Adolescence

Study finds childhood bullying linked to distrust and mental health problems in adolescence

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A new study, co-led by UCLA Health and the University of Glasgow, found that young teenagers who develop a strong distrust of other people as a result of childhood bullying are substantially more likely to have significant mental health problems as they enter adulthood compared to those who do not develop interpersonal trust issues.

The study, published in the journal Nature Mental Health on Feb. 13, is believed to be the first to examine the link between peer bullying, interpersonal distrust, and the subsequent development of mental health problems, such as anxiety, depression, hyperactivity and anger.

Researchers used data from 10,000 children in the United Kingdom who were studied for nearly two decades as part of the Millennium Cohort Study. From these data, the researchers found that adolescents who were bullied at age 11 and in turn developed greater interpersonal distrust by age 14 were around 3.5 times more likely to experience clinically significant mental health problems at age 17 compared to those who developed less distrust.

The findings could help schools and other institutions to develop new evidence-based interventions to counter the negative mental health impacts of bullying, according to the study’s senior author Dr. George Slavich, who directs UCLA Health’s Laboratory for Stress Assessment and Research.

“There are few public health topics more important than youth mental health right now,” Slavich said. “In order to help teens reach their fullest potential, we need to invest in research that identifies risk factors for poor health and that translates this knowledge into prevention programs that can improve lifelong health and resilience.”

The findings come amid growing public health concerns about the mental health of youth. Recent studies by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that 44.2% of sampled high school students in the U.S. reported being depressed for at least two weeks in 2021, with one in 10 students who were surveyed having reported attempted suicide that year.

In this new study, the researchers viewed these alarming trends from the perspective of Social Safety Theory, which hypothesizes that social threats, such as bullying, impact mental health partly by instilling the belief that other people cannot be trusted, or that the world is an unfriendly, dangerous or unpredictable place.

Prior research has identified associations between bullying and mental and behavioral health issues among youth, including its impact on substance abuse, depression, anxiety, self-harm and suicidal thoughts. However, following youth over time, this study is the first to confirm the suspected pathway of how bullying leads to distrust, and in turn, mental health problems in late adolescence.

Slavich said when people develop clinically significant mental health problems during the teenage years, it can increase their risk of experiencing both mental and physical health issues across the entire lifespan if left unaddressed.

In addition to interpersonal distrust, the authors examined whether diet, sleep or physical activity also linked peer bullying with subsequent mental health problems. However, only interpersonal distrust was found to relate bullying to greater risk of experiencing mental health problems at age 17.

“What these data suggest is that we really need school-based programs that help foster a sense of interpersonal trust at the level of the classroom and school,” Slavich said. “One way to do that would be to develop evidence-based programs that are especially focused on the transition to high school and college, and that frame school as an opportunity to develop close, long-lasting relationships.”

Type 1 diabetes risk rises with BMI during adolescence

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Adolescents’ risk for developing type 1 diabetes rose with increasing BMI, according to data presented at the American Diabetes Association Scientific Sessions and simultaneously published in Diabetologia.

“There were previous reports on the association between obesity and type 1 diabetes in previous cohorts that included mostly children,” Gilad Twig, MD, PhD, a resident in the department of internal medicine at Sheba Medical Center in Tel Aviv, Israel, told Healio. “We were somewhat surprised to see that the association persisted in adolescents who were perfectly healthy — apart from having abnormal weight — without apparent risk factors for type 1 diabetes.”

Overweight and obesity in teens increases risk for developing type 1 diabetes
Teens in the 75th percentile or higher of BMI have a greater risk of developing type 1 diabetes as adults than those below the 50th percentile of BMI. Data were derived from Zucker I, et al. 1263-P. Presented at: American Diabetes Association Scientific Sessions; June 3-7, 2022; New Orleans (hybrid meeting).

Twig and colleagues conducted a retrospective cohort study of adolescents aged 16 to 19 years who underwent a medical examination prior to military conscription in Israel from January 1996 to December 2016. Data from participants were linked to the Israeli National Diabetes registry. BMI was calculated using height and weight measured at baseline. Participants were placed into age- and sex-matched percentiles based on criteria from the CDC. Participants in the 85th to 94th percentile of BMI were considered to have overweight, and obesity was defined as the 95th percentile or higher.

There were 834,050 men and 592,312 women included in the study. Over a median follow-up of 11.2 years, there were 777 incident type 1 diabetes cases during 15,819,750 person-years, for an incidence rate of 4.9 cases per 100,000 person-years.

The risk for type 1 diabetes gradually increased with higher BMI. In multivariable analysis, adolescents in the 75th to 84th percentile of BMI (adjusted HR = 1.41; 95% CI, 1.11-1.78), with overweight (aHR = 1.54; 95% CI, 1.23-1.94) and with obesity (aHR = 2.05; 95% CI, 1.58-2.66), had an increased risk for type 1 diabetes compared with those in the fifth to 49th percentile of BMI.

“For adolescents with obesity, the risk for type 1 diabetes was approximately doubled,” Twig said. “It is important to remember that in our study, we grouped all those with obesity in the group regardless of obesity severity. Therefore, it is likely that for adolescents with more severe forms of obesity, the actual risk for developing type 1 diabetes is even higher.”

Each 5-unit increase in BMI was associated with a 35% increase in risk for developing type 1 diabetes (aHR = 1.35; 95% CI, 1.24-1.47) and each 1 standard deviation increase in BMI increased the risk for developing type 1 diabetes by 25% (aHR = 1.25; 95% CI, 1.17-1.32).

Twig said future research is planned to identify more risk factors for incident type 1 diabetes in the same cohort.

“We are, in particular, planning to better identify the characteristics of adolescents in whom excessive weight may have a more emphasized role in the development of type 1 diabetes,” Twig said.

Why Does Schizophrenia Start In Adolescence? An Inside Look At The Teen Brain

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Late adolescence is such a critical time period for mental health, new study finds. 

Adolescence is a time of growth and change — but psychologists also know it’s a time when the first signs of certain mental health conditions, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, can appear. The precise link between mental health and adolescence was unclear, but a new study on brain changes that occur in teenagers helps explain why late adolescence is such a critical time period for mental health.

MRI scans of teens revealed that brain regions which have the strongest link to the schizophrenia risk genes are developing most rapidly. These regions are critical hubs that control how different regions of the brain communicate, so when something goes wrong, it can have wide-ranging implications.

Late adolescence is such a critical time period for mental health, new study finds.

The study, now published in the online journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that the outer region of the brain, known as the cortex, shrinks in size and becomes thinner during late adolescence. This process causes an increase in levels of myelin, the sheath that insulates nerve fibers and allows them to communicate effectively, Medical Xpress reported. This increase in myelin occurs in areas of the brain that act as major connections between different regions of the brain network.

“Adolescence can be a difficult transitional period and it’s when we typically see the first signs of mental health disorders such as schizophrenia and depression,” explained Ed Bullmore, head and professor of psychiatry at Cambridge, Medical Xpress reported. “This study gives us a clue why this is the case.”

The study is one of the most detailed investigations into the adolescent brain, and involved using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to study the brain structure of almost 300 individuals aged 14 to 24 in order to compare the brain structure of teenagers of different ages. The MRI scans were then compared to the Allen Brain Atlas, a tool which maps regions of the brain by gene expression.

“As these regions are important hubs that control how regions of our brain communicate with each other, it shouldn’t be too surprising that when something goes wrong there, it will affect how smoothly our brains work,” explained Bullmore.

The team hope this finding will help to spark further research into mental health and the young brain, and eventually even lead to better diagnosis and treatment for mental health conditions.

Why Does Schizophrenia Start In Adolescence? An Inside Look At The Teen Brain

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Adolescence is a time of growth and change — but psychologists also know it’s a time when the first signs of certain mental health conditions, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, can appear. The precise link between mental health and adolescence was unclear, but a new study on brain changes that occur in teenagers helps explain why late adolescence is such a critical time period for mental health.

MRI scans of teens revealed that brain regions which have the strongest link to the schizophrenia risk genes are developing most rapidly. These regions are critical hubs that control how different regions of the brain communicate, so when something goes wrong, it can have wide-ranging implications.

teenagerteenager

Late adolescence is such a critical time period for mental health, new study finds.

The study, now published in the online journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that the outer region of the brain, known as the cortex, shrinks in size and becomes thinner during late adolescence. This process causes an increase in levels of myelin, the sheath that insulates nerve fibers and allows them to communicate effectively, Medical Xpress reported. This increase in myelin occurs in areas of the brain that act as major connections between different regions of the brain network.

“Adolescence can be a difficult transitional period and it’s when we typically see the first signs of mental health disorders such as schizophrenia and depression,” explained Ed Bullmore, head and professor of psychiatry at Cambridge, Medical Xpress reported. “This study gives us a clue why this is the case.”

The study is one of the most detailed investigations into the adolescent brain, and involved using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to study the brain structure of almost 300 individuals aged 14 to 24 in order to compare the brain structure of teenagers of different ages. The MRI scans were then compared to the Allen Brain Atlas, a tool which maps regions of the brain by gene expression.

“As these regions are important hubs that control how regions of our brain communicate with each other, it shouldn’t be too surprising that when something goes wrong there, it will affect how smoothly our brains work,” explained Bullmore.

The team hope this finding will help to spark further research into mental health and the young brain, and eventually even lead to better diagnosis and treatment for mental health conditions.

Stress in adolescence prepares rats for future challenges

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Stress in adolescence prepares rats for future challenges
Mouse being weighed. 

Rats exposed to frequent physical, social, and predatory stress during adolescence solved problems and foraged more efficiently under high-threat conditions in adulthood compared with rats that developed without stress, according to Penn State researchers. The results may provide insights into how humans respond to adolescent stress.

“Even though the stressed were really run through the gamut, they do not come out with an overall cognitive deficit,” said Lauren Chaby, Ph.D. student in neuroscience and ecology, Penn State. “What they do have is this context-specific performance that’s linked to the environment that they experienced during adolescence.”

Researchers are interested in the effects of maltreatment and adverse environments during human adolescence, but this can be difficult to study. Chaby turned to rats to investigate this question because it is unethical to manipulate in humans and rats have a short lifespan, allowing her to study long-term effects more efficiently. She exposed adolescent rats to a range of unpredictable stressors, including smaller or tilted cages, social isolation or crowding, and predator scents or vocalizations.

“Unpredictable stress can have dramatic and lasting consequences, both for humans and for free-living animals,” said Chaby. “Unpredictability is part of what can make stress so toxic. You don’t have control over your environment, you don’t have control over what’s going to happen next, you’re not able to predict it. So we tried to use a range of stressors so the rats couldn’t predict which stressor was going to come next.”

The researchers then tested adult animals to see if there were lasting effects of stress in adolescence. But Chaby noted that many studies investigating the consequences of stress during early life or adolescence test adult animals under standard conditions. Standard conditions usually reflect a safe environment—little noise or external threats and dim lighting that is preferred by these nocturnal rats.

“So you have this relaxed situation that they’re trying to solve these tasks in,” said Chaby. “But this isn’t really fair, since some of the animals are used to this and some of the animals aren’t. So we wanted to test them in conditions that were consistent with their rearing conditions to see if that impacted their ability to solve tasks.”

Chaby tested the ability of 24 to solve problems while foraging for food under both standard and high-threat conditions—bright light, a taxidermy hawk swooping overhead, and hawk vocalizations. Adult rats then manipulated a variety of novel objects to obtain food rewards. The researchers published their results in a recent issue of Animal Behavior.

Under high-threat conditions, adult rats stressed during adolescence started foraging sooner, visited 20 percent more food patches, and obtained 43 percent more food than a control group of unstressed adult rats. These statistically significant results suggest that growing up in a stressful environment can prepare rats for a stressful, high-predation environment in the future.

Surprisingly, previously stressed rats did not show any costs of this enhanced performance. Under standard conditions, stressed rats took significantly longer —17 percent—to visit the first food patch due to initial wariness, but ultimately ate the same amount of food as unstressed rats who began foraging more quickly.

“And that’s one of my favorite findings, because I always think that’s so cool when you have animals that are doing things in two different ways but are coming to the same performance outcome,” said Chaby.

There may still be a cost of this enhanced performance that occurs over a longer period of time, noted Chaby. For example, they could have a “live-fast die-young strategy.”

Chaby hopes that studies like this can help direct how we study adolescent stress in humans.

“I think that addressing this empirically in a model where we have internal control can really allow us to at least understand what questions we should be asking about ourselves,” said Chaby.

UDs and Implants Safe and Effective for Teens, ACOG Says .

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Long-acting contraceptives — namely, intrauterine devices and the contraceptive implant — “are the best reversible methods for preventing unintended pregnancy, rapid repeat pregnancy, and abortion in young women,” according to a committee opinion from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.

Published in Obstetrics & Gynecology, the statement outlines evidence supporting both the safety and efficacy of long-acting contraceptive methods in adolescent girls. In particular, research shows that teenagers using long-acting methods are far more likely to continue using those methods at 1 year — and 20 times less likely to have an unintended pregnancy — compared with those using short-acting methods. In addition, complication rates with long-acting contraception do not differ between women and teenage girls.

Just 4.5% of adolescent girls who use contraceptives use an IUD or implant, according to one estimate.

The authors write that long-acting methods “should be first-line treatment recommendations for all women and adolescents,” and “counseling about [such] methods should occur at all health care provider visits with sexually active adolescents.”

Source:Obstetrics & Gynecology

 

Technology Fuels Cyberbullying and Cheating in Teens.

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McAfee’s study “The Digital Divide: How the Online Behavior of Teens is Getting Past Parents” shows an alarming 70% of teens have hidden their online behavior from their parents, up from 45% in 2010. And yet half of parents live under the assumption that their teen tells them everything he/she does online.

The school year is now upon us. If you haven’t already, you will soon start packing up the kids to send them off to school. Outfitting your kids with new clothes are new technologies is often a big part of back to school preparations.

However, these technologies can have drawbacks and even some dangers that parents need to address: cyberbullying and cheating.

Cyberbullying

  • Almost 25% of teens claimed to be targets of cyber bullying and 2/3 of all teens have witnessed cruel behavior online
  • Only 10% of parents are aware of their teens are targets of cyber bullying
  • Facebook has become the new school yard for bullies with 92.6% of teens saying that cruel behavior takes place on Facebook, and 23.8% on Twitter, 17.7% on MySpace and 15.2% via Instant Messenger
  • When witnessing others being attacked, 40% of teens have told the person to stop, 21% have told an adult and 6% joined in
  • When being attacked themselves, 66% of teens responded to the attacker (with 35% responding in person), 15.4% avoided school, and an alarming 4.5% have been in a physical fight with their attacker

 

Cheating

  • Only 23% of parents express concern about their teen going online to cheat in school, yet nearly half of all teens (48%) admit they’ve looked up answers to a test or assignment online
  • 22% cheated specifically on a test via online or mobile phone; while only 5% of parents believed their children did this.
  • 15.8% of teens have admitted to cheating on a test by looking up answers on their phone yet only 3.2% of parents thought their teens cheated this way
  • 14.1% of teens admitted to looking up how to cheat on a test online
  • Overall, 77.2% of parents said they were not worried about their teens cheating online

Parents, you must stay in-the-know. Since your teens have grown up in an online world, they may be more online savvy than you, but you can’t give up. You must challenge yourself to become familiar with the complexities of the teen online universe and stay educated on the various devices your teens are using to go online.

As a parent, I proactively participate in my kids’ online activities and talk to them about the “rules of the road” for the Internet. I’m hoping that this report opens other parent’s eyes so they’ll become more involved in educating their teens with advice and tools

 

Source: http://blogs.mcafee.com

 

Cannabis Use Associated with Neuropsychological Decline, Drop in IQ .

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Persistent cannabis use, especially when begun during adolescence, leads to measurable neuropsychological decline by midlife, according to a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Researchers followed a birth cohort of some 1000 New Zealanders. The subjects’ cannabis use was periodically measured, starting at age 18 and continuing through age 38. Intelligence testing was done during childhood and again at age 38.

Use of cannabis at least 4 days per week was associated with neuropsychological decline by age 38. The decline was especially notable among adolescents who were cannabis dependent (8-point loss in IQ by adulthood). The overall effect persisted after controlling for education and use of other drugs and tobacco.

Asked to comment, Barbara Geller of Journal Watch Psychiatry said: “The belief that cannabis represents a more benign recreational drug than alcohol is belied by this research and by reports of increased vulnerability to psychosis in adolescent-onset users.”

Source: PNAS