Smartphone-based meditation training to reduce adolescent depression

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Project Summary / Abstract Despite robust evidence that (a) depression rises precipitously during adolescence, (b) mental health during adolescence predicts lifelong trajectories, and (c) meditation-based interventions (MBIs) reduce depressive symptoms, access to and research on MBIs in adolescent populations is limited. Mobile health (mHealth) delivery of MBIs offers the promise of accessibility, affordability, and personalization. Research on mHealth MBIs in adults indicates these programs are feasible, acceptable, safe, and effective in reducing depressive symptoms. Coupled with advances in ambulatory assessment of behavior and psychophysiology (i.e., personal sensing data) through wearable devices, mHealth and personal sensing data represent a new frontier in intervention research and mental health care. Although mHealth technologies are ubiquitous for today’s adolescents, there is virtually no research on mHealth MBIs in adolescents and no research integrating mHealth MBI delivery with personal sensing data. The proposed Career Development Award begins to address this knowledge gap by developing the candidate’s skills to conduct research involving clinical adolescent samples, personal sensing data, and advanced mediation methods to identify mechanisms of change. This new training will be leveraged to study, in a sample of 150 adolescents with elevated depressive symptoms, the impact of a mHealth MBI that has strong preliminary evidence of efficacy. Participants will be randomly assigned to the mHealth MBI or to a wait-list control condition. Aim 1 will assess the feasibility, acceptability, and safety of the 8-week mHealth MBI in depressed adolescents. Aim 2 will preliminarily assess program efficacy in reducing depressive symptoms. Aim 3 will characterize psychological (i.e., perseverative thinking, cognitive distancing, loneliness), behavioral (i.e., social isolation via geolocation data), and psychophysiological (i.e., sleep quality and heart rate metrics via wearable) mediator effects on depressive symptoms using advanced structural equation modeling methods. These methods will provide preliminary evidence of intervention efficacy while potentially identifying mechanisms of change at multiple levels of analysis, providing critical data for planning future, large-scale randomized controlled trials. All aims will be supported by didactic, experiential, and mentored training in the fundamentals of clinical research through the NIH-funded Institute for Clinical and Translational Research (ICTR) and the Center for Healthy Minds. Aim 3 will be facilitated by new training in personal sensing data and advanced mediation methods, supported by a mentor team with extensive expertise in these domains. Combined, the research aims and training goals of this project seek to promote the development of accessible, acceptable, safe, and effective mHealth MBIs for the treatment and ultimately prevention of adolescent depression. This award will enable the candidate to conduct future intervention and mechanism research aimed at reducing the burden of depression in adolescents.