Intro: Dr. Dawn Kingston is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Nursing at the University of Calgary.
DR DAWN KINGSTON
CC: DAWN, YOU’RE INVOLVED IN A PROJECT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY WHERE YOU’RE LOOKING AT WHAT IMPACT DISASTERS HAVE ON CHILDREN. COULD YOU TELL ME A LITTLE BIT PLEASE ABOUT WHAT THE NAME OF THAT PROJECT IS AND WHAT IT IS THAT YOU ARE TRYING TO DO?
DK: We’re really looking at resilience in Albertan families. So the project is really designed to understand primarily what was the impact of a disaster like the (High River) flood on family resilience and in particular, how children are resilient or how they cope with an adversity like the flood.
We also have the opportunity to look much earlier into these children’s lives.
Its one thing that distinguishes this study from other disaster studies is that we actually have been studying these families and children since the mother’s were pregnant. So they are now five to eight years of age. And the flood happened to happen when they were three or four years old.
But we’re also able to look then at some of the things that even happened earlier in these children’s lives that might be classed as adverse circumstances. And so we’re using that as well to understand how these children cope.
CC: SO ACTUALLY HAVING THAT KIND OF BACKGROUND, YOU COULD SEE IF SOME CHILDREN HAVE MORE OF A PREDISPOSITION TO NEGATIVE OR POSITIVE RESPONSE. IS THAT IT?
DK: That’s exactly it. So what we’re really interested in doing is looking at a number of risk factors.
You know, we understand what puts children at risk for coping poorly, poor mental health problems, for challenges in development. But what we don’t always know is what makes them resilient.
And so in this study, we’re actually looking at a few things. We’re looking at, is there a genetic signature? Are there certain genes that lend to whether a child is resilient or not. We’re looking at the epigenetic influences, whether experiences in their lives change their DNA or change their genes in a way. Does adversity do that in a way that makes it easier or harder for them to be resilient in a situation?
We’re also looking at things like stress hormones and other body chemicals that we might see associated with poor resilience.
And then finally, we’re looking at a bunch of social factors as well, social and demographic factors.
And we want to put the entire picture together to really understand how it works together to make a child resilient or not resilient in the face of a difficult experience in childhood.
CC: HOW FAR ARE YOU INTO THE PROJECT?
DK: We’re about a year and a half in. Just sometimes it takes that long to pull together a large team grant which we have. So we have three universities and five different labs–so five different investigators along with the five different labs. And it does take awhile to pull everything together.
But we’re at the point now where we’re having our surveys are going out to families and they are answering them.
And the part where we’re getting the genetic information and the stress hormone is coming from the children providing saliva samples. So we’re getting the children to spit for us also.
CC: KIDS LIKE SPITTING.
DK: Yeah.
CC: SO ONCE YOU GET THOSE SAMPLES, WHAT DO YOU DO TO BE ABLE TO ANALYZE WHAT YOU’RE GETTING FROM IT, AND HOW DO YOU KNOW IF THEIR GENES HAVE CHANGED SOMEHOW?
DK: Yes, it’s interesting. So once we get the samples, they come into a lab in Calgary. And then we extract the DNA from them and the RNA. We’ve got another separate kit where the children are giving us spit samples that will be analyzed for stress hormones and stress chemicals.
And each of these is going to a different lab, to a different investigator who has a different level of expertise.
So we won’t actually be able to see whether there have been changes per se. We’re really looking at an association. Is there a relationship between early adversity and what we’re seeing in certain children’s DNA who have been exposed to adversity and those who haven’t?
So rather than looking at change in one particular child, we’re really comparing groups of children–those who have had adversity and those who haven’t.
CC: WHAT ARE SOME OF THE THINGS THAT YOU KNOW OF SO FAR THAT WOULD BE NEGATIVE IMPACTS ON CHILDREN FROM NOT BEING ABLE TO COPE VERY WELL WITH THE DISASTER?
DK: You know it’s interesting because we don’t know a lot about pre-disaster risk factors. That’s part of the issue that this study can provide.
In most studies of disasters, they kind of start from the disaster and go forward. And they look at the children who’ve had the disaster, who haven’t had the disaster, and you know whether they end up having challenges at school, problems with development, whether they end up having some anxiety or depression.
So really it’s more looking at the impact of the disaster.
What we do know though, is that parenting makes a huge difference. And we’re interested in looking at that in our study as well.
So if parents are able to help their children cope with a disaster they do a lot better than if the parents aren’t intentionally able to support the children.
CC: ARE THERE POTENTIAL LONG TERM IMPACTS?
DK: You know, I would say, when it comes to natural disasters, we’re still working through that. It’s interesting because most of the resilience knowledge that we have is actually from children who were in very extreme circumstances such as children who were in Romanian orphanages, for example.
So the disaster research is actually quite young. And we haven’t really had an opportunity to follow-up with children consistently for a very long time into adulthood, for example.
But what we know from work done in terms of adverse childhood experiences for the AIHS there’s been about a decade of work done on early childhood adversity where they have asked adults to look back into their childhood and identify experiences. And then they have linked those early adversities to adult health outcomes; everything from cardiac disease to mental health problems to substance use etc.
This is one reason why we are very keen to study adversity in a very broad sense, it’s because there’s building body of scientific evidence that really shows that if you have adversity as a child, it has a long term impact on your mental and physical health.
CC: HAVE YOU BEEN ABLE TO INCORPORATE ANYTHING FROM THE FORT MCMURRAY FIRE INTO YOUR STUDY?
DK: Right. What we’ve done is we’ve started asking families whether they were involved in the fire at all? How were they involved? Did it have an impact on their family lives, on their children in any way?
What we have to remember is the children that we are actually studying are more Calgary based. So we might see an effect or a spillover effect. We might see some effect if there were families in Fort McMurray that came down and stayed with our families for example.
But we didn’t question the families in Fort McMurray specifically. And I know there were other studies that were aiming to do that.
But you are right. It is interesting and it follows quite quickly on the heels of work that has been done in other Canadian cities, for example in Quebec and the Quebec ice storm. Much of our Canadian disaster information has actually come from that and the impact on families and children.
CC: NOW YOU’RE STILL WORKING THROUGH THE PROJECT, THROUGH THE STUDY. WHEN DO YOU EXPECT TO FINISH UP?
DK: We will have our information from the families collected by six to eight months. We will be starting to analyze our genetic samples and saliva samples before that.
But we expect in about eight months we’ll have our data collected and it will take us another couple of months after that to actually understand what it means to analyze it and pull it together.
CC: WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO THIS INFORMATION AFTERWARDS? HOW MIGHT IT BE APPLIED?
DK: One thing that we are doing in the project is we want to use this to develop a screening tool that can be used to identify children who might be at risk for not bouncing back or not having high resilience.
So this is a tool or a series of questions that could be used by educators, teachers, school systems, children when they start school. It could be used by family physicians, pediatricians. It could be used by social services, as well.
So any system that is really looking at how children might cope and be resilient as a marker of how they do in terms of health and education.
CC: THANK YOU VERY MUCH, DAWN.
DK: My great pleasure.
Dr. Dawn Kingston is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Nursing at the University of Calgary.
