Who are the Children of the 90s?

If you were down on Bristol Harbourside this weekend you may have noticed an event at MShed, or heard mention of ‘Children of the 90s’. Who are these children, and what were they doing at the museum? The answer involves a journey more than 20 years back in time, and the vision and foresight of Bristol Professor Jean Golding.

Raise A Glass To The Birth Cohort

In yesterday’s post, Suzi pointed out how Children of the 90s has helped her research, and last Friday, BBC Breakfast had a feature on a study that is already a couple of years old, yet remains very much in its infancy. As with Children of the 90s, ‘Born in Bradford’ is a longitudinal cohort: a study which recruits a group of participants, sometimes well before their birth certificates are signed, and follows them during the course of their lives (often alongside their parents and/or other relatives). Herculean efforts are put in to record buckets of information about them along the way. Such a study is an immensely rich and important resource.

Studies begin with certain goals in mind and develop over time to address new research questions and shifting paradigms in medicine. For example, early work from Children Of The 90s helped to resolve contention about which way we should lie our babies at night to lower the risk of cot death (that’s face up, new parents!). Nowadays, the participants are collectively entering their third decade walking this earth, and continue to help us answer questions about the incalculable complexities of maintaining good health in the 21^st century.

Many types of information and measures are recorded by cohorts (all with the consent of participants, of course). These can range from simple questionnaires about things like family income and leisure activity preferences to in-depth measures taken at medical examinations, including blood samples used to measure various biochemical properties. Since the advent of the human genome project in 2003, we are increasingly being able to survey the genetic information of participants to explore what effects our DNA can have on our propensity for developing certain traits or diseases.

Pot Luck – does smoking cannabis really increase your chances of becoming psychotic?

Paranoia. You’re being watched. The people on the street are not who they seem; they’re following you. You’re sure you’ve seen that man before, he must be a spy. It might sound like James Bond’s inner monologue, but these are some of the sensations you can feel while intoxicated after smoking cannabis. They’re also some of the symptoms of psychosis, a disorder of the mind which has been linked to cannabis use. Feeling paranoid when you’re high is not the same as developing a condition like psychosis. The effects of intoxication are gone after a few hours; psychosis as a disorder can involve episodes like this lasting for days, or longer. Currently the government believes that cannabis use as a teenager increases a person’s risk of developing psychosis, but the scientific evidence is not so clear cut.

Although cannabis is illegal, it is a widely used drug. A 2004 report from the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction found that two in five 15 year olds in the UK had tried cannabis, and one in ten had done so more than 50 times the previous year. Because of this, you might expect there to be lot of youngsters with psychosis, but it’s a very rare disorder. David Nutt, the ex-government drug advisor, has pointed out that although the use of cannabis has increased dramatically over the last few decades, the number of people with psychosis over the same time period has not increased at the same rate. If there was a direct link between cannabis use and likelihood to develop psychosis, you would expect to see both either increase or decrease together. If there is a link between cannabis use and psychosis it is likely to be complicated, and it is still not clear in which direction an effect occurs. It may be that the link is seen because people with psychosis find that smoking cannabis alleviates some psychotic symptoms, such as social anxiety, so they self medicate.