DYSEDEN

Childhood learning disorders (dyslexia, dysorthography, dyscalculia) and psychological disorders (conduct disorders, emotional disorders, pervasive developmental disorders…) engender enormous social costs across the whole life span. It is therefore of utmost importance to understand the factors that increase the susceptibility to these disorders, and to identify those on which an intervention may be possible. Factors affecting the development of learning and psychological disorders in children form a complicated network where genes, environment, culture, life events, and psychosocial factors are in dynamic interaction with one another. Furthermore, there are bidirectional interactions between learning abilities and mental health, with mental disorders affecting learning outcomes, and with school difficulties due to learning disorders increasing the susceptibility to emotional and behavioural disorders. The present project will focus on social determinants of learning and psychological disorders. The present project proposes to capitalise on an exceptional dataset already collected by the EDEN epidemiological project on about 1500 children followed from gestation to the age of 5 years. The goal is to prolong the project until those children are 10 years old, to test them on their scholastic achievements and learning abilities, and to collect information relative to their psychological health and disorders. Together with all the data already collected on the social and biological environment and make-up of these children, as well as the data relative to their earlier stages of their development, this new step promises to provide new insights into the determinants of learning abilities and disorders, and psychological health and disorders.