The Research Forum is designed to drive the research policy agenda for child and adolescent psychiatry by creating an environment that encourages scientific exploration and collaboration of investigators across disciplines. The primary audience for the 2012 Research Forum is researchers, although others are invited to attend.

Illness prevention is the Holy Grail in all of medicine. In psychiatry, where a lack of pathophysiologic understanding of the mental disorders has precluded causal treatments, primary and targeted prevention efforts are even more relevant. The importance of prevention is enhanced by the detrimental effect that mental disorders have on quality adjusted life years and by the degree of disability that is associated with mental illness. Since children and adolescents are undergoing critical developmental changes, preventing, or even delaying, the onset of psychiatric disorders that interfere with the attainment of age-appropriate maturational processes is particularly crucial. While prevention science has developed dramatically in the past decades, child psychiatry has only recently branched out into this area.

The 2012 Research Forum introduces participants to principles of universal and targeted prevention in medicine, mechanisms involved in mental illness risk and resilience, and novel clinical applications of psychiatric prevention efforts in youth at familial and clinical high risk for exemplary major psychiatric disorders with pediatric onset. It exposes participants to insights on basic principles of prevention sciences and biobehavioral mechanisms of normal and abnormal brain development, dovetailing these more theoretical aspects with the emerging clinical applications of psychiatric prevention efforts in youth at risk for major psychiatric disorders that often have their origin in childhood and adolescence.

The focus of the morning session is to review the fundamental principles of medical prevention and the basic mechanisms underlying normal and abnormal neuropsychiatric development. Specific goals are to: provide an overview of concepts in prevention science and how they are methodologically approached, review neurobiological mechanisms for developing psychopathology, describe how the environment interacts with brain mechanisms for developing psychopathology, and highlight risk and resilience factors for the development of psychopathology in youth.

The focus of the afternoon session is to review the application of universal and targeted prevention efforts to selected major psychiatric disorders with onset in youth. Specific goals are to: review the early illness signs and symptoms prior to the first full episode, differentiate the symptomatic prodrome from risk markers, endophenotypes, and predictors as much as possible, review/propose high risk criteria, describe early identification and intervention opportunities, discuss enrichment strategies for help seeking high risk patients who are more likely to progress to the full illness and/or have relevant disability, identify strategies for early treatment that have already been or that should be tested, propose a staged intervention schedule for clinicians based on the current knowledge base, and provide thoughts on the transfer and scalability of research findings to clinical practice.

The Research Forum provides ample opportunity for discussion between the audience and the panelists. At the conclusion of the program, participants have an integrated understanding of the rationale, methodologies, experimental design options, and basic, clinical and translational approaches regarding universal and targeted prevention efforts in pediatric psychiatry.

If you have questions regarding the Research Forum, please contact Andrea Silva, M.A. at 202.587.9665 or asilva@aacap.org.