University of California San Francisco
LEVERAGING NEUROSCIENCE TO INFORM ADOLESCENT HEALTH
In this review article, AYAH-RN researchers consider how to leverage some of the rapid advances in developmental neuroscience in ways that can improve adolescent health. Led by Drs. Suleiman and Dahl (then at the University of California, Berkeley), the article provides a brief overview of several key areas of scientific progress relevant to these issues, followed by a focus on two examples of important health problems that increase sharply during adolescence: sleep problems and affective disorders. These examples illustrate how an integrative, developmental science approach provides new insights into treatment and intervention. They also highlight a cornerstone principle: how a deeper understanding of potentially modifiable factors—at key developmental inflection points along the trajectory toward clinical disorders—is beginning to inform, and may eventually transform, a broad range of innovative early intervention strategies to improve adolescent health.
This article titled was published in the March 2017 issue of the Journal of Adolescent Health, with two other AYAH-RN review articles. View the full article for free here.