Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
ReviewThe TRacking Adolescents' Individual Lives Survey (TRAILS): Design, Current Status, and Selected Findings
Section snippets
Objectives of TRAILS
The TRacking Adolescents' Individual Lives Survey (TRAILS) consists of two prospective cohort studies, a population-based (N = 2,230) and a clinical (N = 543) cohort. Both follow youth from early adolescence into adulthood. In this article, we focus on the population cohort. The clinical cohort follows children who contacted specialty mental health services before the age of 10 years.1 [Like the population cohort, it was conducted in the North of the Netherlands and includes measurement waves
What The Study Has Found
At the end of 2011, a total of 132 journal articles had been published or accepted for publication (www.trails.nl). Below we present a selection of findings on (dis)continuity, risk, and resilience factors.
Developmental Pathways in Adolescence: Accumulation or Reduction of Risk in Adolescents With High Initial Problem Levels?
Although evidence suggests an increase of problem behavior during adolescence,69, 70 it is unclear whether this behavioral development is a general phenomenon affecting most adolescents or concentrated in the initially vulnerable. If children with relatively high levels of problems before they enter adolescence are especially prone to show increasing levels of problems, this would strongly argue for early interventions. Two mechanisms provide theoretical plausibility to the hypothesis of
Sample
The sample is described extensively in the introductory section of this article. For these analyses, we selected participants for whom we had information from at least two data points (n = 2140, 96.0% of full sample; 51% female and 49% male).
Psychopathology
We assessed psychopathology with the Youth Self-Report (YSR) and parent-reported Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL)75, 76, 77 at the first three assessment waves (ages 10–18 years). We did not use data from the fourth wave because, in this wave, the YSR was
Results
Table 4 shows the means and standard deviations of the study variables, and Figure 2 depicts the observed and smoothed gender-specific problem levels across adolescence. Mean levels of Aggressive Behavior and Anxious/Depressed problems decreased during adolescence, especially in boys, whereas those of the Rule-Breaking Behavior and Withdrawn/Depressed behavior increased in both genders. The variance of the Rule-Breaking and Withdrawn/Depressed Behavior scales increased substantially, with the
Discussion
In this study, we examined the development of internalizing and externalizing behaviors during adolescence. Our analyses produced two important sets of findings. The first set emphasizes that the study of developmental pathways needs to take into account the individual's gender, type of psychopathology, and age. Normative development differs not only between internalizing and externalizing problems, but also between dimensions within these broad domains. Rule-Breaking Behavior, such as
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The role of temperament in the relationship between early onset of tobacco and cannabis use: the TRAILS study
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Life stressors as mediators of the relation between socioeconomic position and mental health problems in early adolescence: the TRAILS study
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Stressful life events and depressive symptoms in young adolescents: modulation by respiratory sinus arrhythmia?The TRAILS study
Biol Psychol
Peer stressors and gender differences in adolescents' mental health: the TRAILS study
J Adolesc Health
Adolescents' cortisol responses to awakening and social stress: effects of gender, menstrual phase and oral contraceptivesThe TRAILS study
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No replication of genotype effect of 5-HTTLPR on cortisol response to social stress in larger adolescent sample
Biol Psychiatry
Timing matters: long term effects of adversities from prenatal period up to adolescence on adolescents' cortisol stress responseThe TRAILS study
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The adaptive calibration model of stress responsivity
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Socioeconomic position predicts specialty mental health service use independent of clinical severity: the TRAILS study
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Mapping brain maturation
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Interpreting neuroticism scores across the adult life course: immutable or experience-dependent set points of negative affect?
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Cohort profile: the Dutch 'TRacking Adolescents' Individual Lives' Survey'; TRAILS
Int J Epidemiol
Evaluation of non-response bias in mental health determinants and outcomes in a large sample of pre-adolescents
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Benefits of extensive recruitment effort persist during follow-ups and are consistent across age group and survey methodThe TRAILS study
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How common are common mental disorders?Evidence that lifetime prevalence rates are doubled by prospective versus retrospective ascertainment
Psychol Med
Prior juvenile diagnoses in adults with mental disorder—developmental follow-back of a prospective-longitudinal cohort
Arch Gen Psychiatry
Parental major depression and the risk of depression and other mental disorders in offspring: a prospective-longitudinal community study
Arch Gen Psychiatry
What characteristics of primary anxiety disorders predict subsequent major depressive disorder?
J Clin Psychiatry
Temperament profiles associated with internalizing and externalizing problems in preadolescence
Dev Psychopathol
Internalizing and externalizing problems in adolescence: general and dimension-specific effects of familial loadings and preadolescent temperament traits
Psychol Med
Victimization and suicide ideation in the TRAILS study: specific vulnerabilities of victims
J Child Psychol Psychiatry
Externalizing behaviors in preadolescents: familial risk to externalizing behaviors, prenatal and perinatal risks, and their interactions
Eur Child Adolesc Psychiatry
Risk indicators of anxiety throughout adolescence: the TRAILS study
Depress Anxiety
Parental psychopathology and socioeconomic position predict adolescent offspring's mental health independently and do not interact: the TRAILS study
J Epidemiol Community Health
Bullying and victimization in elementary schools: a comparison of bullies, victims, bully/victims, and uninvolved preadolescents
Dev Psychol
CHRM2, parental monitoring, and adolescent externalizing behavior: evidence for gene-environment interaction
Psychol Sci
Differential susceptibility in youth: evidence that 5-HTTLPR X positive parenting is associated with positive affect “For better and worse.”
Translat Psychiatry
Evidence for plasticity genotypes in a gene-gene-environment interaction: the TRAILS study
Genes Brain Behav
Genetically based reduced MAOA and COMT functioning is associated with the cortisol stress response: a replication study
Mol Psychiatry
No associations between single nucleotide polymorphisms in corticoid receptor genes and heart rate and cortisol responses to a standardized social stress test in adolescents: the TRAILS study
Behav Genet
Predicting life-time and regular cannabis use during adolescence; the roles of temperament and peer substance use: the TRAILS study
Addiction
Predicting onset of cannabis use in early adolescence: the interrelation between high-intensity pleasure and disruptive behavior: the TRAILS study
J Stud Alcohol Drugs
Effortful control as predictor of adolescents' psychological and physiological responses to a social stress test: the TRacking Adolescents' Individual Lives Survey
Dev Psychopathol
Temperament, parenting, and depressive symptoms in a population sample of preadolescents
J Child Psychol Psychiatry
Child temperament moderates the impact of parental separation on adolescent mental health: the TRAILS study
J Fam Psychol
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2023, Mental Health and PreventionDemographic and mental health assessments in the adolescent brain and cognitive development study: Updates and age-related trajectories
2021, Developmental Cognitive NeuroscienceCitation Excerpt :In terms of age-related differences in mental health, there is consistent evidence from studies in both the United States, Canada and Europe that levels of depression tend to increase from school age into adolescence (Strohschein, 2005; Van Oort et al., 2009; Robbers et al., 2010; Ormel et al., 2012; Ferro et al., 2015; Coley et al., 2019; Antolin-Suarez et al., 2020), with evidence that this increase is greater in females than males (Bongers et al., 2003). Patterns for anxiety are more mixed, with some evidence for decreases in various forms of anxiety from school age to adolescence (Van Oort et al., 2009; Ormel et al., 2012). In general, the data suggest that aggressive, attentional and rule-breaking problems tend to decrease from middle childhood to adolescence (Bongers et al., 2003; Strohschein, 2005; Fanti and Henrich, 2010; Robbers et al., 2010), but with some exceptions (Keiley et al., 2000; Ormel et al., 2012).
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2020, Developmental Cognitive NeuroscienceCitation Excerpt :Two longitudinal cohorts were set up: the YOUth cohorts to sample neurocognitive development (Work Package 1;Onland- Moret et al., 2020), and the Leiden-CID cohorts (‘L-CID’) to test interventions in twins (Work Package 2; Crone et al., 2020). Work Package 3 unites four current cohorts established prior to CID (Branje et al., 2020): Generation R (‘Gen-R’, Kooijman et al., 2016); Netherlands Twin Register (‘NTR’, Boomsma et al., 2006); RADAR (e.g., Branje and Meeus, 2018; Crocetti et al., 2017) and TRAILS (Ormel et al., 2012). Finally, Work Package 4 focuses on advanced statistical modelling and animal models.
Intergenerational transmission: Theoretical and methodological issues and an introduction to four Dutch cohorts
2020, Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience
This article is part of a special series on recent findings and progress in the fields of birth cohort and longitudinal studies of child and adolescent psychopathology. This special series is intended to showcase some of the most important new findings and promising leads in the study of developmental psychopathology over time, and to demonstrate the Journal’s renewed commitment to publishing the highest quality articles on the topic. Each article is in part a review of the most important findings to date from the study and in part original research to allow readers to learn about a new research finding with a more complete context of the study than is usually possible.
Drs. Ormel and Oldehinkel contributed equally to this research.
This research is part of the TRacking Adolescents' Individual Lives Survey (TRAILS). Participating centers of TRAILS include various departments of the University Medical Center and University of Groningen, the Erasmus University Medical Center Rotterdam, the University of Utrecht, the Radboud Medical Center Nijmegen, and the Parnassia Bavo group, all in the Netherlands. TRAILS has been financially supported by various grants from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) (Medical Research Council program grant GB-MW 940-38-011, the Netherlands Organisation for Health Research and Development [ZonMW] Brainpower grant 100-001-004, ZonMw Risk Behavior and Dependence grants 60-60600-97-118, ZonMw Culture and Health grant 261-98-710, Social Sciences Council medium-sized investment grants GB-MaGW 480-01-006 and GB-MaGW 480-07-001, Social Sciences Council project grants GB-MaGW 452-04-314 and GB-MaGW 452-06-004, NWO large-sized investment grant 175.010.2003.005, NWO Longitudinal Survey and Panel Funding 481-08-013), the Dutch Ministry of Justice (WODC), the European Science Foundation (EuroSTRESS project FP-006), Biobanking and Biomolecular Resources Research Infrastructure BBMRI-NL (CP 32), and the participating universities.
The authors are grateful to all adolescents, their parents and teachers who participated in this research and to everyone who worked on this project and made it possible.
Disclosure: Dr. Verhulst has published the Dutch translation of the Achenbach System of Empirically Based Assessment. Drs. Ormel, Oldehinkel, Sijtsema, van Oort, Veenstra, and Vollebergh, and Mr. Raven report no biomedical financial interests or potential conflicts of interest.
This article will be discussed in an editorial by Drs. James J. Hudziak and Douglas K. Novins in an upcoming issue.