[Symposium 115] Clinical Diagnosis is critical to advancing the improvement in clinical care and outcomes through research in mental health

[SY-115] Clinical Diagnosis is critical to advancing the improvement in clinical care and outcomes through research in mental health

Megan Galbally¹, Josephine Power¹, Izaak Lim¹, Katherine Sevar¹, Harish Kalra¹ (1. Monash University (Australia))

Keywords:

Clinical diagnosis,Research,Perinatal,Child

The importance of clinical diagnosis underpins much of contemporary health care decision making and poor diagnostic accuracy is frequently identified as a significant modifiable contributor to clinical variation and incidents. Research in perinatal and child mental health the use of diagnostic clinical measures would be by exception rather than an expectation of research design and methods in most research undertaken. Yet reviews continue to highlight as one of the barriers to progress in mental health research examining causal and aetiological pathways the gap in accuracy of phenotype and in particular the absence of inclusion of robust diagnostic measurement even when labour intensive and expensive methodologies such as genome wide association is undertaken. The paper will present data from a longitudinal pregnancy cohort study of 887 women that has followed these women and then their children from early pregnancy to 8 years of age using repeat diagnostic clinical measures in both mothers and children together with repeated dimensional and symptom based measures. This paper will first focus on the findings for repeat measurement of SCID and EPDS in mothers and the second part will focus on the repeat measurement of PAPA at 4 years and DISC at 8 years together with repeat CBCL in children within the study. Highlights will be the relationship between these measures of mental health, associations with predictors and outcomes in this sample and finally an exploration of subtypes of perinatal depression using EPDS and then the SCID collected in this study in mothers.