Genes, Risk, and Resilience: Unpacking Adolescent Mental Health, Behaviour, and Education

This project examines mental health within the causal framework of adolescent education and risk behaviours engagement.

Project Summary

Adolescent mental health problems, risk behaviours, and educational outcomes form a critical triad affecting young people’s life trajectories. While these factors consistently co-occur, their causal relationships remain unclear, creating a fundamental evidence gap that limits intervention effectiveness. Recent research (Arellano Spano et al. 2024) established educational achievement causally reduces risk behaviour engagement in adolescent, however the paper noted that additional research is needed to investigate how mental health fits within these causal pathways, identifying this as a critical missing piece. 

This project directly addresses the gap by completing the causal triangle using a systematic two-step approach. First, bidirectional Mendelian randomization (MR) to establish which causal relationships exist between mental health, education, and risk behaviours. Second, causal mediation analysis will quantify the mechanisms through which effects operate. Applied to the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) cohort, this will determine whether mental health represent an upstream cause driving both educational and behavioural outcomes, a downstream consequence of education, or operated through complex indirect pathways. Critically, mediation analysis will reveal whether the education to risk behaviour causal pathway established in previous research (Arellano Spano et al., 2024) mediates mental health effects, or whether mental health operates through independent mechanisms, providing the first complete causal map of these relationships.

References: 
Arellano Spano, M., Morris, T.T., Davies, N.M. et al. Genetic associations of risk behaviours and educational achievement. Commun Biol 7, 435 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-024-06091-y