Evidence begins to emerge that unhealthy diet might be implicated in the development of common mental disorders. While there is a plethora of high-quality prospective studies on the association between diet and mental disorders in adults, such studies in adolescents are scarce. The already high and rising burden of mental disorders in adolescents necessitates a careful examination of diet as a potential target for interventions to improve mental health in adolescents. Julia will present on the effect of diet on mental health outcomes in Canadian middle adolescents (i.e., 14-17 years old) who participated in the longitudinal COMPASS study.
Julia Dabravolskaj, MSc, Ph.D., has recently graduated with a Ph.D. in Epidemiology from the University of Alberta, Canada. Her dissertation elucidates the relationship between diet and mental health in Canadian middle adolescents. An important place in her dissertation belongs to the process of building an evidence-informed directed acyclic graph to understand which variables are potentially implicated in the diet-mental health relationship and to guide data analyses. Julia is also interested in the intersection of epidemiology and implementation science, particularly as applied to the comprehensive school health/health promoting school approach.