Ambitious Statewide Mental Health Study Recruiting at UH
August 15, 2024
UH Clinical Update | August 2024
University Hospitals is joining forces with medical and higher education institutions across Ohio in an ambitious, unprecedented new study to identify the root causes of mental illness and addiction, as well as factors that promote resilience.
Funded with an initial investment of $20 million from the state of Ohio, the SOAR (State of Ohio Adversity and Resilience) study is the first-ever multigenerational study that aims to transform mental health prevention, treatment and resiliency. Investigators at 12 universities, medical schools and hospitals across Ohio, including UH, are surveying 15,000 volunteers from all 88 Ohio counties. In addition, they’re doing more intense study with physical and brain health markers with 3,600 people, examining multiple generations and siblings within a family. These tests include functional MRI with evaluation of recognizing emotion and managing stress, EEG, and blood screening for inflammatory biomarkers, increasingly implicated in mental illness.
The SOAR study comes as Ohio faces sobering facts on mental health: Nearly one in four Ohioans live with a mental health issue, one in 13 live with addiction, and five Ohioans die by suicide every day.
At UH, child psychiatrist and SOAR lead site investigator Molly McVoy, MD, is recruiting study participants in groups of two or more, who are age 15 or older, and who define themselves as a family. Participants need not have a mental health diagnosis or condition to join the study, and those taking psychiatric medications are also welcome to participate.
“The goal is to have the most broad-based sample that's representative of Ohio, so there are no clinical exclusion criteria,” Dr. McVoy says. Participants who can’t safely have an MRI can still participate in other aspects of the study, she says.
SOAR investigators have modeled their study after the pivotal Framingham Heart Study, which has been active since 1948 and has informed much of what is known today about the root causes and risk factors for heart disease. According to Dr. McVoy, there is a pressing need in the mental health arena for this kind of rigorous, multigenerational approach – which the SOAR study can meet.
“We actually know very little about root causes of mental illness, and almost as importantly, about resilience,” she says. “We’ve had very little research looking at people with the same risk factors, and understanding which ones turn someone towards either a mental health or a substance use problem – as well as the things that keep them well. We have a lot of broad information at a group level, but that's about where it ends. While we know the things that help protect you from heart disease and put you at risk, we just don't have that same kind of information for mental health.”
With its ambitious scope, the SOAR study hopes to remedy that.
“We can assess factors like socioeconomic status, family status and those kinds of risk factors, in addition to brain imaging and EEG,” Dr. McVoy says. “Those things have never been done together before at this scale.”
Dr. McVoy says she hopes to enroll 150 participants in the SOAR study at UH -- in all kinds of different configurations.
“We want adolescents and their parents or adolescents and their sibling and their grandparents -- multiple generations of people who may or may not have all the same risk factors,” she says. “That will tell us a little bit about what, across families and generations, helps them either be well or more at risk for mental health issues. In the end, we hope to understand better the things we should be targeting to help keep people's brains well.”