Corpus of Modern Scottish Writing (CMSW)

This poster describes the online Corpus of Modern Scottish Writing (1700-1945), being created at the University of Glasgow. The corpus fills the chronological gap between the Helsinki Corpus of Older Scots (1375-1700) and the Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech (1945-present). The period covered by CMSW is an important time in the history of Scotland and Scots. It begins with the last stages of the standardisation of written English and the onset of the ‘Vernacular Revival’ in literary Scots. Out of the interaction between Broad Scots and written Standard English, the hybrid prestige variety of today’s Scottish English is said to emerge: CMSW will allow researchers to substantiate this claim, among many others. Once complete, CMSW will contain at least 4 million words of text, with accompanying metadata, covering a range of genres, including personal writing, administrative prose, verse and drama, and the writings of language commentators

Financial Stress and Mental Health among Higher Education Students in the United Kingdom up to 2018: a Rapid Review of Evidence

Introduction: In the UK, as in many other high-income countries, debt due to higher education has increased substantially in recent decades. For example, as of 2018, the average student in England will have accrued £50,000 of debt upon university completion. The prevalence of common mental health problems has also increased, alongside these increased financial pressures. However, it is as yet unclear whether there is an association between financial stress and mental health among higher education students. / Methods: We conducted a rapid review of the peer-reviewed scientific literature to examine the links between indicators of financial stress and mental health among university students in the UK. Studies were located through a systematic search of Psychinfo, Pubmed and Embase up to November 2018. Eligible studies were English-language publications testing the association between any indicator of financial stress and mental health among higher education students in the United Kingdom. / Results: The search strategy above yielded 1,272 studies, from which only 9 met the inclusion criteria. A further two studies were identified through hand-searching. Financial indicators included amount of debt, experience of financial difficulties and financial concerns/debt worry. There was little evidence that debt level was associated with mental health—only 3 of 7 studies found an association in the expected direction between higher debt and worse mental health. Evidence was more consistent for a cross-sectional relationship between subjective measures of financial difficulty (7 of 7 studies) and debt worry/financial concern (4 of 5 studies) with worse mental health, though longitudinal evidence was very limited. / Conclusion: Among higher education students in the UK, there is little evidence that the amount of debt is associated with mental health, while subjective measures of higher financial stress are more consistently associated with worse mental health outcomes. The identified evidence was judged to be weak due to uncertain study generalisability, and the potential for bias due to common causes of financial stress and mental health outcomes (confounders). Thus, further research is required to examine whether links between financial stress and mental health outcomes are robust and causal in nature

The gender gap in adolescent mental health: a cross-national investigation of 566,829 adolescents across 73 countries

Mental ill-health is a leading cause of disease burden worldwide. While women suffer from greater levels of mental health disorders, it remains unclear whether this gender gap differs systematically across regions and/or countries, or across the different dimensions of mental health. We analysed 2018 data from 566,827 adolescents across 73 countries for 4 mental health outcomes: psychological distress, life satisfaction, eudaemonia, and hedonia. We examine average gender differences and distributions for each of these outcomes as well as country-level associations between each outcome and purported determinants at the country level: wealth (GDP per capita), inequality (Gini index), and societal indicators of gender inequality (GII, GGGI, and GSNI). We report four main results: 1) The gender gap in mental health in adolescence is largely ubiquitous cross-culturally, with girls having worse average mental health; 2) There is considerable cross-national heterogeneity in the size of the gender gap, with the direction reversed in a minority of countries; 3) Higher GDP per capita is associated with worse average mental health and a larger gender gap across all mental health outcomes; and 4) more gender equal countries have larger gender gaps across all mental health outcomes. Taken together, our findings suggest that while the gender gap appears largely ubiquitous, its size differs considerably by region, country, and dimension of mental health. Findings point to the hitherto unrealised complex nature of gender disparities in mental health and possible incongruence between expectations and reality in high gender equal countries

Mental health in higher education students and non-students: evidence from a nationally representative panel study

Despite increasing policy focus on mental health provision for higher education students, it is unclear whether they have worse mental health outcomes than their non-student peers. In a nationally-representative UK study spanning 2010-2019 (N = 11,519), 17-24 year olds who attended higher education had lower average psychological distress (GHQ score difference =  - 0.37, 95% CI - 0.60, - 0.08) and lower odds of case-level distress than those who did not (OR = 0.91, 95% CI 0.81, 1.02). Increases in distress between 2010 and 2019 were similar in both groups. Accessible mental health support outside higher education settings is necessary to prevent further widening of socioeconomic inequalities in mental health

Risk factors relate to the variability of health outcomes as well as the mean: a GAMLSS tutorial

Background: Risk factors or interventions may affect the variability as well as the mean of health outcomes. Understanding this can aid aetiological understanding and public health translation, in that interventions which shift the outcome mean and reduce variability are typically preferable to those which affect only the mean. However, most commonly used statistical tools do not test for differences in variability. Tools that do have few epidemiological applications to date, and fewer applications still have attempted to explain their resulting findings. We thus provide a tutorial for investigating this using GAMLSS (Generalised Additive Models for Location, Scale and Shape). Methods: The 1970 British birth cohort study was used, with body mass index (BMI; N=6,007) and mental wellbeing (Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale; N=7,104) measured in midlife (42-46 years) as outcomes. We used GAMLSS to investigate how multiple risk factors (sex, childhood social class and midlife physical inactivity) related to differences in health outcome mean and variability. Results: Risk factors were related to sizable differences in outcome variability-for example males had marginally higher mean BMI yet 28% lower variability; lower social class and physical inactivity were each associated with higher mean and higher variability (6.1% and 13.5% higher variability, respectively). For mental wellbeing, gender was not associated with the mean while males had lower variability (-3.9%); lower social class and physical inactivity were each associated with lower mean yet higher variability (7.2% and 10.9% higher variability, respectively). Conclusions: The results highlight how GAMLSS can be used to investigate how risk factors or interventions may influence the variability in health outcomes. This underutilised approach to the analysis of continuously distributed outcomes may have broader utility in epidemiologic, medical, and psychological sciences. A tutorial and replication syntax is provided online to facilitate this (https://osf.io/5tvz6/). Funding: DB is supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (grant number ES/M001660/1), The Academy of Medical Sciences / Wellcome Trust ('Springboard Health of the Public in 2040' award: HOP001/1025); DB and LW are supported by the Medical Research Council (MR/V002147/1). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript

Inequalities in body mass index, diet and physical activity in the UK: Longitudinal evidence across childhood and adolescence

We use longitudinal data across a key developmental period, spanning much of childhood and adolescence (age 5 to 17, years 2006–2018) from the UK Millennium Cohort Study, a nationally representative study with an initial sample of just over 19,000. We first examine the extent to which inequalities in overweight, obesity, BMI and body fat over this period are consistent with the evolution of inequalities in health behaviours, including exercise and healthy diet markers (i.e., skipping breakfast) (n = 7,220). We next study the links between SES, health behaviours and adiposity (BMI, body fat), using rich models that account for the influence of a range of unobserved factors that are fixed over time. In this way, we improve on existing estimates measuring the relationship between SES and health behaviours on the one hand and adiposity on the other. The advantage of the individual fixed effects models is that they exploit within-individual changes over time to help mitigate biases due to unobserved fixed characteristics (n = 6,883). We observe stark income inequalities in BMI and body fat in childhood (age 5), which have further widened by age 17. Inequalities in obesity, physical activity, and skipping breakfast are observed to widen from age 7 onwards. Ordinary Least Square estimates reveal the previously documented SES gradient in adiposity, which is reduced slightly once health behaviours including breakfast consumption and physical activity are accounted for. The main substantive change in estimates comes from the fixed effects specification. Here we observe mixed findings on the SES associations, with a positive association between income and adiposity and a negative association with wealth. The role of health behaviours is attenuated but they remain important, particularly for body fat

Mental health in relation to changes in sleep, exercise, alcohol and diet during the COVID-19 pandemic: examination of four UK cohort studies

BACKGROUND: Responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have included lockdowns and social distancing with considerable disruptions to people's lives. These changes may have particularly impacted on those with mental health problems, leading to a worsening of inequalities in the behaviours which influence health. METHODS: We used data from four national longitudinal British cohort studies (N = 10 666). Respondents reported mental health (psychological distress and anxiety/depression symptoms) and health behaviours (alcohol, diet, physical activity and sleep) before and during the pandemic. Associations between pre-pandemic mental ill-health and pandemic mental ill-health and health behaviours were examined using logistic regression; pooled effects were estimated using meta-analysis. RESULTS: Worse mental health was related to adverse health behaviours; effect sizes were largest for sleep, exercise and diet, and weaker for alcohol. The associations between poor mental health and adverse health behaviours were larger during the May lockdown than pre-pandemic. In September, when restrictions had eased, inequalities had largely reverted to pre-pandemic levels. A notable exception was for sleep, where differences by mental health status remained high. Risk differences for adverse sleep for those with the highest level of prior mental ill-health compared to those with the lowest were 21.2% (95% CI 16.2–26.2) before lockdown, 25.5% (20.0–30.3) in May and 28.2% (21.2–35.2) in September. CONCLUSIONS: Taken together, our findings suggest that mental health is an increasingly important factor in health behaviour inequality in the COVID era. The promotion of mental health may thus be an important component of improving post-COVID population health

Changes in the body mass index and blood pressure association across time: Evidence from multiple cross-sectional and cohort studies

Although body mass index (BMI) is considered a key determinant of high blood pressure, its importance may differ over time and by age group. We utilised separate data sources to investigate temporal changes in this association: 23 independent (newly sampled), repeated cross-sectional studies (Health Survey for England (HSE)) at ≥25 years (1994-2018; N = 126,742); and three British birth cohorts at 43-46 years (born 1946, 1958, and 1970; N = 18,657). In HSE, associations were weaker in more recent years, with this trend most pronounced amongst older adults. After adjustment for sex, anti-hypertensive treatment and education, the mean difference in systolic blood pressure (SBP) per 1 kg/m2 increase in BMI amongst adults ≥55 years was 0.75 mmHg (95%CI: 0.60-0.90) in 1994, 0.66 mmHg (0.46-0.85) in 2003, and 0.53 mmHg (0.35-0.71) in 2018. In the 1958 and 1970 cohorts, BMI and SBP associations were of similar magnitude yet weaker in the 1946 cohort, potentially due to differences in blood pressure measurement device. Quantile regression analyses suggested that associations between BMI and SBP were present both below and above the hypertension threshold. A weaker association between BMI and blood pressure may partly offset the public health impacts of increasing obesity prevalence. However, despite sizable increases in use of antihypertensive medication, BMI remains positively associated with SBP in all ages. Our findings highlight the need to tackle non-medical factors such as population diet which influence both BMI and blood pressure and the utility of using multiple datasets to obtain robust inferences on trends in risk factor-outcome associations across time