Clinical Research Directory

Probing the Role of Mitochondrial Oxidative Stress in Impaired Vascular Function Among Young Adults With Early Life Adversity

Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) represent highly stressful events in the first 18 years of life that include abuse, neglect, and household and community-level dysfunction. Greater exposure to ACEs are associated with greater increases in the risk of cardiovascular diseases and death. Our laboratory has previously observed that vascular function is disrupted in young adults with prior ACE exposure, even though these individuals appear to be healthy clinically (i.e., no classic clinical cardiovascular disease risk factors). There is a need to identify and understand the biological mechanisms underlying these vascular impairments to inform effective interventions to reduce cardiovascular risks the millions of individuals affected by ACEs. The body's response to stress is coordinated across various systems, all of which depend on energy supplied by mitochondria (often referred to as the "powerhouse of cells"). Based on new evidence across multiple physiological systems from our team, our overarching hypothesis is that disruption of mitochondrial function contributes to cardiovascular impairments among young adults with ACEs. Here we propose the initial pilot work necessary to begin to understand these associations, which will directly inform identification of individuals who may be most vulnerable to stress-related cardiovascular risk and the development of interventions to promote cardiovascular-stress resilience. Our aims are to: 1. Determine whether mitochondrial oxidative stress contributes to impaired vascular function among young adults who experienced early life adversity. 2. Determine whether reducing mitochondrial oxidative stress improves the cellular stress and integrated cardiovascular response to laboratory-based psychosocial stress among young adults who experienced early life adversity.

Chinese Community Sample of Hierarchical Model of Psychopathology

By validating Hierarchy Model of psychopathology(HiTOP) in Chinese community samples, this study aims for illumating the problem of diagnostic heterogeneity and high comorbidity within existing psychiatric classification systems in Chinese culture. Concurrently, this study also focuses on exploring trans-diagonostic risk and proctective factors underline HiTOP dimensions. the main questions it aims to answer are: 1. Explore HiTOP model cultural differences between western culture and eastern culture. 2. Understand the impact of different dimension of adverse childhood experience on HiTOP structure. 3. Investigate the relationship between individual unique psychological variables and psychopathological dimensions. Participants will receive a detailed survey trying to measure their psychopathology symptoms, adverse childhood experience and psychological variables. This study expects to fallow up participants for 4 years to monitor the symptom changes.

Paired Emotion Reading Improves Emotion Regulation in Rural Children With ACE

The goal of this study is to explore the feasibility and effectiveness of the online Paired Emotion Reading Intervention (PERI) on the emotion regulation of rural children with adverse childhood experiences (ACE), as compared with the online Paired General Reading Intervention (PGRI) group and a Care as Usual (CAU) control group. This study is a cluster randomized controlled trial and will recruit three rural schools, randomly assigning them to PERI, PGRI, or CAU. Each school will recruit 50 children with ACE. Additionally, the investigators will recruit 150 urban children of similar ages to the rural children. Urban and rural children will be randomly paired to form urban-rural reading groups, reading different types of books and engaging in discussions. It is hypothesized that, after the intervention, rural children in the PERI group will show significantly greater improvements in emotion regulation self-efficacy and emotional awareness compared to the PGRI and CAU groups. These group differences are expected to persist at 1-month and 3-month follow-up assessments.