Keyword: Press release

The higher the cotinine levels were in the mother’s blood during pregnancy, the greater was the child’s risk of developing attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) later in life, showed an epidemiological study conducted by the Research Centre for Child Psychiatry at the University of Turku. Globally, it is the first study in which the connection between fetal nicotine exposure and diagnosis of ADHD was shown by measuring cotinine levels from pregnant maternal serum specimens.

Developed by researchers at the University of Turku, an immunotherapeutic antibody therapy re-educates macrophages to activate passivated cytotoxic T cells to kill cancer. The antibody therapy prevented the growth of tumours in several mouse models. The development of the therapy has now progressed to patient testing in a phase I/II clinical trial.

The World Bank is funding the University of Turku and four Tanzanian universities in developing geospatial expertise to control risks posed by floods and climate change. Cities in Tanzania are especially vulnerable to the extreme phenomena caused by climate change due to population growth and weak urban planning.

Traditional elephant handling worldwide is rapidly changing. Researchers from the University of Turku in Finland and Myanma Timber Enterprise (MTE) veterinarians found mahouts in Myanmar are only 22 years old on average, with an average experience of three years working with elephants, and they are changing elephants yearly preventing the development of long-term bonds between elephants and mahouts. These shifts contrast the traditional elephant-keeping system of skills being accumulated over a lifetime of working with the same elephant before being taught to the younger generation.

A new study conducted at the University of Turku shows that grandmother involvement with their grandchildren improves the survival of the grandchildren. Based on historical Finnish church records, the study however finds the ability to provide help to young grandchildren declines with grandmother age and deteriorated health.

The most popular programmes were Global Innovation Management, Biomedical Sciences, Digital Health and Life Sciences, as well as Information Security and Cryptography that received 725 applications in total. All in all, the international Master’s degree programmes received 1,376 applications from 94 countries, as the number of applications in the previous year was 1,116.

Children’s risk of being diagnosed with reactive attachment disorder (RAD) increases if parents are diagnosed with any type of mental health disorder, discovered researchers from the Research Centre for Child Psychiatry of the University of Turku, Finland. Particularly parents’ alcohol and drug addiction and mother's depression were associated with reactive attachment disorder in children. The nationwide population-based study is the most extensive study on the risk factors of RAD.

In total, 1,805 higher academic degrees and 194 doctoral degrees were completed at the University of Turku in 2018. Last year, the number of completed doctoral degrees was higher than ever before in the University’s history.

With the help of a multidisciplinary register and questionnaire study, Finnish researchers showed that both the educational level and its occupational orientation predict the mother’s smoking during early pregnancy.

The research groups of Academy Professor Riitta Lahesmaa and Research Director Laura Elo from Turku Centre for Biotechnology have discovered new proteins that regulate T cells in the human immune system. Some of these proteins can provide possible new targets for drug development in treating immune-mediated diseases.