ReviewPsychological medicine2019
Do natural experiments have an important future in the study of mental disorders?
Review in Psychological medicine, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 28 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
28 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 51 citations in OpenAlex.
- The association between prenatal famine, DNA methylation and mental disorders: a systematic review and meta-analysis.Clinical epigenetics · 2023Pooled it
- Changes in suicide attempt, suicidal ideation, and self-harm among Indian adolescents: comparison of cross-sectional surveys before (2016) and after (2023) COVID-19 pandemic.Child and adolescent psychiatry and mental health · 2026Article
- Extending the Use of Mendelian Randomisation With Non-Inherited Variants to Assess Socially Transmitted Parental Exposures Under Assortative Mating.Genetic epidemiology · 2026Article
- The Evolving ADHD Phenotype in the Externalizing Context.The American journal of psychiatry · 2026Review
- Investigating Irritability as a Potentially Causal Risk Pathway to Depression Using Two Genetically Informed Designs.Biological psychiatry global open science · 2025Article
- Child Mental Health Research in Low- and Middle-Income Countries: A Twin-Family Feasibility Study in Nigeria.Behavior genetics · 2025Article
- The Association Between Clinically Diagnosed Neonatal Jaundice and Autism: A Swedish Register-Based Cohort Study.Acta paediatrica (Oslo, Norway : 1992) · 2025Article
- Investigating the reasons behind a later or missed diagnosis of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder in young people: A population cohort study.JCPP advances · 2025Article
- Long-term physical health conditions and youth anxiety and depression: Is there a causal link?Psychological medicine · 2025Article
- The youth mental health crisis: analysis and solutions.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2024Review
- Testing the consequences of alcohol, cannabis, and nicotine use on hippocampal volume: a quasi-experimental cotwin control analysis of young adult twins.Psychological medicine · 2023Article
- Mental-Health Trajectories of U.S. Parents With Young Children During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Universal Introduction of Risk.Clinical psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2023Article
- Relative age in the school year and risk of mental health problems in childhood, adolescence and young adulthood.Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines · 2023Article
- Great Expectations: recommendations for improving the methodological rigor of psychedelic clinical trials.Psychopharmacology · 2022Review
- Parenting in the Context of the Child: Genetic and Social Processes.Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development · 2022Article
- Association of cumulative early medical factors with autism and autistic symptoms in a population-based twin sample.Translational psychiatry · 2022Article
- The acute and persisting impact of COVID-19 on trajectories of adolescent depression: Sex differences and social connectedness.Journal of affective disorders · 2022Article
- Genetic Advances in Autism.Journal of autism and developmental disorders · 2021Review
- Genetic contributions to autism spectrum disorder.Psychological medicine · 2021Review
- Orbitofrontal cortex thickness and substance use disorders in emerging adulthood: causal inferences from a co-twin control/discordant twin study.Addiction (Abingdon, England) · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
There is an enormous interest in identifying the causes of psychiatric disorders but there are considerable challenges in identifying which risks are genuinely causal. Traditionally risk factors have been inferred from observational designs. However, association with psychiatric outcome does not equate to causation. There are a number of threats that clinicians and researchers face in making causal inferences from traditional observational designs because adversities or exposures are not randomly allocated to individuals. Natural experiments provide an alternative strategy to randomized controlled trials as they take advantage of situations whereby links between exposure and other variables are separated by naturally occurring events or situations. In this review, we describe a growing range of different types of natural experiment and highlight that there is a greater confidence about findings where there is a convergence of findings across different designs. For example, exposure to hostile parenting is consistently found to be associated with conduct problems using different natural experiment designs providing support for this being a causal risk factor. Different genetically informative designs have repeatedly found that exposure to negative life events and being bullied are linked to later depression. However, for exposure to prenatal cigarette smoking, while findings from natural experiment designs are consistent with a causal effect on offspring lower birth weight, they do not support the hypothesis that intra-uterine cigarette smoking has a causal effect on attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and conduct problems and emerging findings highlight caution about inferring causal effects on bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.