New professor aims to find the genetic variants involved in ADHD
Ditte Demontis is a new professor of psychiatric genetics at the Department of Biomedicine, where she works to identify genetic risk factors for childhood externalizing psychiatric disorders.
The long-term goal of Professor Ditte Demontis’ research is to contribute to improved treatment of psychiatric disorders such as ADHD. An important and fundamental step along the way is to map out genetic risk variants, which can point to the biological mechanisms involved in ADHD. Ditte Demontis and her research group therefore screen the genomes of hundreds of thousands of people in order to identify the crucial genetic differences between those who develop ADHD and those who do not.
Ditte Demontis and her colleagues have already achieved several major breakthroughs in the understanding of the genetic architecture of ADHD. The first twelve genetic risk variants have been identified, and it has become clear that there is a great overlap between the genetic risk factors connected to ADHD and those connected to other diseases that often co-occur with ADHD. Furthermore, the researchers have shown that the genetic architecture of individuals diagnosed with ADHD in childhood is different from the genetic architecture underlying ADHD diagnosed in adulthood.
Ditte Demontis took up the professorship at the Department of Biomedicine on 1 October 2022.
Contact
Professor Ditte Demontis
Aarhus University, Department of Biomedicine
Phone: +45 28 53 97 46
E-mail: ditte@biomed.au.dk