The vulnerability-stress-model has gained much attention in mental disorders as it nicely captures the multifactorial nature of the disorders. During the last years, research activities aimed to identify biological and genetic components that operate in interaction with psychosocial factors like stressful life-events and urbanicity within this model increasing or lowering ones vulnerability for mental disorders.
In our symposium we will highlight new brain imaging findings of environmental and genetic risk factors in depressive and bipolar disorders and schizophrenia extending this focus to epigenetic mechanisms.
T. Kircher reports about transdiagnostic structural and functional brain changes data in patients with MDD, BD and SZ and links this to risk factors.
H. Walter will report about neurobehavioral risk and resilience factors for mental disorders and discuss the prospects of the search for biomarkers in light of recent findings from big data.
H. J. Grabe will present new results on the effects of several Alzheimer related SNPs on hippocampal subfields and how risk for mental illness such as childhood traumatization and major depression act as a moderator in this association. Data will be analysed from the Study of Health in Pomerania SHIP-LEGEND and SHIP-TREND with available MRI data (N=3200). These findings will be complemented by epigenetic data in SHIP-TREND.
A. Meyer-Lindenberg will present new results on incorporating data on interindividual differences in reacting to resilience factors into climate cost prediction models, forming the basis of accounting for the mental health effects of global warming.