Finnish Prenatal Study (FIPS)

There is increasing evidence that prenatal exposures and early development play an important role in the etiology of psychiatric disorders. Finnish Prenatal Study (FIPS) aims at clarifying etiological processes by examining early developmental events in relation to psychiatric disorders. Ongoing studies with funding from National Institutes of Health (NIH) are FIPS-Autism and FIPS-Schizophrenia. FIPS-Bipolar has received funding from NARSAD. Planned FIPS studies include major depression, anxiety, eating disorders, OCD, ADHD, Tourette’s syndrome, and antisocial personality disorder (Table 1).

FIPS is the largest seroepidemiologic study of prenatal exposures in psychiatric disorders using archived prenatal sera, based on the Finnish Maternity Cohort (FMC). A unique feature of FMC is the availability of archived maternal serum samples obtained during the first trimester and stored, frozen, in a central biorepository. These samples were obtained from over 98% of pregnant women in Finland 1983-2007 (1.5 million pregnancies). Serum samples are used to examine prenatal exposures, i.e. infections, mother’s hormonal activity and substance use during pregnancy. All methods are standard manual hemagglutination inhibition (HAI), enzyme linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) or automated methods enzyme immunoassay (EIA).

Laboratory work is performed at the National Prenatal Serology Laboratory in Oulu, Finland, according to ISO 17025 standards. Comprehensive national register data and clinical records from maternity and well-baby clinics containing information on pregnancy, perinatal and neonatal complications, congenital malformations, growth and development and history of mental disorders in family members are collected and linked at the University of Turku to the serologically documented prenatal exposures (Table 2). A nested case-control (1:4) design is used, in which the cases are identified from the Finnish inpatient and outpatient psychiatric registries. Matched controls are selected from the Population Register. Compared to any previous studies, FIPS has far greater statistical power and precision to study rare, but most severe mental disorder, such as infantile autism and schizophrenia.

 

04.10.2011 15:48 Jarna Lindroos