Mental-physical multiple long-term conditions across the lifecourse: a cross-cohort epidemiological, longitudinal and genomic investigation
Supervisors:
Dr Alex Siu Fung Kwong, Centre for Clinical Brain Sciences (Division of Psychiatry), University of Edinburgh
Prof Andrew McIntosh, Centre for Clinical Brain Sciences (Division of Psychiatry), University of Edinburgh
Dr Esme Elsden, Centre for Clinical Brain Sciences, University of Edinburgh
Summary:
Most people who develop multiple long-term conditions (MLTCs) experience a combination of mental and physical health problems, yet we know little about how this pattern emerges across a lifetime. Why do mental and physical conditions cluster together? Which conditions tend to appear first? Why are some groups more affected than others? And what biological pathways might explain these links? This PhD will use some of the world’s most valuable health research datasets to investigate the causes and consequences of mental-physical MLTCs. The project will combine large-scale biobank and health-record linked resources, including UK Biobank, Our Future Health, and Generation Scotland, with longitudinal birth and ageing cohorts from the UK, USA, Europe, and China. The student will first map how mentalphysical MLTC burden differs across generations, countries, sex, and socioeconomic groups. They will then model the longitudinal pathways through which mental and physical conditions accumulate over time. Finally, they will use genomic, proteomic, epigenomic, and causal inference methods to investigate biological pathways linking mental health, physical disease accumulation and premature mortality. The project offers interdisciplinary training in epidemiology, longitudinal modelling, psychiatric genomics, multi-omics, health-record linked data, and causal inference.