Liisa Keltikangas-järvinen - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Liisa Keltikangas-järvinen
International journal of behavioral medicine, Jan 4, 2017
Type 2 diabetes (T2D) has been associated with depressive symptoms, but the causal direction of t... more Type 2 diabetes (T2D) has been associated with depressive symptoms, but the causal direction of this association and the underlying mechanisms, such as increased glucose levels, remain unclear. We used instrumental-variable regression with a genetic instrument (Mendelian randomization) to examine a causal role of increased glucose concentrations in the development of depressive symptoms. Data were from the population-based Cardiovascular Risk in Young Finns Study (n = 1217). Depressive symptoms were assessed in 2012 using a modified Beck Depression Inventory (BDI-I). Fasting glucose was measured concurrently with depressive symptoms. A genetic risk score for fasting glucose (with 35 single nucleotide polymorphisms) was used as an instrumental variable for glucose. Glucose was not associated with depressive symptoms in the standard linear regression (B = -0.04, 95% CI [-0.12, 0.04], p = .34), but the instrumental-variable regression showed an inverse association between glucose and d...
Learning and Individual Differences, 2010
Stress (Amsterdam, Netherlands), Jan 12, 2015
The effect of acute mental stress on atherosclerosis can be estimated using arterial elasticity m... more The effect of acute mental stress on atherosclerosis can be estimated using arterial elasticity measured by carotid artery distensibility (Cdist). We examined the interactive effect of acute stress-induced cardiac reactivity and Cdist to preclinical atherosclerosis assessed by carotid intima-media thickness (IMT) in 58 healthy adults aged 24-39 years participated in the epidemiological Young Finns Study. Cdist and IMT were measured ultrasonographically. Impedance electrocardiography was used to measure acute mental stress-induced cardiac autonomic responses: heart rate (HR), respiratory sinus arrhythmia and pre-ejection period after the mental arithmetic and the public speaking tasks. Interactions between HR reactivity and Cdist in relation to preclinical atherosclerosis were found. The results imply that elevated HR reactivity to acute mental stress is related to less atherosclerosis among healthy participants with higher arterial elasticity. Possibly, increased cardiac reactivity ...
The continually increasing cardiovascular risk with decreasing level of socioeconomic position, a... more The continually increasing cardiovascular risk with decreasing level of socioeconomic position, as indicated by education, occupational status, and income, is well-established. 1-3 Understanding factors contributing to this socioeconomic gradient is important for planning disease prevention. It has been suggested that early-life social circumstances influence employment and social position in adulthood which, in turn, influence cardiovascular risk (the pathway model). 4 Cumulative lifetime exposures to IJE vol.32 no.6 Background The role of early personality in socioeconomic inequalities in health is not well understood. We investigated the extent to which type A components in adolescence and early adulthood contributed to the inverse association between education and behavioural cardiovascular disease risk factors in adulthood.
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
Development of hostile attitudes was examined in a random sample of 439 children (225 girls and 2... more Development of hostile attitudes was examined in a random sample of 439 children (225 girls and 214 boys) in a 12-year longitudinal study. Maternal reports of temperament, reflecting perceived child difficultness (high activity and anger and low cooperativeness) and mother's hostile child-rearing attitudes, were obtained at age 3 and 3 years later at age 6. Self-reported hostile attitudes of children were obtained 12 years later at age 15. Maternal perceptions of child difficultness and hostile maternal child rearing served as independent predictors of subsequent hostile attitudes. However, this developmental pattern was different for girls and for boys: Maternal perceptions of child difficultness were emphasized in the development of girls' hostile attitudes, whereas hostile maternal child-rearing attitudes were emphasized in the development of boys' hostile attitudes. Although child temperament and maternal attitudes were associated in early and middle childhood, this ...
International Journal of Methods in Psychiatric Research, 2015
Concordance between sum scores of self-reported depressive symptoms and structured interview diag... more Concordance between sum scores of self-reported depressive symptoms and structured interview diagnoses has been studied extensively, but are these the best attainable self-report-based predictions for interview diagnoses? We maximized the cross-validated concordance between World Health Organization's Composite International Diagnostic Interview (CIDI) diagnosis and Beck's Depression Inventory (BDI), and General Health Questionnaire (GHQ), from the viewpoint of exploratory statistics, re-analysing Health 2000 general-population sample of adults over 30 years in mainland Finland (N = 5200-5435). BDI sumscore prediction of CIDI diagnosis could be superseded by using (1) weighted sums of items, (2) classification trees constructed from items, or (3) a single item. Best solution (2) yielded cross-validated Youden's Index 0.757 [standard error (SE) = 0.001, sensitivity = 0.907, specificity = 0.851], improving the concordance to 1.07-fold (1.18-fold for 12-month diagnosis). A single-item solution was best for the GHQ. All positive predictive values remained low (0.09-0.31). Thus, CIDI-to-questionnaire concordance can be improved by using all information in the questionnaires instead of just sum scores, but latent-trait theory for questionnaires is incompatible with interview diagnoses (single item achieved better concordance than summing all). Self-reports have low predictive value for CIDI diagnoses in the general population, but better in settings with higher major depressive disorder (MDD) base rates. Copyright
Journal of epidemiology and community health, Jan 16, 2015
Environmental risks in childhood have been shown to predict later depressive symptoms. In this st... more Environmental risks in childhood have been shown to predict later depressive symptoms. In this study, we examined whether various environmental risk domains in childhood and adolescence, socioeconomic, psychoemotional, parental lifestyle and life-events, predict depressive symptom trajectories in adulthood individually by domain and as a cumulative risk score across domains. Participants were a nationally representative sample of 1289 men and 1585 women from the Young Finns study, aged 3-18 years at study entry in 1980. They responded to questions on depressive symptoms (modified version of the Beck Depression Inventory) at four study phases from 1997 to 2012. Findings from longitudinal repeated multilevel modelling showed that all clusters of risk within domain and the cumulative risk score were associated with later depressive symptoms (regression coefficient range from 0.07 to 0.34). Socioeconomic risk, psychoemotional risk and the cumulative risk score predicted later depressive...
American journal of medical genetics. Part B, Neuropsychiatric genetics : the official publication of the International Society of Psychiatric Genetics, Jan 18, 2015
Individual differences in aggressive behavior emerge in early childhood and predict persisting be... more Individual differences in aggressive behavior emerge in early childhood and predict persisting behavioral problems and disorders. Studies of antisocial and severe aggression in adulthood indicate substantial underlying biology. However, little attention has been given to genome-wide approaches of aggressive behavior in children. We analyzed data from nine population-based studies and assessed aggressive behavior using well-validated parent-reported questionnaires. This is the largest sample exploring children's aggressive behavior to date (N = 18,988), with measures in two developmental stages (N = 15,668 early childhood and N = 16,311 middle childhood/early adolescence). First, we estimated the additive genetic variance of children's aggressive behavior based on genome-wide SNP information, using genome-wide complex trait analysis (GCTA). Second, genetic associations within each study were assessed using a quasi-Poisson regression approach, capturing the highly right-skewed...
Social science & medicine (1982), 2015
While many associations between neighborhood characteristics and individual well-being have been ... more While many associations between neighborhood characteristics and individual well-being have been reported, there is a lack of longitudinal studies that could provide evidence for or against causal interpretations of neighborhood effects. This study examined whether neighborhood urbanicity and socioeconomic status were associated with within-individual variation in depression, mistrust and social support when individuals were living in different neighborhoods with different levels of urbanicity and socioeconomic status. Participants were from the Young Finns prospective cohort study (N = 3074) with five repeated measurement times in 1992, 1997, 2001, 2007, and 2011. Neighborhood urbanicity and socioeconomic status were measured at the level of municipalities and zip-code areas. Within-individual variation over time was examined with multilevel regression, which adjusted the models for all stable individual differences that might confound associations between neighborhood characterist...
Acta paediatrica (Oslo, Norway : 1992), Jan 2, 2015
This study examined whether there was an association between a repeated dietary and lifestyle int... more This study examined whether there was an association between a repeated dietary and lifestyle intervention that began in infancy and participants' psychological wellbeing at the age of 20. We examined the psychological wellbeing of 457 young adults participating in the Special Turku Coronary Risk Factor Intervention Project (STRIP), a randomised controlled trial conducted in Finland between 1989 and 2011. We assessed potential differences in psychological wellbeing between the intervention and control groups by examining participants' satisfaction with life, how they rated their health, their experiences of stress and the consequences of any stress and symptoms of depression at the age of 20. We also assessed socio-economic status during childhood as a potential confounding factor. We found no association between the long-term dietary and lifestyle intervention and participants' psychological wellbeing in adulthood. Adjusting for sex and childhood socio-economic status d...
JAMA psychiatry, Jan 20, 2015
Neuroticism is a pervasive risk factor for psychiatric conditions. It genetically overlaps with m... more Neuroticism is a pervasive risk factor for psychiatric conditions. It genetically overlaps with major depressive disorder (MDD) and is therefore an important phenotype for psychiatric genetics. The Genetics of Personality Consortium has created a resource for genome-wide association analyses of personality traits in more than 63 000 participants (including MDD cases). To identify genetic variants associated with neuroticism by performing a meta-analysis of genome-wide association results based on 1000 Genomes imputation; to evaluate whether common genetic variants as assessed by single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) explain variation in neuroticism by estimating SNP-based heritability; and to examine whether SNPs that predict neuroticism also predict MDD. Genome-wide association meta-analysis of 30 cohorts with genome-wide genotype, personality, and MDD data from the Genetics of Personality Consortium. The study included 63 661 participants from 29 discovery cohorts and 9786 partic...
Background: Tryptophan hydroxylases (TPHs) are involved in the biosynthesis of serotonin and are ... more Background: Tryptophan hydroxylases (TPHs) are involved in the biosynthesis of serotonin and are therefore candidate genes for psychiatric disorders, including depression. We examined whether the common 218 A N C and 779 A N C polymorphisms in the tryptophan hydroxylase 1 gene (TPH1) moderated the association between perceived social support and sub-clinical depressive symptoms in adults. Methods: The subjects were
Psychology & health, 2011
We examined the association between adulthood emotionality-activity-sociability temperament scale... more We examined the association between adulthood emotionality-activity-sociability temperament scale and preclinical atherosclerosis and, whether this association is mediated by cardiovascular risk factors (low-density lipoprotein cholesterol, systolic blood pressure, diastolic blood pressure and body-mass index (BMI)). The participants were a nationally representative sample of 537 men and 811 women from the Cardiovascular Risk in Young Finns study aged 15-30 years at the baseline in 1992 and aged 24-39 years at the follow-up in 2001. Carotid atherosclerosis was assessed by ultrasound scans of the common carotid artery intima-media thickness (IMT) and brachial flow-mediated dilation (FMD). In men, there was an association between the temperament dimension activity and IMT (β = 0.08, p = 0.036) which was partially mediated by BMI (β decreased from 0.08 to 0.05; p-value of Sobel test = 0.002). However, after correction for multiple comparisons the association between IMT and the tempera...
Preventive medicine, 2003
We examined associations of parental socioeconomic status (SES) and hostile maternal child-rearin... more We examined associations of parental socioeconomic status (SES) and hostile maternal child-rearing attitudes with the insulin resistance syndrome (IRS) precursors in children. The participants were 210 randomly selected healthy boys and girls who participated in the epidemiological Cardiovascular Risk in Young Finns study and who were 3, 6, and 9 years of age at the three study phases. Hostile maternal child-rearing attitudes were self-rated by the mothers. SES consisted of the years of education of the parents and family income. The IRS comprised serum insulin, high-density lipoprotein cholesterol, triglycerides, systolic blood pressure, and body mass index. Among boys, low parental SES and strict maternal discipline were associated with heightened somatic risk. Among girls, parental SES moderated the association between maternal child-rearing attitudes and somatic risk so that belonging to a high-SES family seemed to protect the girls against the adverse health effects of hostile ...
Journal of behavioral medicine, 1997
We investigated the relationship between apolipoprotein E (apoE) polymorphism and cardiovascular ... more We investigated the relationship between apolipoprotein E (apoE) polymorphism and cardiovascular responses to experimentally induced mental stress. Mental stress was induced in 28 healthy 16-year-old boys with a series of stressors (e.g., mental arithmetic, Stroop Color-Word Interference Test). Heart rate (HR), finger blood volume, and skin conductance level were recorded continuously during the task performance. We found that boys with apoE3/2 or apoE3/3 showed marginally significantly greater HR reactivity and significantly greater task levels of HR and HR variability (HRV) during the mental stress than subjects with apoE4/2, apoE4/3, or apoE4/4. In addition, E4/2, E4/3, and E4/4 subjects manifested a distinct stress-related decrease in HRV relative to baseline values while E3/2 and E3/3 subjects showed a slight increase. The results suggests that apoE polymorphism is associated with cardiovascular responsivity to mental stress in adolescent boys.
Preventive medicine, 1995
Cross-sectional and predictive associations between temperament and some essential parameters of ... more Cross-sectional and predictive associations between temperament and some essential parameters of the metabolic syndrome were examined in children. A 3-year follow-up study of 1,589 randomly selected, healthy, 6-, 9-, 12-, and 15-year-old children was used. Somatic parameters studied were serum insulin, serum glucose, serum HDL cholesterol, serum triglycerides, systolic blood pressure, and body-mass index. Temperament of the subjects was rated by their mothers using a questionnaire and a semantic differential. Temperamental factors were related cross-sectionally to, as well as predicted for, the metabolic syndrome precursors over the 3-year period. Mental vitality and positive emotionality were likely to be related and positive emotionality were likely to be related to a low somatic risk level, whereas hyperactivity, negative emotionality (e.g., aggression and anger), responsivity to others, and cooperativeness were related to a high level of somatic risk. These associations were mor...
Stress and Health, 2015
There have been calls to know more about vulnerability factors that may predispose to adverse hea... more There have been calls to know more about vulnerability factors that may predispose to adverse health outcomes at work. We examined if childhood adverse experiences would affect vulnerability to psychosocial stress factors at work. A nationally representative sample of 1546 Finnish men and women was followed up from childhood to adulthood. Childhood adverse experiences consisted of socioeconomic and emotional factors. Job demands and job control were measured 21 years later, and depressive symptoms were measured 21 and 27 years after the childhood measurements. Job demands predicted depressive symptoms over 6 years, and the association was modified by childhood emotional adversity. Participants with three or more emotional adversities in childhood had more depressive symptoms in response to high job demands compared with participants with zero or one emotional adversities in childhood (Betas = -1.40 and -2.01, ps < 0.05 and <0.01). No such moderating effect by childhood adverse experiences was found for the association between job control and depressive symptoms. Although modest in effect size, these findings provide a developmental viewpoint for understanding the role of childhood experiences in work-related stress factors. Such knowledge can enhance understanding of individual differences in vulnerability to the demands of working life. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
... The finding that hostile maternal child-rearing attitudes are an important pre-dictor of depr... more ... The finding that hostile maternal child-rearing attitudes are an important pre-dictor of depressive tendencies for both sexes is consistent with previous findings that generally affectionless and noneffective disciplinary parenting style predis-pose individuals to depression (eg ...
Learning and Individual Differences, 2010
Associations between teacher-perceived temperament, educational competence (EC), and school grade... more Associations between teacher-perceived temperament, educational competence (EC), and school grades in mother language (ML) and mathematics (Math) were assessed in 3212 students (1619 girls) in Secondary School (aged 13-19) taken from a nationally representative Finnish sample. Temperament was assessed with scales from the TABC-R and DOTS-R batteries. EC consists of cognitive ability, motivation, and maturity. Activity, persistence, distractibility, inhibition, and negative emotionality were significantly associated with both ML and Math grades. EC turned out to mediate the relationship between temperament and school performance and moderated the relationship of activity to Math. The findings show a high association between teacher-rated temperament and school performance and indicate a strong "halo effect" between temperament, EC, and school grades.
Heart, 2006
Objective: To examine the association of childhood socioeconomic position (SEP) with adult cardio... more Objective: To examine the association of childhood socioeconomic position (SEP) with adult cardiovascular risk factors, vascular structure, and vascular function in a contemporary population of young adults.Design: Population based prospective cohort study with baseline assessment in 1980.Setting: Finland.Participants: 856 men and 1066 women whose childhood SEP was determined by parental occupational status (manual, lower non-manual, upper non-manual) at age 3–18
International journal of behavioral medicine, Jan 4, 2017
Type 2 diabetes (T2D) has been associated with depressive symptoms, but the causal direction of t... more Type 2 diabetes (T2D) has been associated with depressive symptoms, but the causal direction of this association and the underlying mechanisms, such as increased glucose levels, remain unclear. We used instrumental-variable regression with a genetic instrument (Mendelian randomization) to examine a causal role of increased glucose concentrations in the development of depressive symptoms. Data were from the population-based Cardiovascular Risk in Young Finns Study (n = 1217). Depressive symptoms were assessed in 2012 using a modified Beck Depression Inventory (BDI-I). Fasting glucose was measured concurrently with depressive symptoms. A genetic risk score for fasting glucose (with 35 single nucleotide polymorphisms) was used as an instrumental variable for glucose. Glucose was not associated with depressive symptoms in the standard linear regression (B = -0.04, 95% CI [-0.12, 0.04], p = .34), but the instrumental-variable regression showed an inverse association between glucose and d...
Learning and Individual Differences, 2010
Stress (Amsterdam, Netherlands), Jan 12, 2015
The effect of acute mental stress on atherosclerosis can be estimated using arterial elasticity m... more The effect of acute mental stress on atherosclerosis can be estimated using arterial elasticity measured by carotid artery distensibility (Cdist). We examined the interactive effect of acute stress-induced cardiac reactivity and Cdist to preclinical atherosclerosis assessed by carotid intima-media thickness (IMT) in 58 healthy adults aged 24-39 years participated in the epidemiological Young Finns Study. Cdist and IMT were measured ultrasonographically. Impedance electrocardiography was used to measure acute mental stress-induced cardiac autonomic responses: heart rate (HR), respiratory sinus arrhythmia and pre-ejection period after the mental arithmetic and the public speaking tasks. Interactions between HR reactivity and Cdist in relation to preclinical atherosclerosis were found. The results imply that elevated HR reactivity to acute mental stress is related to less atherosclerosis among healthy participants with higher arterial elasticity. Possibly, increased cardiac reactivity ...
The continually increasing cardiovascular risk with decreasing level of socioeconomic position, a... more The continually increasing cardiovascular risk with decreasing level of socioeconomic position, as indicated by education, occupational status, and income, is well-established. 1-3 Understanding factors contributing to this socioeconomic gradient is important for planning disease prevention. It has been suggested that early-life social circumstances influence employment and social position in adulthood which, in turn, influence cardiovascular risk (the pathway model). 4 Cumulative lifetime exposures to IJE vol.32 no.6 Background The role of early personality in socioeconomic inequalities in health is not well understood. We investigated the extent to which type A components in adolescence and early adulthood contributed to the inverse association between education and behavioural cardiovascular disease risk factors in adulthood.
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
Development of hostile attitudes was examined in a random sample of 439 children (225 girls and 2... more Development of hostile attitudes was examined in a random sample of 439 children (225 girls and 214 boys) in a 12-year longitudinal study. Maternal reports of temperament, reflecting perceived child difficultness (high activity and anger and low cooperativeness) and mother's hostile child-rearing attitudes, were obtained at age 3 and 3 years later at age 6. Self-reported hostile attitudes of children were obtained 12 years later at age 15. Maternal perceptions of child difficultness and hostile maternal child rearing served as independent predictors of subsequent hostile attitudes. However, this developmental pattern was different for girls and for boys: Maternal perceptions of child difficultness were emphasized in the development of girls' hostile attitudes, whereas hostile maternal child-rearing attitudes were emphasized in the development of boys' hostile attitudes. Although child temperament and maternal attitudes were associated in early and middle childhood, this ...
International Journal of Methods in Psychiatric Research, 2015
Concordance between sum scores of self-reported depressive symptoms and structured interview diag... more Concordance between sum scores of self-reported depressive symptoms and structured interview diagnoses has been studied extensively, but are these the best attainable self-report-based predictions for interview diagnoses? We maximized the cross-validated concordance between World Health Organization's Composite International Diagnostic Interview (CIDI) diagnosis and Beck's Depression Inventory (BDI), and General Health Questionnaire (GHQ), from the viewpoint of exploratory statistics, re-analysing Health 2000 general-population sample of adults over 30 years in mainland Finland (N = 5200-5435). BDI sumscore prediction of CIDI diagnosis could be superseded by using (1) weighted sums of items, (2) classification trees constructed from items, or (3) a single item. Best solution (2) yielded cross-validated Youden's Index 0.757 [standard error (SE) = 0.001, sensitivity = 0.907, specificity = 0.851], improving the concordance to 1.07-fold (1.18-fold for 12-month diagnosis). A single-item solution was best for the GHQ. All positive predictive values remained low (0.09-0.31). Thus, CIDI-to-questionnaire concordance can be improved by using all information in the questionnaires instead of just sum scores, but latent-trait theory for questionnaires is incompatible with interview diagnoses (single item achieved better concordance than summing all). Self-reports have low predictive value for CIDI diagnoses in the general population, but better in settings with higher major depressive disorder (MDD) base rates. Copyright
Journal of epidemiology and community health, Jan 16, 2015
Environmental risks in childhood have been shown to predict later depressive symptoms. In this st... more Environmental risks in childhood have been shown to predict later depressive symptoms. In this study, we examined whether various environmental risk domains in childhood and adolescence, socioeconomic, psychoemotional, parental lifestyle and life-events, predict depressive symptom trajectories in adulthood individually by domain and as a cumulative risk score across domains. Participants were a nationally representative sample of 1289 men and 1585 women from the Young Finns study, aged 3-18 years at study entry in 1980. They responded to questions on depressive symptoms (modified version of the Beck Depression Inventory) at four study phases from 1997 to 2012. Findings from longitudinal repeated multilevel modelling showed that all clusters of risk within domain and the cumulative risk score were associated with later depressive symptoms (regression coefficient range from 0.07 to 0.34). Socioeconomic risk, psychoemotional risk and the cumulative risk score predicted later depressive...
American journal of medical genetics. Part B, Neuropsychiatric genetics : the official publication of the International Society of Psychiatric Genetics, Jan 18, 2015
Individual differences in aggressive behavior emerge in early childhood and predict persisting be... more Individual differences in aggressive behavior emerge in early childhood and predict persisting behavioral problems and disorders. Studies of antisocial and severe aggression in adulthood indicate substantial underlying biology. However, little attention has been given to genome-wide approaches of aggressive behavior in children. We analyzed data from nine population-based studies and assessed aggressive behavior using well-validated parent-reported questionnaires. This is the largest sample exploring children's aggressive behavior to date (N = 18,988), with measures in two developmental stages (N = 15,668 early childhood and N = 16,311 middle childhood/early adolescence). First, we estimated the additive genetic variance of children's aggressive behavior based on genome-wide SNP information, using genome-wide complex trait analysis (GCTA). Second, genetic associations within each study were assessed using a quasi-Poisson regression approach, capturing the highly right-skewed...
Social science & medicine (1982), 2015
While many associations between neighborhood characteristics and individual well-being have been ... more While many associations between neighborhood characteristics and individual well-being have been reported, there is a lack of longitudinal studies that could provide evidence for or against causal interpretations of neighborhood effects. This study examined whether neighborhood urbanicity and socioeconomic status were associated with within-individual variation in depression, mistrust and social support when individuals were living in different neighborhoods with different levels of urbanicity and socioeconomic status. Participants were from the Young Finns prospective cohort study (N = 3074) with five repeated measurement times in 1992, 1997, 2001, 2007, and 2011. Neighborhood urbanicity and socioeconomic status were measured at the level of municipalities and zip-code areas. Within-individual variation over time was examined with multilevel regression, which adjusted the models for all stable individual differences that might confound associations between neighborhood characterist...
Acta paediatrica (Oslo, Norway : 1992), Jan 2, 2015
This study examined whether there was an association between a repeated dietary and lifestyle int... more This study examined whether there was an association between a repeated dietary and lifestyle intervention that began in infancy and participants' psychological wellbeing at the age of 20. We examined the psychological wellbeing of 457 young adults participating in the Special Turku Coronary Risk Factor Intervention Project (STRIP), a randomised controlled trial conducted in Finland between 1989 and 2011. We assessed potential differences in psychological wellbeing between the intervention and control groups by examining participants' satisfaction with life, how they rated their health, their experiences of stress and the consequences of any stress and symptoms of depression at the age of 20. We also assessed socio-economic status during childhood as a potential confounding factor. We found no association between the long-term dietary and lifestyle intervention and participants' psychological wellbeing in adulthood. Adjusting for sex and childhood socio-economic status d...
JAMA psychiatry, Jan 20, 2015
Neuroticism is a pervasive risk factor for psychiatric conditions. It genetically overlaps with m... more Neuroticism is a pervasive risk factor for psychiatric conditions. It genetically overlaps with major depressive disorder (MDD) and is therefore an important phenotype for psychiatric genetics. The Genetics of Personality Consortium has created a resource for genome-wide association analyses of personality traits in more than 63 000 participants (including MDD cases). To identify genetic variants associated with neuroticism by performing a meta-analysis of genome-wide association results based on 1000 Genomes imputation; to evaluate whether common genetic variants as assessed by single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) explain variation in neuroticism by estimating SNP-based heritability; and to examine whether SNPs that predict neuroticism also predict MDD. Genome-wide association meta-analysis of 30 cohorts with genome-wide genotype, personality, and MDD data from the Genetics of Personality Consortium. The study included 63 661 participants from 29 discovery cohorts and 9786 partic...
Background: Tryptophan hydroxylases (TPHs) are involved in the biosynthesis of serotonin and are ... more Background: Tryptophan hydroxylases (TPHs) are involved in the biosynthesis of serotonin and are therefore candidate genes for psychiatric disorders, including depression. We examined whether the common 218 A N C and 779 A N C polymorphisms in the tryptophan hydroxylase 1 gene (TPH1) moderated the association between perceived social support and sub-clinical depressive symptoms in adults. Methods: The subjects were
Psychology & health, 2011
We examined the association between adulthood emotionality-activity-sociability temperament scale... more We examined the association between adulthood emotionality-activity-sociability temperament scale and preclinical atherosclerosis and, whether this association is mediated by cardiovascular risk factors (low-density lipoprotein cholesterol, systolic blood pressure, diastolic blood pressure and body-mass index (BMI)). The participants were a nationally representative sample of 537 men and 811 women from the Cardiovascular Risk in Young Finns study aged 15-30 years at the baseline in 1992 and aged 24-39 years at the follow-up in 2001. Carotid atherosclerosis was assessed by ultrasound scans of the common carotid artery intima-media thickness (IMT) and brachial flow-mediated dilation (FMD). In men, there was an association between the temperament dimension activity and IMT (β = 0.08, p = 0.036) which was partially mediated by BMI (β decreased from 0.08 to 0.05; p-value of Sobel test = 0.002). However, after correction for multiple comparisons the association between IMT and the tempera...
Preventive medicine, 2003
We examined associations of parental socioeconomic status (SES) and hostile maternal child-rearin... more We examined associations of parental socioeconomic status (SES) and hostile maternal child-rearing attitudes with the insulin resistance syndrome (IRS) precursors in children. The participants were 210 randomly selected healthy boys and girls who participated in the epidemiological Cardiovascular Risk in Young Finns study and who were 3, 6, and 9 years of age at the three study phases. Hostile maternal child-rearing attitudes were self-rated by the mothers. SES consisted of the years of education of the parents and family income. The IRS comprised serum insulin, high-density lipoprotein cholesterol, triglycerides, systolic blood pressure, and body mass index. Among boys, low parental SES and strict maternal discipline were associated with heightened somatic risk. Among girls, parental SES moderated the association between maternal child-rearing attitudes and somatic risk so that belonging to a high-SES family seemed to protect the girls against the adverse health effects of hostile ...
Journal of behavioral medicine, 1997
We investigated the relationship between apolipoprotein E (apoE) polymorphism and cardiovascular ... more We investigated the relationship between apolipoprotein E (apoE) polymorphism and cardiovascular responses to experimentally induced mental stress. Mental stress was induced in 28 healthy 16-year-old boys with a series of stressors (e.g., mental arithmetic, Stroop Color-Word Interference Test). Heart rate (HR), finger blood volume, and skin conductance level were recorded continuously during the task performance. We found that boys with apoE3/2 or apoE3/3 showed marginally significantly greater HR reactivity and significantly greater task levels of HR and HR variability (HRV) during the mental stress than subjects with apoE4/2, apoE4/3, or apoE4/4. In addition, E4/2, E4/3, and E4/4 subjects manifested a distinct stress-related decrease in HRV relative to baseline values while E3/2 and E3/3 subjects showed a slight increase. The results suggests that apoE polymorphism is associated with cardiovascular responsivity to mental stress in adolescent boys.
Preventive medicine, 1995
Cross-sectional and predictive associations between temperament and some essential parameters of ... more Cross-sectional and predictive associations between temperament and some essential parameters of the metabolic syndrome were examined in children. A 3-year follow-up study of 1,589 randomly selected, healthy, 6-, 9-, 12-, and 15-year-old children was used. Somatic parameters studied were serum insulin, serum glucose, serum HDL cholesterol, serum triglycerides, systolic blood pressure, and body-mass index. Temperament of the subjects was rated by their mothers using a questionnaire and a semantic differential. Temperamental factors were related cross-sectionally to, as well as predicted for, the metabolic syndrome precursors over the 3-year period. Mental vitality and positive emotionality were likely to be related and positive emotionality were likely to be related to a low somatic risk level, whereas hyperactivity, negative emotionality (e.g., aggression and anger), responsivity to others, and cooperativeness were related to a high level of somatic risk. These associations were mor...
Stress and Health, 2015
There have been calls to know more about vulnerability factors that may predispose to adverse hea... more There have been calls to know more about vulnerability factors that may predispose to adverse health outcomes at work. We examined if childhood adverse experiences would affect vulnerability to psychosocial stress factors at work. A nationally representative sample of 1546 Finnish men and women was followed up from childhood to adulthood. Childhood adverse experiences consisted of socioeconomic and emotional factors. Job demands and job control were measured 21 years later, and depressive symptoms were measured 21 and 27 years after the childhood measurements. Job demands predicted depressive symptoms over 6 years, and the association was modified by childhood emotional adversity. Participants with three or more emotional adversities in childhood had more depressive symptoms in response to high job demands compared with participants with zero or one emotional adversities in childhood (Betas = -1.40 and -2.01, ps < 0.05 and <0.01). No such moderating effect by childhood adverse experiences was found for the association between job control and depressive symptoms. Although modest in effect size, these findings provide a developmental viewpoint for understanding the role of childhood experiences in work-related stress factors. Such knowledge can enhance understanding of individual differences in vulnerability to the demands of working life. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
... The finding that hostile maternal child-rearing attitudes are an important pre-dictor of depr... more ... The finding that hostile maternal child-rearing attitudes are an important pre-dictor of depressive tendencies for both sexes is consistent with previous findings that generally affectionless and noneffective disciplinary parenting style predis-pose individuals to depression (eg ...
Learning and Individual Differences, 2010
Associations between teacher-perceived temperament, educational competence (EC), and school grade... more Associations between teacher-perceived temperament, educational competence (EC), and school grades in mother language (ML) and mathematics (Math) were assessed in 3212 students (1619 girls) in Secondary School (aged 13-19) taken from a nationally representative Finnish sample. Temperament was assessed with scales from the TABC-R and DOTS-R batteries. EC consists of cognitive ability, motivation, and maturity. Activity, persistence, distractibility, inhibition, and negative emotionality were significantly associated with both ML and Math grades. EC turned out to mediate the relationship between temperament and school performance and moderated the relationship of activity to Math. The findings show a high association between teacher-rated temperament and school performance and indicate a strong "halo effect" between temperament, EC, and school grades.
Heart, 2006
Objective: To examine the association of childhood socioeconomic position (SEP) with adult cardio... more Objective: To examine the association of childhood socioeconomic position (SEP) with adult cardiovascular risk factors, vascular structure, and vascular function in a contemporary population of young adults.Design: Population based prospective cohort study with baseline assessment in 1980.Setting: Finland.Participants: 856 men and 1066 women whose childhood SEP was determined by parental occupational status (manual, lower non-manual, upper non-manual) at age 3–18