Adolescence and the next generation

Our warmest congratulations to Professor Mary Wlodek and her colleagues on the publication of their invited review in the current issue of Nature

The current issue of Nature features a compendium on adolescent health which considers adolescence through News Features, Comment articles and three major invited reviews that consider adolescence from three different approaches: paediatrics, anthropology and epidemiology. The third of these reviews, by a Melbourne-based team lead by Professor George Patton, Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, explored how factors that harm adolescent health can affect the health of the next generation. The health problems of adolescents including obesity, mental health, poor nutrition and substance abuse can have serious consequences in their own children some years later. Rather than trying to tackle these problems once a woman knows she is pregnant, by which time it may be too late, the far better approach is to treat these problems in adolescents long before they become parents.

The Melbourne-based researchers, which include Professor Wlodek from the Department of Physiology, are to be congratulated on having their review, just one of three invited reviews  on adolescence, published in this prestigious journal. This is acknowledgement that researchers from the University of Melbourne and MCRI are world-leaders in epidemiological studies of adolescence.