Identifying early life physical health factors to improve mental health outcomes in children

Dr Amy Finlay-Jones

Beyond Brain and Behaviour: Understanding the role of the gut microbiome in infant and child mental health

Research Collaboration Award

$29,433

2020 - 2021

Mental Health and Youth, Telethon Kids Institute/CCHR, University of Western Australia, collaborating with Brain and Body Lab (University of California, Los Angeles, USA)

Dr Finlay-Jones was awarded a BrightSpark Research Collaboration Award in 2020 to investigate how different body systems, such as gut health, influence child and adolescent mental health.

To promote positive mental health and neurodevelopment, and to improve identification, prevention, and management of psychopathology, it is vital to improve our understanding of the interactions between the biological and psychosocial mechanisms implicated in mental health and illness. A key area of interest is the relationship between the gut microbiome (i.e., the diverse collection of microbes found in the gastrointestinal tract) and the brain, with mounting evidence indicating that the gut microbiome plays a role in mental health, illness, and neurodevelopment. Key behaviours, such as colic in infants, or gastrointestinal or somatic distress in young children may hold potential as an “early warning sign” that the child is at risk of developing mental ill-health in later life. Identifying these signs and understanding their associations with later mental health outcomes can provide new opportunities for prevention and early intervention efforts.

This RCA project sought to prevent childhood mental illness by:

  1. finding better ways to determine which infants and young children are most likely to develop mental health problems in later life;
  2. improving our understanding of how different body systems (such as the digestive system and immune system) influence child and adolescent mental health;
  3. developing and testing new programs to improve children’s physical and mental health from conception onwards; and
  4. understanding how to improve the uptake of such programs in practice.

To achieve these aims, Dr Finlay-Jones and her team collaborated with several researchers in Australia and the US whose research focuses on how we can better understand the earliest signs of mental health problems in infants and young children, and what we can do to prevent these problems from developing into more complex difficulties. Such collaborations include with the University of California, Northwestern University, the University of North Carolina, the Stanford Psychophysiology Laboratory, and the Food and Mood Centre at Deakin University.

Collaborative activities that arose throughout this project included data collection and analysis, collaboration on journal articles and systematic reviews, and a virtual seminar series, as well as a planned longitudinal cohort study across multiple sites world-wide in future.

Their collaborative activities identified that some children display chronic physical health symptoms from an early age that indicate that they are more likely to develop mental illness in later life. While new programs like probiotics and nutritional strategies appear promising, are appealing to parents and may be more accessible than other mental illness prevention programs, a lot more work is required to understand the specific biological pathways involved in the development of childhood mental health problems.

Since receiving this award, Dr Finlay-Jones has been appointed Head of the Early Neurodevelopment and Mental Health team at Telethon Kids Institute, which sits within the International Child Development program, alongside the Child Health, Development and Education team and the Food and Nutrition team. Together, they aim to develop integrated intervention approaches that combine behavioural and nutritional strategies to improve child development and prevent childhood mental illness.

“My research trajectory in this field has been immensely helped by the support of the BrightSpark Research Collaboration Award and the collaborations that have been developed through this opportunity.”

Dr Amy Finlay Jones