CAPRI-Voc

• Research type

  Research Study

• Full title

  Children and Adolescents with Parental Mental illness: Measuring Vocal Brain Development in Babies of Mothers who have Experienced Serious Mental Illness (CAPRI-Voc)

• IRAS ID

  212715

• Contact name

  Kathryn Abel

• Contact email

  Kathryn.M.Abel@manchester.ac.uk

• Sponsor organisation

  The University of Manchester

• Duration of Study in the UK

  4 years, 11 months, 30 days

• Research summary

  Improving the social and academic outcomes of children and adolescents with parental mental illness is an urgent political and public health concern for the UK and EU. Parental mental illness is believed to affect cohesion of the family, yet social care and healthcare interventions are poorly targeted and non-specific. This study forms part of a wider ERC funded programme CAPRI ' Children and Adolescents with PaRental mental illness: Understanding the 'who and 'how' of targeting interventions. CAPRI’s aims are to provide the missing evidence needed so health and social care services can understand better 'who' to target and 'how' to target so we can prevent long term problems for these children.
  This specific study (CAPRI-Voc) will recruit around 130 mums who have experienced serious mental illness with infants aged between 9-18 months (+/-2 months). Mums and infants will undergo assessments at two time points. With the mums we shall look at their childhood experiences and assess current mood and circumstances. We shall be capturing mum-infant interactions in a 6 minute video clip taken during free-play. With the infants, we shall conduct i) a Bayley’s Assessment of development a widely used tool for observing and recording aspects of a young child's development followed by ii) a functional neuroimaging assessment using Near Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS), a portable, safe optical imaging technique recording from the scalp . Data collected will be compared with data from a sister study with identical assessments in 'healthy mums' and their infants acting as controls. This will help determine if specific identified risk factors relate to changes in brain responses during infant language development. It is hoped that, if high risk children within the larger group of children at-risk can be identified and supported early enough, the effects of parental mental illness on those children can be minimised.

• REC name

  North West - Greater Manchester West Research Ethics Committee

• REC reference

  17/NW/0074

• Date of REC Opinion

  13 Feb 2017

• REC opinion

  Favourable Opinion