Publications by authors named "Moffitt T"

Background: Aging is the strongest risk factor for Alzheimer's disease (AD). Accordingly, identifying biomarkers of accelerated aging is a major focus of AD prevention research. Current MRI-based "aging clocks" (i.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Aging is the strongest risk factor for Alzheimer's disease (AD). Accordingly, identifying biomarkers of accelerated aging is a major focus of AD prevention research. Current MRI-based "aging clocks" (i.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Adversity that exhibits continuity across the life course has long-term detrimental effects on physical and mental health. Using 920 participants from the Dunedin Study, we tested the following hypotheses: (1) children (ages 3-15) who experienced adversity would also tend to experience adversity in adulthood (ages 32-45), and (2) interim personality traits in young adulthood (ages 18-26) would help account for this longitudinal association. Children who experienced more adversity tended to also experience more stressful life events as adults, β=.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • - The geroscience hypothesis suggests that biological aging contributes significantly to cognitive decline.
  • - Analyzed data from the Framingham Heart Study linked faster aging (measured by the DunedinPACE epigenetic clock) to poorer cognitive performance and quicker decline over two decades.
  • - Findings indicate that biological aging metrics can help identify individuals at risk for cognitive decline, which may enhance risk assessment in clinical settings and future trials.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Mental disorders and physical-health conditions frequently co-occur, impacting treatment outcomes. While most prior research has focused on single pairs of mental disorders and physical-health conditions, this study explores broader associations between multiple mental disorders and physical-health conditions.

Methods: Using the Norwegian primary-care register, this population-based cohort study encompassed all 2 203 553 patients born in Norway from January 1945 through December 1984, who were full-time residents from January 2006 until December 2019 (14 years; 363 million person-months).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • - The study explored the relationship between adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and mental health issues, noting that supportive adult relationships can help mitigate these problems.
  • - Using a twin-difference design, researchers analyzed data from a UK twin study to determine whether the protective effects of maternal warmth and adult support on mental health were truly causal, controlling for genetic and environmental factors.
  • - Results indicated that while children with more supportive adult relationships showed lower levels of mental health problems, these protective effects were significantly reduced when accounting for genetic and environmental factors, suggesting interventions should be more multifaceted.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Epigenetic measures of aging derived from DNA methylation are promising biomarkers associated with prospective morbidity and mortality, but require validation in real-world medical settings. Using data from 2,216 post-9/11 veterans, we examined whether accelerated DunedinPACE aging scores were associated with chronic disease morbidity, predicted healthcare costs, and mortality assessed over an average of 13.1 years of follow up in VA electronic health records.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Aims: Exposure to multiple forms of victimisation in childhood (often referred to as poly-victimisation) has lifelong adverse effects, including an elevated risk of early-adulthood psychopathology. However, not all poly-victimised children develop mental health difficulties and identifying what protects them could inform preventive interventions. The present study investigated whether individual-, family- and/or community-level factors were associated with lower levels of general psychopathology at age 18, among children exposed to poly-victimisation.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

How many primary-care encounters are devoted to mental-health conditions compared with physical-health conditions? Here we analyzed Norway's nationwide administrative primary-care records, extracting all doctor-patient encounters occurring during 14 years (2006-2019) for the population aged 0-100 years. Encounters were recorded according to the International Classification of Primary Care. We compared the volume of mental-health encounters against volumes for conditions in multiple different body systems.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Research indicates that prospective and retrospective measures of maltreatment often identify different groups of individuals, yet the reasons for these discrepancies remain understudied.

Objective: This study explores potential sources of disagreement between prospective and retrospective measures of maltreatment, utilising qualitative data from interviewers' notes.

Participants And Setting: The Environmental Risk Longitudinal Twin Study includes 2232 children followed from ages 5-18.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

To understand how aging affects functional decline and increases disease risk, it is necessary to develop accurate and reliable measures of how fast a person is aging. Epigenetic clocks measure aging but require DNA methylation data, which many studies lack. Using data from the Dunedin Study, we introduce an accurate and reliable measure for the rate of longitudinal aging derived from cross-sectional brain MRI: the Dunedin Pace of Aging Calculated from NeuroImaging or DunedinPACNI.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Homicide is the leading cause of death among young people in Latin America, one of the world's most violent regions. Poverty is widely considered a key cause of violence, but theories suggest different effects of poverty, depending on when it is experienced in the life-course. Longitudinal studies of violence are scarce in Latin America, and very few prospective data are available worldwide to test different life-course influences on homicide.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Importance: Low childhood socioeconomic status (SES) is a social hallmark of aging that contributes to adult health disparities and earlier morbidity and mortality. Childhood perceptions of stress are associated with child health outcomes and may contribute to premature biological aging into adulthood.

Objective: To describe the association of childhood SES and perceived stress with midlife insulin resistance and epigenetic age and to explore whether late adolescent adiposity mediates the observed associations.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Objectives: Tests of physical function are often thought to measure functioning that is (1) musculoskeletal, and (2) newly declining in adult life. In contrast, this study aimed to: (1) add to evidence that physical-function tests also measure brain function, and (2) test the novel hypothesis that adult physical function is associated with brain function beginning in early childhood. We investigated early childhood brain function and midlife physical function in the Dunedin Study, a 5-decade longitudinal birth cohort (n = 1,037).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Millions of adults and children are exposed to high levels of lead, a neurotoxicant, each year. Recent evidence suggests that lead exposure may precipitate neurodegeneration, particularly if the exposure occurs early or late in life, with unique alterations to the structure or function of specific subfields of the hippocampus, a region involved in memory and Alzheimer's disease. It has been proposed that specific hippocampal subfields may thus be useful biomarkers for lead-associated neurological disease.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

As disasters increase due to climate change, population density, epidemics, and technology, information is needed about postdisaster consequences for people's mental health and how stress-related mental disorders affect multiple spheres of life, including labor-market attachment. We tested the causal hypothesis that individuals who developed stress-related mental disorders as a consequence of their disaster exposure experienced subsequent weak labor-market attachment and poor work-related outcomes. We leveraged a natural experiment in an instrumental variables model, studying a 2004 fireworks factory explosion disaster that precipitated the onset of stress-related disorders (posttraumatic stress disorder, anxiety, and depression) among individuals in the local community (N = 86,726).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Objectives: The Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study provides a unique opportunity to document the progression of ear health and hearing ability within the same cohort of individuals from birth. This investigation draws on hearing data from 5 to 13 years and again at 45 years of age, to explore the associations between childhood hearing variables and hearing and listening ability at age 45.

Design: Multiple linear regression analyses were used to assess associations between childhood hearing (otological status and mid-frequency pure-tone average) and (a) age 45 peripheral hearing ability (mid-frequency pure-tone average and high-frequency pure-tone average), and (b) age 45 listening ability (listening in spatialized noise and subjective questionnaire on listening experiences).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Infections, which can prompt neuroinflammation, may be a risk factor for dementia. More information is needed concerning associations across different infections and different dementias, and from longitudinal studies with long follow-ups. This New Zealand-based population register study tested whether infections antedate dementia across three decades.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

As societies age, policy makers need tools to understand how demographic aging will affect population health and to develop programs to increase healthspan. The current metrics used for policy analysis do not distinguish differences caused by early-life factors, such as prenatal care and nutrition, from those caused by ongoing changes in people's bodies due to aging. Here we introduce an adapted Pace of Aging method designed to quantify differences between individuals and populations in the speed of aging-related health declines.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Perceptions of crime detection risk (e.g., risk of arrest) play an integral role in the criminal decision-making process.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The negative health consequences of loneliness have led to increasing concern about the economic cost of loneliness in recent years. Loneliness may also incur an economic burden more directly, by impacting socioeconomic position. Much of the research to date has focused on employment status which may not fully capture socioeconomic position and has relied on cross-sectional data, leaving questions around the robustness of the association and reverse causation.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Introduction: Dementia risk may be elevated in socioeconomically disadvantaged neighborhoods. Reasons for this remain unclear, and this elevation has yet to be shown at a national population level.

Methods: We tested whether dementia was more prevalent in disadvantaged neighborhoods across the New Zealand population (N = 1.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • People with higher education levels tend to live longer and experience better health, potentially due to slower biological aging.
  • The study aimed to investigate if upward educational mobility is linked to slower biological aging and improved longevity using data from three generations of the Framingham Heart Study.
  • The analysis included 3101 participants, measuring biological aging through DNA-methylation data, and aimed to identify the relationship between educational outcomes and aging rates.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Introduction: Medication treatment for opioid use disorder (MOUD) decreases opioid overdose risk and is the standard of care for persons with opioid use disorder (OUD). Recovery coach (RC)-led programs and associated training curriculums to improve outcomes around MOUD are limited. We describe our comprehensive training curriculum including instruction and pedagogy for novel RC-led MOUD linkage and retention programs and report on its feasibility.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Objective: People who eat healthier diets are less likely to develop dementia, but the biological mechanism of this protection is not well understood. We tested the hypothesis that healthy diet protects against dementia because it slows the pace of biological aging.

Methods: We analyzed Framingham Offspring Cohort data.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF