Our Impact
The SGDP Centre leads several internationally renowned cohorts, particularly longitudinal cohorts including the Twins Early Development Study (TEDS), The Environmental Risk Study (E-Risk), The Dunedin Study and the Genetic Links to Anxiety and Depression (GLAD) Study.
We are international leaders in uncovering the genetic underpinnings of psychiatric disorders such as depression and eating disorders, including highlighting relationships between physical and mental disorders. Our work has also uncovered numerous key facts about the development of mental health conditions across the lifespan, for example how common it is to experience multiple different conditions, not just one. We have begun to show clinical utility for polygenic scores, for example with regard to prediction of risk of a psychiatric condition and diagnosis after first episode of psychosis.
We led the way on work examining interplay between genetic and environmental factors. For example, on the interaction of polygenic risk with both childhood trauma and lifetime trauma, the latter featuring in the New Scientist. Similarly, our seminal work has demonstrated the importance of retrospectively self-reported trauma for mental health, and the low agreement between this and prospectively collected “objective” measures.
We developed one of earliest software packages for polygenic scores (PRSice), which was so user-friendly that it facilitated the uptake of this method internationally. We also showed the potential of polygenic scores for prediction of risk of psychiatric disorders, and also more widely for prediction of clinical outcomes like diagnosis after first episode psychosis. We jointly developed the analytical pipeline for the Illumina epigenetics microarray (video of a talk on this), which is widely used within the epigenetics community.
We have been very active in dissemination of work to the academic community with numerous members of the department acting as editors for the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, as exemplified in the celebrations of 60 years of the journal.
We have developed novel psychological tests for social cognition (e.g., the Strange Stories test, cited >1,300 times) that are widely used and translated across the world, in studies of typical development and an array of clinical groups, notably autism.