33rd Labelle Lecture looked at pre-emptive approaches to child, youth mental health

Mental health crises are increasing among children and youth, and treatment services can’t keep up with need. In this year’s Labelle Lecture, presented on Wednesday, Nov. 6, 2024, entitled “Timely: Towards early intervention of children’s mental ill-health,” Dr. Anna Moore of Cambridge University, UK, discussed the opportunity that predictive technologies offer to enable a preventative system for children’s mental health, and the infrastructure required for its development and implementation.

Dr. Moore is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow; Assistant Professor in Child Psychiatry and Medical Informatics in the Department of Psychiatry, University of Cambridge and Clinical Consultant in Paediatric Psychological Medicine at Cambridge and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust. Her group, Timely, develops pre-emptive approaches to child and adolescent mental health.

Mental health crises are increasing among children, and there is a critical need to reverse this trend. Yet most health research focusses on adults. Dr. Moore’s presentation described her early experiences as a clinician; policy fellow at the Department of Health and in a government-funded health innovation hub that led to her heading a national child mental health transformation program entitled “i-THRIVE”, a whole system, integrated mental health system for children and young people. More than 60% of children in the UK now live in regions adopting the approach.

This work highlighted the need to build CADRE, the Child & Adolescent Data Resource, which makes longitudinal multi-agency administrative data together with genomics and biomarker information available to academics and innovators to stimulate paediatric research, development and health system improvement.

CADRE is a federated informatics platform spanning five cities across the UK and collating routinely collected de-identified data relating to health, education and social care relating to over 6 million children and young people.

To enable inclusion of genomics data, Dr. Moore also leads the NIHR BioResource’s D-CYPHR (DNA – children and young people’s health resource), to recruit the first recallable community of children (0-15 years) volunteering to participate in childhood genetics research.

Watch the video of her Lecture here: https://youtu.be/1gyu7Dvq3vA