Prof Edmund Sonuga-Barke PhD, King's College London
Edmund Sonuga-Barke is currently Professor of Developmental Psychology, Psychiatry and Neuroscience at the Institute of Psychology, Psychiatry and Neuroscience, Kings College London. He is Honorary Skou Professor at Aarhus University School of Medicine, Denmark. He is Editor in Chief of the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry.His research focuses on improving the lives of children and adolescents with neuro-developmental disorders such as ADHD. To this end, his work aims to develop new therapeutic interventions by employing basic developmental science approaches to study the pathogenesis of such conditions, their underlying genetic and environmental risk and resilience sources and their mediating brain mechanisms and developmental and mental health outcomes. Since 2005 he has been PI of the English & Romanian Adoptees Study.
Prof Sonuga-Barke is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (2016) and The British Academy (2018). Since 2018 he has been included in the Clarivate list of “most influential scientific minds” in Psychology/Psychiatry for the high impact of his work.
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What are the implications of the English and Romanian Adoptees (ERA) study for our understanding of neuro-developmental disorders?
Neuro-developmental disorders such as ADHD and autism are strongly familial and heritable - with the later, in particular, being interpreted as pointing to their predominantly genetic origins. Environmental influences are at best considered to play a marginal role in moderating these influences as part of a broader pattern of gene-environment interplay. At the same time, we have recently shown that risk for neuro-developmental disorders is also substantially elevated in individuals exposed to extreme deprivation experienced in non-familial institutional settings. For instance, in the English Romanian Adoptees (ERA) study, adults exposed as young children to between 6 and 43 months of extreme deprivation in the Romanian orphanages that existed at the time of the fall of the Communist regime prior to their adoption, displayed a 7-fold elevation of risk for ADHD. An effect that is extremely hard to explain in terms genetic factors. In this talk, I will describe the ERA study, as a unique natural experiment, and review its key clinical, neuropsychological and brain imaging findings. I will explain how the study has provided new insights into early environmental influences on neuro-development and mental health – especially as these relate to neuro-development. By so doing I will raise the question of where environmentally “caused” neuro-developmental conditions fit into current conceptualisations of the condition.