Hello.
Hi
Hi Mary.
I'm doing the scan today. Do you want to have a seat please?
Anytime you want to stop scanning, press the button and we will stop scanning. OK. OK.
We're investigating mental health and risk taking behaviour in teenagers, and the study
is going on throughout Europe, also at Universities in Ireland and France and Germany. And we're
using the fields of genetics, cognitive neuroscience and psychiatry to get a better idea of how
the teenage mind works.
The offer of doing something new, like having a brain scan and doing all those kind of psychological
tests and stuff, it just interested me.
There's been two phases of the study thus far that took place when the subjects were
14 and 16, so now we're in the middle of the new phase now that they're 18. So we should
be getting access to results in four to six months in terms of neuro-imaging data at least.
Some of the questionnaires, a lot of the questions are about your life and the things you've
been through, and it kind of opened up the window that I have had like quite a normal
life, like there's nothing that's happened to me that has influenced it in a bad way.
A lot of mental illnesses actually have their first onset before age 24, and actually half
of them before age 14. So it's very important that we are able to identify symptoms early
on, as well as risk factors for developing certain mental illnesses, so it's very important
that we're catching people between 14 and 18. They might come back when they're 21.
So presumably around that time your brain's kind of finished maturing or at least made
more progress in that way. So we might bring them back.
While you can still hear me, here are the finger grabs, so you can hold them like this
and press these two.
One of the extra analyses that we're doing on the scanner, for instance, is the abdominal
scan. That's not something that the IMAGEN study is doing at the other sites. And so
here, we're not just doing a brain scan with a normal brain coil. We're using an abdominal
coil that goes around our subject's kind of mid-section. We ask them to do a breath-hold
for about 18 seconds. And we're measuring visceral fat. There's been previous data that
suggests that visceral fat has to do with a decrease in executive functioning, like
decision making, working memory that type of thing in adolescents. So we're looking
at replicating those results. So we use an abdominal coil, a head coil as well for the
brain scan. We use a tablet to do some neuro-psychological tests.
Are you OK? Yeah. OK, great.
I quite like the MR, I know that sounds really weird, but I do like the MRI scan and it's
kind of a new experience. I've tested a hundred and seven subjects total,
I think she's the one hundred and eighth. But we still have many more to go through.
So the study is not even close to being finished. We're still really in the thick of it so...
OK, can I ask you to close your eyes?
You can open your eyes now.
As soon as we kind of have the big picture of all the results coming in from the genetic
analyses, the neuro-imaging data, and then the data from the mental health interviews
and other things that I do with them, people will start doing analyses and trying to publish
some articles right away so we won't have to wait another three years.
OK? OK, thank you, just relax.
Because it's from 14 to 18, there's such a big difference. Like, there's been so much
change in my life, and I've kind of seen that with the questionnaires. So it will be interesting
to see how much it's changed further when I'm 21.
OK, I'm ready.
OK. Great, you start the scan now.
You have a picture of your brain?
I do. I have like a CD with a picture of my brain on which was so weird just to watch
back and, yeah, I would have never had that opportunity to see my own brain if I hadn't
have done this.