Thalia runs the Emotional Development Intervention and Treatment Lab (EDIT Lab) at KCL. She is interested in the reasons why people differ in how they respond to life's experiences. She is especially curious about how genetic factors are involved in the development of emotional symptoms. At present she is exploring two major themes within her group.
First, they are recruiting very large samples in order to explore genetic influences on anxiety, depression and treatment outcomes. With her close colleague Dr Gerome Breen, she has just launched a major new initiative called the Genetic Links to Anxiety and Depression (GLAD) study, which forms part of the National BioResource for Mental Health.
Second, she is really interested in why anxiety and depression tend to run in families, and whether this is due to sharing home life or whether it is due to sharing genes. Her latest research in this area involves recruiting families of twins and their children.
Thalia Eley and Gerome Breen explore a new systematic meta-review of predictors of antidepressant treatment outcome in depression, which looks at clinical and demographic variables, but also biomarkers including both genetic and neuroimaging data.
Thalia Eley shares her thoughts on a recent Nature genome-wide association study of depression phenotypes in the UK Biobank, which uses different definitions of depression to provide more tractable targets for future genetic studies.
