthood.
So, one thing to note with this study is, as you can see, there was a wide age range. So offspring were aged nine to 17 at baseline, so we had a wide age range at each subsequent wave. But for this study we wanted to look at developmental patterns, by developmental stage. So, what we did was we calculated the prevalence of disorders, by age group in years, rather than by wave, and in order to do this, we had to do something called ‘clustering’ in our analyses.
So, clustering on the ID of each participant, to account for participants that might have occurred in the same age group at multiple waves. So, for example, if I wanted to look at childhood, adolescence, adulthood, etc., there might be some participants who were still in that childhood group at waves one and waves two, because of their age. So, all analyses, kind of, accounted for that and clustered people on their ID number.
So, this is a very rudimentary diagram of what the EPAD data looks like. So, we have around 300 families who stayed with us through waves one to three, ‘cause these happened in quite quick succession, so there was around a year gap between each of these. But then, at wave four, which happened around seven to eight years later, there was a bit of a drop-off in numbers, because of this longer time lag, so we have about 200 families participating by this point.
So, when I looked at the data by age and years, what I ended up with was lots of young people who had data in, kind of, the late childhood, early teenage years and then a, sort of, drop-off in data available later into adulthood. So, one way of tackling this is to then group these data into, kind of, age groups. So, I ended up with a childhood group, an early adolescence group, a late adolescence group, transition to adulthood group, that we’re, kind of, interested in for this research, and then this mid to late 20s group, as well. So, you can see the numbers of participants in each of these age groups at the bottom there.
So, moving onto the results of this study. Firstly, we wanted to look at the prevalence of mood and anxiety disorders from childhood to early adulthood. So, for mood prevalence, what we found was around 25% of the offspring, so quite a high number, met criteria for a current mood disorder, at least once during the course of the study. And if you break this down by those age groups that I derived, you can see that, as we might expect, this was less common in childhood, kind of, increasing through adolescence and, sort of, beginning to peak at the transition to adulthood and then peaking in the mid to late 20s.
And I suppose one thing to note is that at each age group, these numbers that we were seeing, for prevalence of mood disorder, were higher than you’d expect in the general population, based on reports from the general population. So, kind of, showing this increased prevalence of these disorders in these offspring. When I looked specifically at major depressive disorder, being the, kind of, most common mood disorder, we see a similar pattern. So, kind of, less common in childhood, increasing through adolescence, and peaking in the mid to late 20s.
For anxiety disorders, we saw a slightly different pattern. So, a third of the offspring met criteria for a current anxiety disorder at least once during the study, so, again, quite a high rate. And we see that these – that the prevalence is, sort of, higher in childhood, as we might expect, than mood disorders, and it, kind of, seems to drop down a little bit during early adolescence, before rising again during later adolescence, and peaking, kind of, maybe a little bit earlier than the mood disorder, so at the transition to adulthood.
When we look at generalised anxiety disorder, again, as, kind of, being one of the most common anxiety disorders, we see a pattern that’s more similar to what we saw with the mood disorders, I suppose. So, less common in childhood, before increasing through adolescence, and then peaking at this transition to adulthood. So, another thing I looked at was breaking down these results by sex, so looking at males and females separately, and apologies for all the, kind of, numbers in the table. But one of the interesting things to note in this study was that these, kind of, sharp increases in prevalence that we were, sort of, seeing around the transition to adulthood in mood and anxiety disorder seemed to be happening slightly later for males than for females, so I’ve sort of highlighted in bold for comparison here. But for mood disorders, for example, we see a sharp increase in the rate of mood disorders during late adolescence, as you might expect, but this doesn’t seem to happen for males, until the transition to adulthood, so around 18 to 22 years.
For anxiety disorder, again, this sharp increase in anxiety disorder seems to be happening for females in early adolescence, whereas it doesn’t seem to happen until late adolescence for males. And another interesting point was that, as I touched on earlier, we know there’s a female preponderance typically of depression. But in this sample, what we saw actually that was – once these rates had increased in males, they remained similarly quite high in the mid to late 20s and later on, as they did for females, so if not even a little bit more prevalent in males later on in adulthood than for the females.
And that brings me onto my next, kind of, section of results for the EPAD study. So, we also wanted to look for these mood and anxiety disorders at the age at which they were first diagnosed, the, kind of, course they followed over time, and patterns of comorbidity, as well, so, like, co-occurrence with other disorders at the same time. So, with the age at first diagnosis findings, I guess the key finding was that it varied really very widely. So, as you can see, for mood disorders, the age at first diagnosis within the study ranged from nine to 26 years old. So a really, really big age range there and this was seen similarly for anxiety disorders, as well. And I guess one thing to note is that some of these ages at onset were really very young, compared to what we’d expect from the general population. So, for example, one child in the study had their first research diagnosis in this study of major depressive disorder at only ten years old. So really, we’re observing quite young ages at first diagnosis in this sample.
And in terms of the course that these disorders followed over time, so even though these young people were still quite young really at the end of the study, so from 18 to 28 years old at the end of the study, over 7% of them had had more than one episode of mood disorder, across the four study assessment waves. And over 13% of the sample had met criteria for anxiety disorder at, at least – at more than one assessment wave, as well.
And comorbidity was very, very common. So, of those who had a mood disorder, over 70% of them had another psychiatric disorder that they met criteria for, at the same time, and for anxiety, this figure was over 60%. And just to break down, kind of, the types of comorbidity we saw in the study there, as you can see, kind of, of the comorbidity types we saw, mood and anxiety comorbidity was by far the most common, followed by having, kind of, more than one type of anxiety disorder concurrently.
And this, sort of, plots the rates of mood disorder comorbidity over time, or over, sort of, age group, compared to having a single mood disorder on its own. So, as you can see, for mood disorder comorbidity, this was more common than just having one mood disorder on its own, across each age group. For anxiety disorder, the pattern was a little bit different. So, while in, kind of, childhood, having a single anxiety disorder and no other concurrent disorder was more common than having a comorbid presentation. As we moved into adolescence and adulthood, comorbidity became the more common presentation.
And the final, sort of, section of results for this work we’re looking at social functioning, impairment, and risky health behaviours in early adulthood. Really, I guess, the key takeaway from this is that poor outcomes in early adulthood, sort of, socially speaking, for these offspring, were really very common. So, over half of the offspring had, sort of, impairment in their daily functioning by their early adulthood, so age 18 to 28. And nearly 10% had reported a recent suicide attempt, or deliberate self-harm. Nearly a third had, kind of, harmful levels of alcohol use. Nearly a quarter, kind of, reported poor social support, so they reported only having one person, or no-one, to rely on for social support. On the other hand, sort of, education and employment outcomes didn’t look quite so bad in the offspring of depressed parents. So, nearly 60% had completed a degree or were currently in university, while only 15% were not in education, employment or training. I suppose it’s important to note that we had that bit of dropout by wave four in this study, due to, kind of, the later timepoint of data collection, and, sort of, parental education was found, I think, to be associated with that dropout slightly. So, it might be possible that the more educated, kind of, families were retained to a, kind of, greater extent by this timepoint, so that might be affecting results there.
And in terms of how, sort of, prior and current disorder in the offspring affected these social outcomes in early adulthood, we found that both previous and current mood and anxiety disorder in the offspring were significantly associated with this impairment in daily functioning in adulthood. Current mood and anxiety disorder was also associated with the recent suicide attempt or deliberate self-harm. Both previous and current mood disorder or anxiety disorder were associated with being, kind of, less likely to complete a degree, or be currently in university. And only current mood or anxiety disorders seemed to be significantly associated with increased likelihood of being not in education, employment or training.
So, moving onto discussing these results then. Really, one of the key takeaways from, kind of, looking at the prevalence over the different age groups was we could see that the risk period for the onset of mood and anxiety disorders was really very prolonged in the offspring of depressed parents. Extending from childhood all the way through to adulthood, with prevalence, sort of, peaking in early adulthood. The transition period from adolescence to adulthood was a key emerging point for mood and anxiety disorders, particularly in males. The age of onset of disorders varied widely, and comorbidity was very common. And high rates of poor social outcomes in early adulthood were observed, some of which were associated with prior and/or current mood or anxiety disorder.
So, some strengths of this particular study were we had detailed clinical measures, over multiple assessment waves, spanning 13 years. This cohort, the EPAD cohort, is the largest cohort that we know of, of the offspring of parents with major depression. Some limitations of this study, however, are the attrition that I referred to earlier, so the loss of certain participants over time. We did not have a control group in this study, as we looked only at the offspring of depressed parents in this cohort.
And, thinking about the implications of this work then, I suppose we already know from previous studies, and from, kind of, policies, including those put forward by the World Health Organization, that the offspring of depressed parents should be considered for prevention and early intervention programmes. This study, sort of, adds to that and, also, highlights that such interventions may need to be delivered or considered over sustained periods, and the need for prolonged vigilance in this group of the offspring of depressed parents.
So, that brings me onto the next section of my talk. So, currently, what I’m working on is a clinical trial of a preventative intervention in young people who have a parent with a history of depression. So, this trial is called the SWELL trial, that stands of the Skills for Adolescent WELLbeing, and I’m going to talk you through, sort of, what we plan to do in this trial. So, this trial sits under a workstream at the Wolfson Centre called Interventions and Adolescence at High Familial Risk. And the core aim of this workstream is to develop and test intervention to support young people, and their families, where a parent suffers from depression.
To give you some background on this work, in the children of parents with a history of depression, we know from the previous parts of my presentation that they’re at increased risk of depression, and CBT-based depression prevention approaches appear to be promising in this group. One programme that’s shown particular benefit is the Coping with Stress programme, and this is a group-based cognitive behavioural therapy, or CBT, programme.
And Garber and colleagues, who ran a large randomised controlled trial over in the US, back in 2009, found that this intervention was effective in preventing the onset of depression, but not when the young person’s parent was currently depressed at the start of the study. So it seemed to be less effective for young people whose parent was currently depressed, though all of the young people in the study had a parent who had a history of depression.
So, with this in mind, we made a few updates to the intervention for the SWELL trial. Firstly, we’ve added this parent depression treatment optimisation phase, for parents who are depressed at the start of the study, prior to the young person being randomised to the preventative intervention. And this is to address that finding from the Garber study, where they found that current depression in the parent modified the effects of the intervention for the young people. And really, we’re aiming to get the parent into the best possible place we can, before the young person starts their intervention, and we hope that this means it will work better for the young person. But the parent will still remain in the study, and their child, regardless of whether they recover or not at the end of this optimisation phase.
And we’ve also adapted the trial, adapted the trial intervention, for scalability within a, kind of, modern, UK, NHS context. So, it’s been shortened from eight months to five months overall. It’s also been – it’s also going to be delivered online, sort of, over a Zoom-like platform, rather than in person. So, to give you an overview of the SWELL intervention and what it, kind of, involves. It’s a psychoeducational group, CBT, delivered, as I say, over Zoom. It will involve groups of six to eight young people being, sort of, guided through sessions by a trained Therapist. There will be eight lots of weekly sessions that are 90 minutes in length, covering, kind of, various cognitive restructuring type skills, and this will be followed by three lots of monthly continuation sessions. So these will allow an opportunity to consolidate what they’ve learned in the weekly sessions and, kind of, troubleshoot any issues they’ve been having.
So, the first sessions provide an overview of depression, its relationship to stressful situations, and then introduce the group members to each other, of course. And then the sessions move onto focusing on training and cognitive restructuring skills, sort of, focused on techniques for modifying negative thoughts. And so, the aims of this study then, are to test the effectiveness of this SWELL intervention for the prevention of depression episodes in young people at an increased risk for depression. And we also want to test the effect of the intervention on secondary outcomes, such as symptoms of depression and anxiety. And if the intervention works we want to know, you know, why it works and how it works, so we will also be exploring potential mechanisms through which the intervention might have its effect and, sort of, factors affecting, kind of, implementation of the intervention.
In terms of, kind of, who we want in the study and who we’re looking to recruit, our inclusion criteria are young people aged 13 to 17 years, who have subthreshold depressive symptoms at the moment, or have a history of depression in the past, and this is because we’re looking to, kind of, prevent depression rather than treat an active depressive episode. They also need to have a parent with a history of recurrent depression, so at least two previous episodes, who’s willing to engage with the study in a depression treatment plan.
And in terms of, kind of, exclusion criteria, if the young person meets diagnostic criteria for depression currently they can’t be involved, as this is a preventative study, as I mention. Similarly, if they’re currently on antidepressants, or have previously completed CBT, they will be excluded. And another exclusion criteria is, kind of, the child having other, sort of, mental health difficulties that would mean that this intervention wouldn’t be the right fit for them. So, for example, generalised learning difficulties, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, eating disorder, and alcohol or drug dependence.
And, similarly, if the parent has other difficulties that would mean the study’s not quite the right fit, so bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, personality disorder, or post-traumatic stress disorder. And there are other, kind of, more bureaucratic type inclusion/exclusion criteria, as well. So, for example, as the parent will be going into this treatment optimisation phase if they’re currently depressed, we need our trial Psychiatrist to be their treating Psychiatrist, so the parent can’t be currently in secondary services. Okay, and we’re aiming to recruit 400 young people and their parent as well.
So, in terms of how this study’s, sort of, set up and how the participants will flow through the study. So, as I mentioned, this is a randomised controlled intervention trial. It includes a treatment optimisation phase for parents who are currently depressed at the screening stage, and I’ll go into more about what that involves shortly. If the parent’s currently depressed, they will enter this stage for 12 weeks, before the parent and the young person then completes some baseline assessments about their mental health and related factors, before then being randomised immediately after baseline. So, the young person will be randomised either to a, kind of, treatment as usual group, where they just carry on with any usual treatment they’d be receiving, or they’re allocated to our SWELL intervention group CBT.
Then we follow-up with both the young person and the parent three months and nine months after they are randomised. And there’s also some qualitative data collection going on, as well, we want to collect, kind of, the parent’s and young person’s feedback about, sort of, what they found helpful in the intervention, and this will help us to explore mechanisms, as well. Okay, so in terms of what the parent treatment optimisation involves. Parents who are currently depressed at the screening stage will be referred into this parent treatment optimisation stage, if they’re eligible for the study. So, it will involve an initial consultation with a Consultant Psychiatrist, working with us on the trial. And they will, sort of, consider the parent’s current depressive symptoms, whether there needs to be a change to any medication, initiation of new medication, kind of, making some lifestyle, sort of, change advice, if needed, and there’s also an opportunity to, kind of – for the parent to be initiated onto an internet CBT programme.
This treatment phase will last 12 weeks in total, and there will be check-ins every two weeks with other members of the treatment team, including the Psychiatrists or other workers we have in the team who are supporting this treatment optimisation phase. And this is all, sort of, based on the NICE guidelines for management of adult depression. And the outcomes we are looking at for this study. So, primarily, we are testing whether a depression episode occurs in the young person during the nine month follow-up period, using a, sort of, time-to-event approach. So, we want to see whether this intervention can increase the time to onset of a depressive episode in young people, so helping to prevent it.
And we also want to look at secondary outcomes, such as whether the intervention reduces depression symptoms, reduces a risk score we’re developing for depression, does it reduce their anxiety symptoms, irritability symptoms? Whether it improves their quality of life, developmental competency, and whether it reduces impairment, as well. And to note, as well, that we are currently recruiting for this study. So, we are looking for parents with a history of depression, and a child aged 13 to 17 for recruitment, and we’ll go through a, kind of, more detailed screening phase with them once they’re in the study. And we’re recruiting young people and their parents, via the parent, through four main routes. So, a pre-existing cohort of people who’ve participated in, kind of, mental health research before, so at the National Centre for Mental Health. We’re also recruiting through primary care in South Wales, in the UK, and we’re recruiting through primary mental health services in South Wales, as well, and via social media. And this study is open, you know, through social media to any family in the UK, who – you know, where there’s a parent with a history of depression and a child aged 13 to 17.
And of course, it’s quite an exciting study, ‘cause there’s an opportunity for parents to access, sort of, a consultation with a trial Psychiatrist if they’re currently experiencing high depression symptoms. And there’s also an opportunity for young people to potentially be a part of this preventative CBT group, teaching those skills for wellbeing. Okay, so, to sum up then. Today, I’ve, kind of, of given a brief overview of depression and, sort of, parental depression and why they are important. I’ve looked at, sort of, some recent work we’ve done in the EPAD study, so this cohort of offspring of recurrently depressed parents. And then finished up by talking about this SWELL trial, so a clinical trial looking to prevent depression in young people who are at increased risk through having a parent with a history of depression.
So, with that, I’ll wrap up, and thank you very much for listening.