PIPages
Labs

Nancy Brady

University of Kansas, KS·Psychology

Fragile X syndrome (FXS) is an inherited condition that affects development, communication and behavior. Little is known about how young people with FXS fare as they leave school and enter adulthood, or how their mothers fare during this transition.

Fields

Psychology

Medicine & Clinical Research

Social Science

Topics

fragile X syndrome

FMR1 premutation

intellectual disability

Grants
1 known grant, through Jun 2027

What they work on

  1. Determine how early factors such as parenting, communication, autism symptoms and biomarkers, and later factors such as transition plan quality, predict employment, independence and quality of life in young adults with fragile X syndrome.
  2. Examine how child behavior and maternal mental health and biomarkers predict changes in premutation mothers' executive functioning, anxiety, depression and caregiver burden during their child's transition to adulthood.
  3. Use up to 10 longitudinal data points per mother-child pair, from age 2 to 26, to identify possible treatment targets and the best timing for interventions.

More about the research

Many of these mothers carry the premutation, a smaller change in the same gene, and are facing their own aging. Earlier work by this team showed that FXS traits arise partly from interactions among biology, behavior and environment over time.

Why it matters

Identifying what predicts employment, independence and quality of life for young adults with fragile X syndrome could guide when and how to intervene for those at risk of poorer outcomes. Tracking mothers' mental health and caregiver burden could inform support for families and improve school transition planning.

Known grants

From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.

FXS: Late Adolescence and Early Adulthood

NIH · Apr 2016 – Jun 2027

Closest labs

Megumi J Okumura

University of California-San Francisco, CA·Medicine & Clinical Research

Test whether the Resilience in Action (RiA) curriculum improves self-determination, self-efficacy, social confidence and emotional regulation in a randomized waitlist-control trial of 288 young adults with autism aged 19 to 26.

Robert Crosnoe

University of Texas at Austin, TX·Social Science

Document whether exposure to family member deaths in childhood and adolescence predicts unstable trajectories of socioeconomic attainment, family-building, and health in young adulthood, using longitudinal causal-inference techniques on the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health.

Julie Wargo Aikins

Wayne State University, MI·Psychology

Test whether disrupted maternal representations of the child, measured with the Working Model of the Child Interview, stay stable from the third trimester of pregnancy to when the child is two years old, in 99 women living in high-risk settings.

The school

University of Kansas: 26 labs on PI Pages, $546M a year on research, 351 research doctorates a year.

More about University of Kansas

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