We caught up with Anna Viduani, who works on the IDEA Project in Brazil, at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Porto Alegre. Anna is part of an international team of researchers who are working to identify universal and context-specific risk factors for depression in young people around the world.
This exciting MQ-funded project started in 2018, and researchers in Brazil, the UK, Nigeria and Nepal are working have developed a tool to identify risk factors for depression in adolescents. By researching in countries with such different backgrounds, they are hoping to find out which risk factors for depression are unique to their contexts, and which can be found globally.
Can you tell us what the IDEA Project is?
So the acronym IDEA stands for Identifying Depression in Early Adolescence. It's a large international project. Our ultimate goal is to improve detection and prevention of adolescent depression.
We have this amazing team from a lot of countries; researchers here in Brazil, also in the UK, the US, Nepal and Nigeria. And we use both qualitative [non-numerical data e.g., someone's experiences] and quantitative methods [numerical data] and involve a lot of stakeholders from these countries to reach this goal.
A big part of this project, and the part that I've been involved with the most, is establishing the IDEA Risk-Stratified Cohort of 150 adolescents here from Porto Alegre. The IDEA team has developed a risk score that uses the young people’s social demographic information to classify the risk of them developing depression over three years. Using this risk score, we were able to create a cohort [a group of people with a shared characteristic] of 150 Brazilian adolescents who were stratified by risk of developing depression. So we have a high risk group, a low risk one, and a group with untreated major depressive disorder.
And so, what are your key findings in relation to inequalities when it comes to depression and young people?
Inequalities play a great role when we think about identification of depression in young people. This is both in terms of the knowledge available to stakeholders on how to identify adolescent depression, but also on the resources to do that. Additionally, we can also think about the exposure to risk factors. All of these are impacted by structural inequalities. So, we are trying to develop tools and gather evidence on how we can improve this identification. We can also think about the impact of inequalities in access and availability of treatment, and even the outcomes for young people.
How are you working alongside young people to develop the IDEA project?
This is a very cool part of the IDEA project that I'm very excited about because one of our goals is to always involve youth in our research. We often have great ideas as a research team, but it's the adolescents who give us feedback on whether these ideas are actually feasible for reality.
We are now involving more youth in developing and implementing the research process. In the IDEA project, youth are the subject of the research, but they also feed into the design of the research.
For example, we interviewed them to understand their experience of participating in the baseline data collection. It involves many steps like they had to draw blood, saliva, and do an MRI, and stuff like that. So we had this qualitative component to understand how they are perceiving what we are doing, how they're feeling about these things and how they're perceiving this process, so we can actually improve in the future.
They gave us great material to work with on how they experienced the depression. They also explained how they perceive the identifications in school, at home and in the health sector. It's very cool because they also looked at the risk calculator itself to give us insights on the feasibility and possible applications of this risk calculator in real world scenarios.
So young people with lived experience had quite a big influence and it's been really helpful to collaborate with them in the process?
Yeah, totally. We always think about including youth in the development and implementation of the data collection process. They give us great insights and help our research to stay suitable and acceptable for them. Bringing this together, it’s an ongoing commitment, and an ongoing learning process for us as researchers, because we're trying to involve them in a lot of different ways. We have this continuous feedback loop that we can always improve our process and know how to bring them closer to us.
The IDEA project has shown me that we really should work with adolescents not only as subjects, but getting them involved and listening to them during the research process.
"The IDEA project has shown me that we really should work with adolescents not only as subjects, but getting them involved and listening to them during the research process."
You mentioned before about context-specific risk factors for depression in young people. One of the aims with the IDEA project was to identify universal and context-specific risk factors. Could you talk about these?
Sure. This is very interesting because we’ve been very involved in creating the IDEA Risk Cohort. And with this risk cohort was created using social demographic variables informed by the adolescents that feed into our risk assessment tool. It uses things like biological sex and skin colour. Also whether someone has used drugs, social isolation and some markers of household dysfunction like a poor relationship with their mother or father, the relationship between parents, childhood maltreatment, or if they have run away from home. The IDEA Risk Score can be used in other countries, and we have studies showing it works with adolescents from other countries, such as the UK. These are all variables that point to universal risk factors. However, we can also look into the distribution and frequency of these factors among countries, and we can also see whether these various risk factors can happen differently across contexts.This is an ongoing process.
How did you personally get involved with this project and what motivates you to research depression in young people?
I started working with the IDEA project in 2018, when Professor Christian Kieling from the IDEA project was looking for undergraduate students to assist with data collection. I had little to no experience in research, but I knew I wanted to work in projects that helped young people.
Working on the IDEA project has been an amazing experience. I'm now doing my Masters so I have more understanding and a lot more experience and research, and I'm focusing now on the experience of adolescent depression so using data from the interviews and a more qualitative analysis.
I fell in love with research during the IDEA project. I learned so much, both personally and professionally because we had this amazing team to work with, not only here in Brazil, but globally. I feel like I have friends all over the world. We can collaborate, even if we're not geographically close. I've learned so much from our collaborators. I’ve also learned a lot about the power that the youth have. I really believe that young people are changing things for the better.
Also, depression is a highly relevant topic. Both when we see the hard numbers but also when we consider the individual and subjective impact of depression in light of adolescents. It really gets me moving and makes me want to go further and study further.
And what's next for the IDEA project in Brazil?
The IDEA project has several ongoing efforts, because we're following up the 150 adolescents. A big part of this is the Risk Score that predicts depression over three years, for which we’ll need to do follow ups for three years after the baseline assessment. So we're now doing the second year of follow ups.
We are also exploring the use of technology, both in passive sensing, and through apps to help us understand a little bit more about the adolescents’ lives, and how we can also harness technology to understand more about depression and perhaps think of interventions. We’ll see how we can translate all of this knowledge into tailoring prevention.
Thank you for your time, Anna, and we can’t wait to hear what happens next in the IDEA project!
The IDEA Project is playing a vital role in improving our understanding of depression in young people. Fantastic projects like this would not be possible without the support of people like you. Donate to MQ today to help fund life-saving research such as the IDEA Project.
