News

Christel Middeldorp awarded with NWO-TOP subsidy

Dr. Christel Middeldorp (assistant professor at the department of Biological Psychology, VU University Amsterdam and psychiatrist at the Bascule) received a NWO TOP grant for the research project “Genetic influences on stability and change in psychopathology from childhood to young adulthood”.

The aim of the grant is to study why the course of childhood psychopathology differs between children. Some children never encounter emotional and behavioral problems, others do but then remit and remain symptom free for the rest of their life while, in other children, symptoms are more or less chronic and continue into adulthood. The relation between symptoms in parents and the course of symptoms in offspring will be included in the analyses. In addition to describing causes of variation, this project aims to identify genetic variants that influence developmental trajectories of childhood internalizing and externalizing psychopathology.

Data from the longitudinal studies of Netherlands Twin Register (NTR) and the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) will form the basis of the project. New data will be collected in clinical groups for replication studies of the inital findings from the population based studies.

Co-PI’s of the study are prof dr Dorret Boomsma, head of the Netherlands Twin register, dr. Gitta Lubke, associate professor at the department of psychology, University of Notre Dame and dr Marcus Munafo, reader at the department of biological psychology, University of Bristol.

Knowledge about the different factors that predict why certain individuals follow different trajectories of development and the relation between parental symptoms and symptom development in offspring will eventually provide new angles for intervention strategies.