World Mental Health Day, 2021

Mental Health study GLAD (Genetic Links to Anxiety and Depression) recruits participants with anxiety and depression as part of the NIHR BioResource, and is the largest ever study of anxiety and depression.

Participants from GLAD database are also asked if they would like to be part of the PORT study. PORT (Predicting Outcomes and Response to Therapy) aims to understand how people with anxiety respond to their therapy, and if it helps to make them feel any better.

Currently, psychological treatment is only affective 50% of the time and researchers want to be able to understand why that is –so they can work to improve treatment for future patients. As part of the study, participants are asked to complete a few questionnaires to assess whether their specific anxiety may be treatable by cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). Also, a smartphone app is used, called FLARe (Fear Learning and Anxiety Response) as another part of the assessment.

Following this, participants are then referred to CBT via leso Digital Health. Digital health will then provide outcome measures, along with the patient’s self-assessment, of CBT to the study to assess whether the treatment is improving patients’ anxiety. The outcomes from CBT will then be added to a large database and used to predict whether new patients, with similar types of anxiety, will respond well to CBT treatment.

What causes anxiety and depression?

Anxiety is thought to be caused by a heightened activity of a certain part of the brain that processes emotion. This can cause excessive worrying, trouble sleeping, increased heart rate and tensed muscles.

Depression is, on the other hand, thought to be a combination of many different factors, for example, genetics, poor mood regulation, stressful situations, and medications that people may be taking. There are a huge number of chemical reactions in the brain that influence mood, and exactly how these reactions lead to depression is not yet fully understood by scientists. Therefore, 2 different people, with different causes of depression, may not respond to the same treatment.

There are many effective treatments for both depression and anxiety and the PORT study aims to improve these treatment outcomes and understand the more specialised treatment that some patients may need.

If you’re interested in joining the GLAD study, please follow this link for more information: https://gladstudy.org.uk