The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on adolescent mental health

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on adolescent mental health is a widespread concern. However, to date, there is limited empirical evidence which can causally attribute changes to the pandemic. With the aim of overcoming some of the existing methodological limitations, the current study utilised a naturally occurring experiment within two ongoing school-based trials. Depressive symptoms, externalising difficulties (e.g., behaviour problems such as losing your temper or hitting out), and life satisfaction were assessed at baseline and 1-year follow-up across two groups. One group entered the study in phase 1 (2018; pre-COVID-19 group; N = 6,419) and were controls as they did not experience the COVID-19 pandemic between baseline and follow-up. The second group entered the study in phase 2 (2019; COVID-19 group; N = 5,031) and were exposed to the pandemic between baseline and follow-up, therefore providing a natural experiment. Key Findings • The COVID-19 pandemic led to increased adolescent depressive symptoms and decreased life satisfaction • If the COVID-19 pandemic had not occurred, estimates suggest that we would observe 6% fewer adolescents with high depressive symptoms which is a difference of 1.6% in prevalence (27.1% to 25.4%) • There was no overall effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on adolescent externalising difficulties • Girls’ mental health may have been more negatively impacted by the COVID 19 pandemic than boy

Metabolic and cardiovascular traits: an abundance of recently identified common genetic variants

Genome-wide association studies are providing new insights into the genetic basis of metabolic and cardiovascular traits. In the past 3 years, common variants in ∼50 loci have been strongly associated with metabolic and cardiovascular traits. Several of these loci have implicated genes without a previously known connection with metabolism. Further studies will be required to characterize the full impact of these loci on metabolism. Many of the identified loci include multiple independent variants that influence the same metabolic or cardiovascular trait and a few loci harbor independent variants that each influence distinct traits. The total proportion of trait heritability explained by variants identified so far is still modest (typically <10%). Future studies will build on these successes by identifying additional common and rare variants and by determining the functional impact of the underlying alleles and genes