Dr Lauren Heathcote and Dr Gemma Knowles have been awarded Wellcome Mental Health Awards for research to investigate the mechanisms underlying anxiety and trauma.
Combatting post-cancer anxiety
Existing evidence shows that a cancer diagnosis and treatment is linked with increased anxiety, which can persist long after successful cancer treatment. Cancer disrupts a person's relationship with their body, including their awareness and perception of internal bodily sensations (heart rate, respiration and pain, to name a few). Cancer can also change a person's beliefs about their body, for example feeling that their body is an 'adversary' that has turned against them. Perception and beliefs about the body is known as interoception, and may contribute to anxiety.
Dr Lauren Heathcote, Senior Lecturer in Health Psychology at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN), has been awarded over £3 million Wellcome funding for her research programme "When your body betrays you: interoceptive mechanisms of anxiety after cancer".
Dr Heathcote and her team will investigate whether changing interoception, particularly the beliefs people hold about their bodies and the awareness and perception of internal bodily sensations, could reduce post-cancer anxiety.
They will collaborate with lived experience advisors and researchers across King's College London, University College London, Stanford University School of Medicine and the NIH National Cancer Institute in the US.
As cancer survival rates have just surpassed 50%, the mental health consequences of cancer survival are now a public health concern. Cancer disrupts a person's relationship with their body and the sensing of internal bodily sensations - called interoception. With this Wellcome Mental Health Award, we hope to uncover how interoceptive mechanisms can be repaired to help resolve anxiety in cancer survivors. This research could transform future clinical and digital health treatment options.
Dr Lauren Heathcote, Senior Lecturer in Health Psychology at King's IoPPN
Exploring mechanisms underlying high anxiety and depression rates among girls and young women
From around early adolescence, women and girls are around two-to-three times more likely to experience anxiety and depression than men and boys. Dr Gemma Knowles, Lecturer in Epidemiology and Youth Mental Health at the ESRC Centre for Society and Mental Health at King's, has been awarded £4 million Wellcome funding to better understand the mechanisms through which biological sex and sexism causes anxiety and depression to develop and persist in teenage girls and young women aged 10 - 24 years.
Working with an interdisciplinary team of social scientists, neurobiologists, and young people, Dr Knowles and her team will examine the biological (e.g., brain, hormones) and psychosocial (e.g., sports, self-esteem) mechanisms through which sexism shapes mental health. They will also use innovative approaches (such as wearables, hormone-profiling and period-tracking) to understand how mechanisms work in real-time.
The research programme, titled "Working with young people to transform understanding of how sex and sexism cause anxiety in teenage girls and young women: international, interdisciplinary & intersectional approaches" will take place in the UK and Japan in a collaboration with co-lead Dr Atsushi Nishida, Director for the Center of Social Science and Medicine at the Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Medical Science (TMIMS), and his team.
Our vision is a world in which women and girls are no longer three times more likely than men and boys to experience debilitating anxiety and depression. We've been working with young people, teachers and parents to understand what they think the causes and solutions might be, and developed a research programme to bring their ideas to life. With this Wellcome Mental Health Award, we hope to generate groundbreaking insights about the ways in which sexism, misogyny and gender inequality shape girls' lives and mental health, including possible impacts on brain, body and psychosocial development.
Dr Gemma Knowles, Lecturer in Epidemiology and Youth Mental Health at the ESRC Centre for Society and Mental Health
The projects are part of the Wellcome Mental Health Award 'Understanding how anxiety- and trauma-related problems develop, persist and resolve'. They will begin in 2025 and take place over the next five years.
