Difficult childhood experiences and their role in anxiety across Brazil and the UK
Project overview
Adverse childhood experiences such as difficulties in home life, bereavement and bullying have been linked to an increased risk of anxiety disorders.
This project (funded by Wellcome and led by University of Bristol) will explore how and why these experiences increase the risk of anxiety. Ultimately, the goal is to identify ways we can support children who have had these experiences, to prevent anxiety from developing.
The team will use data in existing ‘cohort studies’ to explore this – a type of research project that collects data from a large group of people, and then follows up with those individuals to collect additional data, usually over a long period of time.
With this study, the existing data will be used to track how different social, psychological and biological factors interact with each other following an adverse childhood experience, potentially contributing to the development of anxiety.
This study will look at data from both the UK and Brazil, where children encounter very different challenges and adversities. For example, extreme poverty and street violence are more common in Brazil.
The UK team, including McPin, will work closely with the Brazil team from universities in Sao Paulo and Pelotas to build meaningful approaches to youth involvement in the study. Our youth involvement approach in Brazil will then be evaluated later in the study, to understand what worked well and what could be done differently.
Project details
This research is important because…
- By studying what drives the link between adverse childhood experiences and anxiety in two different countries, we hope to improve interventions and prevention methods (i.e., ensure we are targeting the right mechanisms impacting on young people’s mental health)
- By supporting the Brazil team to build their own youth involvement practices, we can tackle an unmet need in research (lived experience involvement is currently uncommon in Brazil)
The project plans were designed together with young people with lived experience of anxiety.
In spring 2025, we will form a UK young people’s advisory group to shape the project throughout.
This group will be formed of 16-28 year-olds with lived experience of adverse childhood experiences and/or anxiety, and prior youth involvement expertise.
Some of the work that these young people will be involved with includes:
- Prioritising the measures of potential social mechanisms that young people think are important
- Gathering thoughts on the use of genetics in anxiety research and in child maltreatment research
- Shaping how we think about school experiences and how these could influence the pathway from childhood adversity to anxiety
- Co-designing a training approach for the Brazil staff and Brazilian young people in youth involvement practices
- ‘Buddying up’ with the Brazilian young people to support youth involvement
- Working as co-researchers to evaluate our approach to lived experience involvement in Brazil, and contribute to qualitative work exploring differences in the meaning and interpretation of anxiety symptoms across UK and Brazil
- Co-designing and delivering dissemination and impact strategy
Please get in touch with [email protected] for more information on this project.
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