Wellington, June 10 NZPA - The 1000 toddlers who kicked off Dunedin's big longitudinal "multidisciplinary health and development study" are showing their age.

Researchers who have followed the lives of 1000 people born in Dunedin in 1972 and 1973, were today given a big grant to investigate how they are ageing.

Award-winning scientist, Professor Richie Poulton, of Otago University, plans to use the $4,568,389 from the Health Research Council to test a novel theory.

He is investigating whether a persistent history of psychiatric disorder might accelerate a person's progress towards age-related cardiovascular disease.

The research team will check whether people in the study who suffered potentially preventable chronic or recurrent psychiatric disorders during early adulthood -- such as depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, or substance dependence -- are starting to show subtle signs of cardiovascular malfunction

Such indications are known to be indicators that a patient will suffer cardiovascular disease in late life.

In 2003, Prof Poulton, director of the multidisciplinary study research unit, showed that about half of all mental health disorders could be averted if doctors intervened effectively during adolescence or earlier.

In 2001 Melbourne's Monash University showed mentally ill outpatients had a higher prevalence of risk factors for cardiovascular disease, including smoking, obesity, lack of moderate exercise, harmful levels of alcohol consumption and salt intake.

And an earlier study at Stanford University, in California, showed phobic anxiety in men was associated with an increased risk for cardiovascular disease, particularly sudden coronary death. But it said more research was needed, because apart from that there was only weak evidence supporting an association between psychiatric illness and risk for cardiovascular disease.

The World Health Organisation ranks cardiovascular disease and mental health disorders among the top three conditions associated with the greatest loss of life and productive years.

Otago University's deputy vice-chancellor for research, Professor Harlene Hayne, said the longitudinal study had yielded vast amounts of invaluable information about almost every conceivable aspect of the participants' health and development as they grew into adulthood.

"With this new funding, the study is poised to generate further knowledge to guide policy and practice in promoting good health and positive aging," she said.

Separately, another Otago scientist, Kate Scott, in the university's department of psychological medicine, was today given $154,576 over two years to work on "double disabilities" mental disorders in people already suffering physical conditions.

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