１．Social determinants and social consequences of mental health: a life course approach

【Presenter】

Marcus Richards
University College London, UK

Marcus Richards is a Programme Leader at the MRC Unit for Lifelong Health and Ageing at UCL, and a Professor of Psychology in Epidemiology at the Faculty of Population Health Sciences, University College London.

He read Experimental Psychology at Oxford University, and obtained a PhD at London University in the physiology of human learning.

He has held appointments at Columbia University in New York and King’s College London Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience to conduct research into neurodegenerative diseases of ageing, and was one of the first recipients of an Alzheimer’s Society Research Fellowship.

He joined the MRC National Survey of Health and Development team in 1996.

【Chair】

Kiyoto Kasai
The University of Tokyo

【Abstract】

Mental ageing encompasses emotional psychiatric and cognitive function.
Most relevant measures are continuously distributed in the general population, from emotional and behavioural stability and optimum cognitive function at one extreme, to affective and externalising disorders and dementia at the other extreme.

Life course epidemiology, based on birth cohort studies, has consistently shown that these outcomes have strong social determinants. For depression, by far the strongest determinants are stressful life events, even after taking account of adolescent depression.

These social factors can also be consequences of mental ill-health. This is striking in the case of adolescent conduct problems, which are associated with low educational and occupational attainment, intimate relationship problems, and trouble with the criminal justice system.

Social determinants are also important for cognitive impairment and dementia, above all education, where effects are independent of early cognitive development and sensitive to broader social factors such as school leaving age.

Education has been the historical focus for the cognitive reserve model of dementia since it can modify the relationship between pathology and functionality.
These factors will be reviewed in detail during this presentation.