Perinatal mood and anxiety disorders affect one in seven pregnant and postpartum women nationwide, making them the most common complication of pregnancy. Unfortunately, only one in 20 women who need treatment for these conditions actually receives it. This translates to a multigenerational issue, which can negatively affect the mother and child’s long-term physical, emotional and developmental health. It also means an estimated $14.2 billion annually in societal costs in the U.S. alone. While not every perinatal individual with mental health concerns has access to a mental health provider, cell phones and text messaging are ubiquitous. Nonjudgmental support delivered through text messaging may be a low cost approach to reaching women who need emotional support in the perinatal period.
Our project aims to evaluate a text-based mentoring program, the Nurture Program, and assess whether it is possible to support mothers through their third trimester of pregnancy and nine months postpartum and enhance their emotional well-being. The Nurture Program combines the convenience of secure text messaging with the personalization of having a trained peer mentor with whom the mother can develop a trusting relationship. This program also provides resources on child development, connections to local support agencies and suggestions for parent-child bonding and parental wellness activities. Surveyed participants of the Nurture Program consistently report their mentor helped them feel less stressed and more confident in their role as a parent. This study will allow us to measure the impact of this cost-effective approach to promoting perinatal emotional well-being.
After COVID infection, 10-50% of people experience persistent symptoms such as fatigue, palpitations, insomnia, cognitive problems, and headache – often with significant associated distress and functional impairment. The exact combination of symptoms varies from person to person, and it is expected that the specific causes vary from person to person as well.
Because of this variability, the current recommendation is for an evaluation by a multidisciplinary team. This creates a demand on our medical system that far outstrips current resources, and risks exposing patients to long, complex medical evaluations whose results are hard to interpret. In addition, clinical treatment trials that mix patients with similar symptoms but different underlying causes have high failure rates.
To address these challenges, a team of investigators including Rebecca Hendrickson, MD, PhD (Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences), John Oakley, MD, PhD (Department of Neurology), and Aaron Bunnell, MD (Department of Rehabilitation Medicine) are testing an online platform to identify patients whose pattern of symptoms suggest a particular underlying cause that is common after certain physiologic (i.e. illness or injury) and psychological stressors: increased adrenergic (adrenaline/noradrenaline) signaling in the brain and peripheral nervous system. We will pair this with a smaller number of detailed in-person assessments to validate our symptom-based measures and characterize associated biomarkers.
Our results will provide a detailed assessment of the patterns of symptoms caused by high amounts of adrenergic signaling that are seen in persistent post-COVID syndrome, how they change over time, and their association with objective measures of cognition and physiology. The project will provide the information needed to begin clinical treatment trials using existing, well-tolerated treatments that modulate adrenergic signaling. We hope the results will also have strong relevance to other potentially related disorders such as Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) and fibromyalgia.
Explore and suggest policy solutions in response to the public health challenges of high tetrahydrocannabinol potency cannabis. ADAI will host stakeholder sessions to gain perspectives, seek common ground, evaluate, and assess potential policy solutions culminating in a final recommendation report.
The major goal of this project is to evaluate the feasibility and effectiveness of an integrated intervention approach for co-users of marijuana and tobacco who are seeking treatment for tobacco addiction.
Deaths related to the opioid overdose epidemic remain at an all-time high
across the country despite significant efforts to reduce them. There is a
pressing need to support medication treatment for opioid use disorder (OUD) to
help people stay in treatment and reduce the risk of overdose death and other
serious health consequences of untreated addiction. Smartphone-based apps can
facilitate the delivery of an evidence-based approach called contingency
management that incentivizes use of medications for OUD, reduces use of
non-prescribed opioids and improves retention in OUD treatment.
This study will leverage a commercially available smartphone app that can
bring this much-needed behavioral support to patients receiving OUD treatment
in a primary care clinic and in a specialty OUD treatment clinic. The approach
offers a potentially non-labor intensive, cost-effective and highly scalable
means of delivering OUD care.
This project aims to develop and test a mobile health (mHealth) intervention designed for caregivers of young adults with early psychosis who are unengaged in services, and specifically to examine whether it can help aid caregiver treatment facilitation.
The goal of this study is to learn how best to design a databank – a pool of data – about emotional health experiences from youth from around the world. The University of Washington is partnering with Sage Bionetworks to develop a user-friendly data platform for mental health interventions for youth. The overall scope of this project is to recruit 1,500 youth in South Africa, India, and the UK (each) to engage in a mental health intervention and both share their data and help co-design a user-friendly database for lay people, researchers and other key stakeholders. The University of Washington will provide global mental health expertise to Sage’s team to guide design, implementation, and interpretation of data collected.
This study aims to refine and test a brief intervention (CARE) that aims to promote recovery in recent sexual assault survivors. CARE is delivered to supporters of sexual assault survivors (e.g., friends, family members, romantic partners), with or without the survivor present. It aims to encourage conversations about the assault and decrease negative reactions by the supporter. In stage 1 of this study, we will conduct feedback sessions with 8-10 dyads of survivors and their supporters to finalize the intervention materials. In stage 2, we will conduct a pilot clinical trial of CARE with 60 dyads, who will be randomized to dyadic intervention, supporter-only intervention, or waitlist control.
