Research Unit for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry

Research Unit for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry aims of conducting research in the field of child and adolescent psychiatry embracing children and adolescent until the age of 18. The research unit offers guidance and direction on starting-up research projects including supervision of PhD students within the field of child and adolescent psychiatry.

The staff at the research unit consists of PhD students, statisticians, two secretaries, senior researchers, and the head who is a consultant.

The research programme encompasses both analyses of register data and clinical research. At present, the focus is on diagnosing, course, and outcome of mental disorders in children and adolescents.

 Examples of research issues

Improvement of the child and adolescent psychiatry

The research project Improvement of the child and adolescent psychiatry focuses on how to optimize the diagnostic process in child and adolescent psychiatry as well as to describe the pathways that children and adolescents are going through before their referrals are received in the child and adolescent psychiatry.

Furthermore, we test diagnostic instruments used in the evaluation of referrals to child and adolescent psychiatry and their effectiveness in improving the diagnostic process. The diagnostic instruments are Kiddie Schedule for Affective Disorders and Schizophrenia, COMPuter version (K-SADS-COMP) and The Development and Well-being Assessment (DAWBA).

Research in register data and epidemiologic studies

We use register-based data from the Danish registers in the design of epidemiological studies. The variables studied are among others course of illness, job, education, living condition. We perform among other studies incidence studies and study the course of different child and adolescent mental disorders such as autism, ADHD and eating disorder.