Psychiatric research in the Northern Finland Birth Cohort 1986 - a systematic review

Abstract

The Northern Finland Birth Cohort 1986 is a large population-based birth cohort, which aims to promote health and wellbeing of the population. In this paper, we systematically review the psychiatric research performed in the cohort until today, i.e. at the age of 32 years of the cohort (2018). We conducted a systematic literature search using the databases of PubMed and Scopus and complemented it with a manual search. We found a total of 94 articles, which were classified as examining ADHD, emotional and behavioural problems, psychosis risk or other studies relating to psychiatric subjects. The articles are mainly based on two large comprehensive follow-up studies of the cohort and several substudies. The studies have often used also nationwide register data. The studies have found several early predictors for the aforementioned psychiatric outcomes, such as problems at pregnancy and birth, family factors in childhood, physical inactivity and substance use in adolescence. There are also novel findings relating to brain imaging and cognition, for instance regarding familial risk of psychosis in relation to resting state functional MRI. The Northern Finland Birth Cohort 1986 has been utilised frequently in psychiatric research and future data collections are likely to lead to new scientifically important findings. Abbreviations: attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD); magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

Keywords: ADHD; behavioural problems; birth cohort; emotional problems; psychosis risk; systematic review.

Figure 1.

Data collections of the psychiatric studies in the Northern Finland Birth Cohort 1986

Figure 2.

Summary of group differences between familial risk (FR) for psychosis and controls in functional and structural MRI studies in the Northern Finland Birth Cohort 1986. Blue represents decreased fMRI/MRI signal in FR (vs. controls) and red represents an increase in fMRI/MRI signal in FR (vs. controls)