The Niels Bohr Professorship will focus on innovation related to psychiatric epidemiology. The program consists of four inter-linked themes that aim to expand and strengthen the collaboration between the National Center for Register-based Research, the University of Queensland, Statens Serums Institute and Harvard University.
The NBP will follow up on recent discoveries linking neonatal vitamin D and risk of mental disorders - we will strengthen links with the iPSYCH consortium - a major program of psychiatric research in Denmark, founded by the Lundbeck Foundation. We will measure neonatal vitamin D concentration in the iPSYCH2012 case-cohort sample.
Genetic risk factors are important for mental disorders, as they are for many non-communicable disorders. Advances in statistical genetics have allowed us to build polygenic risk scores that can provide individual-level estimates of risk. We can now combine these genetic scores (G) with risk factors from the environment (E). In collaboration with Professors Naomi Wray and Peter Visscher from the Queensland Brain Institute, the University of Queensland, we will explore innovative strategies to combine genetic and environmental risk factors.
In recent years the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation has established a network of collaborators around the world to measure the burden of disease around the world. A team led by Professor Harvey Whiteford at the University of Queensland, and the Queenland Centre of Mental Health Research, have compiled estimates related to the epidemiology of mental disorders and substance use disorders. New techniques have become available that allow the research community to estimate the burden of mental disorders for countries. We will leverage high quality Danish health registers to estimate the burden of treated mental disorders in Denmark, and use individual-level data to explore ways to capture comorbidity within mental disorders.
Psychiatric epidemiology undertaken by researchers at the NCRR Aarhus University, and within the WHO World Mental Health Survey initiative have clearly shown that people with mental disorder rarely have only one condition. Over the lifespan, the patterns of mental disorders change, and often people have several different mental disorders at the same time. This is called comorbidity. In order to understand the burden of mental disorders in the community, we need to estimate patterns of comorbidity (thus COMO for short). Genetic research has demonstrated that different types of mental disorder can share common risk variants. The NB-COMO theme will link all of the co-investigators named on the NBP. We aim to map patterns of COMO based on Danish registers, and samples from within the World Mental Health Survey, and other large datasets. We will use this information to build new phenotypes suitable for genetic studies.
Read more about the four projects: