To improve citizens’ mental health, today’s symptom-based diagnoses need to be complemented with biological criteria accounting for individual and sex differences. The EU-funded research project RE-MEND (Building Resilience against Mental illness during Endocrine-sensitive life stages) focuses on four critical life stages in which changes in endocrine signalling, including sex hormones, could influence an individual’s susceptibility to mental illness: early life, puberty, the peripartum period, and transition into old age. The project will integrate data from extensive population-based longitudinal cohort studies to unveil risk and protective factors as well as biological patterns influencing mental states across these life stages. Moreover, RE-MEND will combine epidemiological with experimental studies, and use advanced OMICS approaches , biostatistics, machine learning and AI for data integration for novel biomarkesr and drug target discoveries. Prof. Joëlle Rüegg , from Uppsala University, Sweden acts as project coordinator.
