The Itla Children’s Foundation donates two professorships, one to the University of Turku and the other to the University of Oulu. The research field of the donated professorships is intervention and implementation research. The professorships are unique in the research of children’s well-being in Finland and are also globally significant.
Research Centre for Child Psychiatry focuses on research of the pre- and perinatal factors in the development of mental health disturbances in childhood and adulthood as well as finding keys to the development of selective interventions focused on children at risk. We aim at transferring knowledge from epidemiological risk studies into intervention studies.
A programme developed for the early detection of children’s disruptive behaviour and low-threshold digital parent training intervention was successfully transferred to child health clinics in primary health care, shows a new Finnish study. In addition, the programme’s low discontinuation rate implies that parents experienced digitally implemented intervention as both user-friendly and easily accessible.
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.