The causes of mental disorders are not understood. There is evidence that a wide range of early onset psychiatric problems may be due to the combination of just three factors. Individual variability in the brain's dopamine reward pathway is biological. Early childhood neglect or abuse is an important role in the second. The third relates to temperament and tendencies toward impulsivity and difficulty controlling emotions. The findings have implications for understanding both the causes and features of a wide range of psychiatric disorders.
Marco Leyton is a professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Senior Scientist at the Research Institute of the McGill University and is the senior author on a recent study. The research suggests that most early onset disorders reflect differential expressions of a small number of biological, psychological and social factors.
The first study combined three factors: temperament, trauma and dopamine.
According to earlier research, each of the three factors has at least modest effects on the development of mental disorders. The authors of the new study had the chance to examine all three factors together. Fifty-two young people living in the Montreal or Quebec City areas have had brain scans that measured their features. The information about the brain features was combined with information about the history of early life adversity.
The approach has high accuracy and potential predictive value.
This combination of just three factors predicted, with over 90% accuracy, which participants had mental health problems either in the past or during the study's three-year follow-up period. CIHR has provided an additional two million dollars to double the sample size and follow the participants through to their mid-20s, since the results are so novel and potentially so important. The paper's first author, Maisha Iqbal, a graduate student in the Integrated Program in Neuroscience, emphasizes that the results need to be replicated in larger and more diverse groups. Our research could change the way we think about mental illnesses.
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Journal reference
Maisha Iqbal, Sylvia Maria Leonarda Cox, Natalia Jaworska, Maria Tippler, Natalie Castellanos-Ryan,Sophie Parent, Robert O. Pihl, Mara R. Brendgen, and Sylvana M. C A three-factor model of common early onset psychiatric disorders. The article is titled "Neuropsychopharmacology, 2021."
