Motor Activity Research Consortium for Health (mMarch)

National Institute Of Mental Health

Investigators

Linked publications & trials

Abstract

There is growing interest in studying the environmental, biologic, and genetic correlates of the components of motor activity as well as the relationships between motor activity with sleep, exercise, mood, and cognitive functioning. Aggregation of the findings across studies is challenged by the substantial differences in the study goals, procedures, and statistical methods. Therefore, mMARCH seeks greater coordination across studies in the procedures and analytic methods of functional data associated with mood and other disorders. In the past year at NIMH, we have been expanding on intensive multimodal studies of youth and within families, following up samples to examine stability, and expanding on domains of assessment. Across the initiative, we have developed a new processing platform (GGIR, an R package to analyze accelerometer data); processed and analyzed actigraphy data from 6 sites; applied novel statistical methods including functional data analysis and Joint Individual Variance Explained (JIVE) to actigraphy cross-site data; collected and analyzed concomitant ecological momentary assessment (EMA) data from 2 sites; examined cross device features; expanded to new sites including Yale, Toronto (CAMH) and the Healthy Brain Network, NY; and supported the development of sophisticated applets in the MindLogger platform to enhance longitudinal data collection for cognitive testing, electronic diary applications, and tracking of mobile assessments in population-based research. Additionally, over the last year we collaborated to publish several key papers related to motor activity and daily rhythms monitoring. With researchers from Australia, we published a systematic review and meta-analysis studying sleep and circadian rhythm disturbances (SCRD) in young people at high risk for early onset bipolar disorder (BD) (Scott et al, 2022). We found that SCRD are common in individuals with different early expressions of BD, and also found greater preferences for eveningness and more dysregulated rhythms in some groups than others, including bipolar at-risk individuals and cases with adolescent/early adulthood BD onset. This work highlights the need for careful consideration of how to evaluate SCRD in individuals at high risk of developing BD. We also collaborated with the Australia group to publish the first in a series of 3 papers to present recommendations to study causal mechanisms of depression in young people (Crouse et al, 2021). The links between the circadian system and light exposure, motor activity, and regularity of sleepwake schedules, paralleled by physical inactivity, sleepwake schedule irregularity, and use of light-emitting devices at night among young people, suggest that public health approaches need to educate young people and their parents about the relevance of these factors for health. Using emerging methodologies and concepts, including circadian-targeted therapies and integration of data from wearable sensors and ecological momentary assessment of mental phenomena, could provide new understandings of depression and enhance outcomes of young people with depression. We also contributed to a comprehensive systematic review to summarize the literature on actigraphy measures of rest-activity patterns in BD to inform its future use (Panchal et al, 2022). We determined the use of actigraphy provides valuable information about rest-activity patterns in BD and found there is a strong need to extend this work to examine patterns of rhythmicity and regularity in BD. The extant literature supports the promise of actigraphy to pave the way for the development of improved early detection, treatment, and prevention methods. In collaboration with one of our 6 core mMarch sites (Hong Kong), we conducted a case-control study to examine dim light melatonin patterns in high-risk youth of parents with BD (Feng et al, 2022). We found that unaffected offspring of BD had lower nocturnal melatonin levels and that dim light melatonin secretion in BD offspring helped to clarify the link between BD and circadian rhythms. Given that alterations in nocturnal melatonin secretion were found, the decreased nocturnal melatonin level may serve as an endophenotype for BD. Finally, with a team of experts, we published a report detailing a workshop from the Sleep Research Society and Sleep Research Network (Mazzotti et al, 2022). The focus of this workshop was to promote innovative approaches for data integration and development of informatics infrastructure supporting multi-site collaboration in sleep and circadian biology and informatics. Key recommendations included collecting and storing findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable data; identifying existing international cohorts and resources supporting research in sleep and circadian biology; and defining the most relevant sleep data elements and associated metadata that could be supported by early integration initiatives. This report introduced foundational concepts with the goal of engagement between the sleep/circadian and informatics communities to facilitate harmonization and adoption of standardized practices for both research and clinical data. Public Health Impact: The formation and continuation of the mMARCH initiative will enable groups to efficiently share and combine data to learn more about how activity affects different disorders and diseases across many populations, including mood disorders, sleep patterns, circadian rhythms, genetic studies, emotion, eating, and other disorders that impact public health. This work will also define targets for prevention and intervention studies. Future Plans: Plans for the next year include expanding the network using the common procedures of actigraphy and EMA to include more sites that can conduct common data analyses, continued development of analytic models including multi-level dynamic models of intensive repeated measures data, and machine learning approaches that classify the structure of inter-relationships among the regulatory domains under investigation. We will also report the findings of our analyses of several projects that investigate the heritability of actigraphy phenotypes and their associations with clinical and health measures in the NIMH and CoLaus family studies, and genetic association studies of these phenotypes in the CoLaus cohort. We will focus on six major activities: 1) joint analysis of the mMARCH core group data including the CoLaus/PsyCoLaus study of comorbidity of depression and cardiovascular disease, the NESDA study in the Netherlands, the Australian studies of twin and youth with emerging mood disorders, the Hong Kong circadian rhythms study and a cohort study of Brazilian youth; 2) establishment of a new protocol "Rhythms and Blues: Multidomain Dynamics of Motor Activity and Mood" to test mechanisms for findings on the mechanisms underlying BD from NIMH Family Study of Affective Spectrum Disorder; 3) addition of several sites with actigraphy and EMA data in both adults and youth with mood disorders; 4) initiation of new studies of youth in seven sites (miniMARCH collaboration); 5) development of translational studies to identify the regulatory systems underlying motor activity and sleep across species, where we also plan to examine the cross-domain inter-relationships and their directional influences using real-time tracking and experimental paradigms in the NIH Rhythms and Blues Program; and 6) establishment of methodologic workgroups to address challenges in analysis of multidomain, multilevel intensive repeated measures data from mobile assessments, and another designed to build aggregate environmental data bases on light and temperature to address the impact of climate change on mental health and underlying domains.