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A new two-year longitudinal study published in the BMJ looked at lifestyle risk behaviors among adolescents impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. “Our study focused on the ‘Big 6’ health behaviors among adolescents, being physical activity, diet, sleep, recreational screen time, alcohol use and smoking, given these are key predictors of both short- and long-term health and wellbeing,” lead author Dr. Lauren Gardner from the University of Sydney’s Matilda Centre told us. [More]

A new study out of Oregon State University looked at the risk of psychiatric diagnoses in the months after a COVID-19 infection. “Previous work during earlier parts of the pandemic reported a high risk of new mental health conditions occurring following COVID infection,” study author Lauren Chan told us. “This study was intended to determine if that risk still exists for patients in the US including patient data until Fall of 2021.” [More]

A new study published in the Journal of Child Psychiatry and Human Development looked at the association between time spent playing and child mental health. “In January 2021, we published a paper explaining why we thought adventurous play might help to prevent anxiety in children,” study author Helen F. Dodd told us. “We explained how, when children play adventurously, they have opportunities to learn about uncertainty, coping and physiological arousal (heart beating fast, butterflies in your tummy etc.). These learning opportunities should target some of the risk factors that we know exist for child anxiety.” [More]

Cumulative exposure to trauma in childhood is a key indicator of suicide ideation in university students. Researchers from Trinity College in Dublin found that adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) were a common cause of poor mental health in college students. [More]

More than 20% of adults who were exposed to chronic levels of parental domestic violence in childhood develop major depressive disorder at some stage. Researchers from the University of Toronto found that 22.5% of adults who witnessed domestic violence between parents later developed major depressive disorder, compared with 9.1% of those who hadn’t witnessed parental domestic violence as children. [More]

A new study published in Cell Reports looked at early stress-induced impaired brain functioning. “We were trying to figure out how the long-lasting, life-long adverse effects of transient early-life stress on behavioral and endocrine responses to adult stresses come about,” study author Tallie Z. Baram told us. “This is important, because these changes are tied to mental illnesses.” [More]

A new study published in the Journal of Development Economics looked at women’s wellbeing in India during the pandemic and its containment. “Our aim was to study how the pandemic and its containment policies affected women's mental wellbeing and food security, in a low income setting,” study author Gaurav Khanna told us. “We wanted to find out how strongly affected women were as they are particularly vulnerable in such settings.” [More]

A new study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry looked at longitudinal changes in structural connectivity in young people at a high genetic risk for bipolar disorder. “Bipolar disorder is characterized by severe and impairing swings of mood, varying from the chaos and impaired judgment of mania to the slowed thinking and suicidal despair of depression,” study author Philip Mitchell told us. “It is a very strongly genetic condition, with close relatives of someone with this condition having ten times the population risk of developing this.” [More]

A new study published in the Journal of Child Development looked at the effects of napping on preschool children’s learning of letter-sound mappings. The research was carried out by faculty of the Macquarie University in Australia, the University of Oxford, the University of York and the University of Sheffield. “We know that letter-sound learning is essential for early reading acquisition, so we want to explore factors that may help with learning this skill,” study author Dr. Hua-Chen Wang told us. “Sleep has been found to enhance learning. As such, this study looks at whether there's a nap for learning letter-sound associations.” [More]

A new study published in PubMed looked at the association between workplace absenteeism and alcohol use disorder from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health. “The goal of our study was to estimate the relationship between lost work time (missed workdays) and alcohol use disorder among full time workers in the US,” study author Laura Bierut told us. “We used a large nationally representative US database to study this issue.” [More]