per se<\/em>.\u00a0 We’re really looking at an association.\u00a0 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?<\/p>\nSo 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.<\/p>\n
CC:\u00a0 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?<\/p>\n
DK:\u00a0 You know it’s interesting because we don’t know a lot about pre-disaster risk factors.\u00a0 That’s part of the issue that this study can provide.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
So really it\u2019s more looking at the impact of the disaster.<\/p>\n
What we do know though, is that parenting makes a huge difference.\u00a0 And we’re interested in looking at that in our study as well.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
CC:\u00a0 ARE THERE POTENTIAL LONG TERM IMPACTS?<\/p>\n
DK:\u00a0 You know, I would say, when it comes to natural disasters, we’re still working through that.\u00a0 It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
So the disaster research is actually quite young.\u00a0 And we haven’t really had an opportunity to follow-up with children consistently for a very long time into adulthood, for example.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 And then they have linked those early adversities to adult health outcomes; everything from cardiac disease to mental health problems to substance use etc.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
CC:\u00a0 HAVE YOU BEEN ABLE TO INCORPORATE ANYTHING FROM THE FORT MCMURRAY FIRE INTO YOUR STUDY?<\/p>\n
DK:\u00a0 Right.\u00a0 What we’ve done is we’ve started asking families whether they were involved in the fire at all?\u00a0 How were they involved?\u00a0 Did it have an impact on their family lives, on their children in any way?<\/p>\n
What we have to remember is the children that we are actually studying are more Calgary based.\u00a0 So we might see an effect or a spillover effect.\u00a0 We might see some effect if there were families in Fort McMurray that came down and stayed with our families for example.<\/p>\n
But we didn’t question the families in Fort McMurray specifically.\u00a0 And I know there were other studies that were aiming to do that.<\/p>\n
But you are right.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Much of our Canadian disaster information has actually come from that and the impact on families and children.<\/p>\n
CC:\u00a0 NOW YOU’RE STILL WORKING THROUGH THE PROJECT, THROUGH THE STUDY.\u00a0 WHEN DO YOU EXPECT TO FINISH UP?<\/p>\n
DK:\u00a0 We will have our information from the families collected by six to eight months.\u00a0 We will be starting to analyze our genetic samples and saliva samples before that.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
CC:\u00a0 WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO THIS INFORMATION AFTERWARDS?\u00a0 HOW MIGHT IT BE APPLIED?<\/p>\n
DK:\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
So this is a tool or a series of questions that could be used by educators, teachers, school systems, children when they start school.\u00a0 It could be used by family physicians, pediatricians. It could be used by social services, as well.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
CC:\u00a0 THANK YOU VERY MUCH, DAWN.<\/p>\n
DK:\u00a0 My great pleasure.\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\nDr. Dawn Kingston is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Nursing at the University of Calgary.<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/li>\n <\/ul>\n\n<\/div> <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Part of large study on disaster resilience looks at why some children cope better than others after disasters like the High River Flood of 2013, explains researcher Dr Dawn Kingston (Alberta Innovates)<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5571,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64,2,17,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2228","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alberta-innovates","category-health-and-medicine","category-social-sciences","category-women-in-science","has-post-title","has-post-date","has-post-category","has-post-tag","has-post-comment","has-post-author",""],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"http:\/\/www.innovationanthology.com\/import\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/06\/870DrDawnKingston.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.innovationanthology.com\/import\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2228","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.innovationanthology.com\/import\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.innovationanthology.com\/import\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.innovationanthology.com\/import\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.innovationanthology.com\/import\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2228"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/www.innovationanthology.com\/import\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2228\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5698,"href":"http:\/\/www.innovationanthology.com\/import\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2228\/revisions\/5698"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.innovationanthology.com\/import\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5571"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.innovationanthology.com\/import\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.innovationanthology.com\/import\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.innovationanthology.com\/import\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}