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€1.5 million project aims to work with 3,000 women to study impact of sex hormone changes on mental health
Researcher and clinical psychiatrist Dr Arianna di Florio, from Cardiff University’s Division of Psychological Medicine and Clinical Neuroscience, has been awarded a grant to launch the first molecular genetic study of psychiatric sensitivity to sex-hormone changes. Dr di Florio will be studying the Genetic Architecture of Sex Steroid-related Psychiatric Disorders and was awarded €1.5 million as part of the 2020 European Research Council (ERC) competition.
“It is the first molecular genetic study of the psychiatric sensitivity to sex hormone changes. We’re aiming to recruit more than 3,000 women living with psychiatric disorders which are temporally related with changes in sex hormones. This will be the largest cohort of women experiencing these conditions to date. It will help us to identify and reach people living with these conditions, making it easier for them to participate in research. It will enable us to conduct sophisticated analyses, integrating detailed longitudinal clinical and psychosocial information with aggregated genome-wide data and functional annotations.” Dr Arianna di Florio
Division of Psychological Medicine and Clinical Neuroscience As part of the study, Dr di Florio will be working alongside the National Centre for Mental Health (NCMH), funded by Health and Care Research Wales, to build a collaboration with women who are living with these disorders.
Professor Ian Jones, Director of NCMH, said: “We are delighted at NCMH that one of our key collaborators, Dr di Florio, has won this prestigious grant from the ERC. These conditions can be devastating for women and are clearly under researched and poorly managed. We are delighted to be able to work with women to make a difference for them in the years to come.”
The study will become a project of the Reproductive Neuroscience Clinical and Research Programme, set up by Dr di Florio to study how genetic and environmental markers can help identify women at risk of psychiatric disorders in relation to changes in sex hormones and improve the current approach to diagnosis, prevention and treatment. Dr di Florio said: “I hope this work will contribute to the de-stigmatisation of mental health disorders related to female reproduction by providing evidence-based, easy-to-understand information to the public, and addressing the gender gap in psychiatry highlighted by the European
Commission and the World Health Organization.”
