Long-term study keeps on growing

Dawn Wiseman

For the past 30 years Alex Schwartzman and his colleagues at Concordia’s Centre for Research on Human Development (CRDH) have been conducting a unique study. It is one of the few studies in the world to have followed a large number of subjects from childhood through to their mid-life years.

Although Schwartzman retired in 2004 as Distinguished Professor Emeritus, he remains very active in research. He heads up the Concordia Longitudinal Risk Research Project. Schwartzman’s research began in 1976 with co-investigator Jane Ledingham (formerly at Concordia), with a focus on determining whether frequent aggression and/or withdrawal in childhood signaled the risk of schizophrenia in early adulthood. The aim of the study was to help mental health workers identify and target for early preventive and remedial treatment children who are at risk for this seriously disabling disorder.

Four thousand francophone children in Montreal were initially screened. The choice of following francophone children to maturity was made because Canadian census data indicated that they were far more likely to remain nearby and accessible for long-term study. And, as it turns out, they have. The “children” who have been participating in the study are now entering their forties, and have children of their own entering their teens. Schwartzman noted, “They have been immensely helpful and cooperative,” for which he and his colleagues are very grateful.

In tracking the personal adjustment of children into maturity, it became apparent to the project’s now expanded team of CRDH researchers and their students that the children who were aggressive or withdrawn were at risk not only for schizophrenia but for other mental and physical health problems as well; and not only at the stage of entry into adulthood, but also at earlier and later points in their lives. The project has therefore broadened into a program of studies examining health risk factors over the life course of these children, and more recently, of their children. Many of the project’s findings have drawn attention to education and income, social support and friendship, and parenting and family life as the key levers of influence on mental and physical wellbeing across the life span and across generations.

These findings have initiated two major lines of current study funded by federal and Quebec research granting agencies. One involves the observation and detailed measurement of the key developmental processes implicated in the transfer of biological and psychosocial risk factors from parent to child.

The other deals with the question of intergenerational transfer in a much larger ecological context. It is examining the impact of major social changes over the past 40 years in Quebec on the transfer of emotional and physical health problems from parent to child across three generations —the parents (now grandparents) of the initial subjects; the subjects themselves (now parents); and their children. It involves the use of identity-protected archival health and census information, and as such, makes for an ideal naturalistic study that is ethically sensitive and at the same time richly informative for health scientists and practitioners, for social policy planners and legislators, and for stakeholders and the community at large.

According to Schwartzman, “The current direction of the longitudinal study also has an important bearing on work being done by prominent investigators in Montreal and elsewhere on the nature-nurture dynamics of intergenerational transfer. The remarkable advances in genomic/molecular research have, perhaps paradoxically, placed emphasis on the role of experience over the life course as a modulator of genetically rooted vulnerabilities to physical and mental health problems.”

Five investigators in addition to Schwartzman are involved in the three-generation study that was recently awarded funding by CIHR (see Journal, Feb. 8). Paul Hastings of CRDH , is co-principal investigator, as is Michal Abrahamowicz of McGill’s Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics. Robyn Tamblyn of the same department, Lisa Serbin, Director of CRDH, and CRDH faculty member Dale Stack complete the roster of researchers associated with the study. Their respective areas of expertise are particularly pertinent in this collaborative research undertaking.