Aim: Adolescence is a period of vulnerability to stress. Increased anxiety during this period has been associated with the later development of mental disorders, hence the growing interest for interventions that could decrease stress reactivity and improve cognitive control in adolescents. Mindfulness-based interventions have demonstrated their efficacy on stress reactivity and anxiety in adults, but evidence is lacking in youth.
Methods:The Mindfulteen Study is a 3-year longitudinal cohort with a nested randomized controlled trial examining the effectiveness of mindfulness-based interventions for adolescents. Young adolescents from the general population, aged between 13 and 15 years old, with no history of current mental health disorder (apart from past mood disorders or current anxiety disorders) are included and stratified into low or high anxiety based on trait anxiety scores before being randomized to early or late 8-week intervention groups. Primary outcomes are based on neuroimaging data (i.e., structural and functional measures in the cortico-limbic network) while secondary outcomes are psychological (i.e., anxiety and stress-associated dimensions) and biological (i.e., cortisol, inflammatory and redox markers). Assessments are performed at baseline, immediately after intervention or waiting time and after 18 months of intervention.
Conclusion:To the best of our knowledge, this is the first randomized controlled trail examining the effect of a mindfulness-based intervention in young adolescents from the general population based on the measurement and analyses of psychological, neuroimaging and biological data.
Since most of the early signs of psychological distress are nonspecific and often under the threshold of a diagnosable disorder, especially in early adolescence, a dimensional and transdiagnostic approach is needed to guide early interventions. In this review, we focus on the transdiagnostic mechanism of emotion dysregulation hypothesised to underlie a group of psychopathologies that we named "emotion dysregulation disorders". Some promising interventions useful at different stages of the evolution of such disorders (from subclinical to clinical ones) are briefly presented. Among them, we propose cognitive-behavioural therapies, mindfulness-based interventions, and mentalisation-based treatment. The mindfulness-based interventions are an essential part of our ongoing study on the effects of an 8-week regular practice of mindfulness on non-clinical adolescents between 13 and 15 years old. We finally conclude with a proposition for a potential clinical staging model for emotion dysregulation disorders.
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