We are especially interested in effects of prenatal and early life adversities, such as exposure to environmental chemicals and maternal stress/psychiatric conditions on offspring mental health and cognitive abilities, and whether these effects are mediated by epigenetic or moderated by genomic variation. We are also interested in using multiomics markers to predict health and cognitive abilities and we are currently focusing on improving early detection of dementia.
As you can see in Picture 1 above, various environmental exposures during pregnancy or in early life, such as mother’s psychosocial stress, hormones, folate-levels, inflammation and environmental chemicals may have an effect on the child’s neurodevelopmental and neurocognitive abilities. These effects may be mediated through epigenetic alterations in the child and moderated by mother’s and child’s core DNA.
In addition, we are studying effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of psychosocial interventions and factors that moderate the impact of these interventions. We are especially interested if brief group psychosocial interventions reduce loneliness, depression, and anxiety in the university students. We are conducting these studies in the IMAGINE-consortium led by Jari Lahti.
We typically work on two types of datasets: large longitudinal cohorts comprising information on the genome, epigenome, transcriptome, and environmental characteristics as well as the mental wellbeing or cognitive abilities; or datasets consisting of multiple timepoints of effectiveness outcomes measured in conjunction with psychosocial interventions and control conditions.
These datasets include biobanks such as UKBiobank or Finnish cohorts such as the Prediction and prevention of preeclampsia and intrauterine growth restriction (PREDO) study cohort, Helsinki Birth Cohort Study cohort, Glycyrrhizin in Licorice (GLAKU) cohort and datasets in the IMAGINE-consortium.
We are excited to collaborate with various consortia, cohorts, or research teams. Please contact Professor Jari Lahti (jari.lahti@helsinki.fi) if you're interested in collaborating with us.
Recent collaboration includes the following: