Harri Antikainen

• PhD
• University of Oulu

Background The study aim was to analyse how mental health services are used in different parts of the Kainuu region in Finland and whether travel time to primary health care services is associated with the use of different contact types (in-person visits, remote contacts, home visits). Methods The study population included adults who had used ment...

Background: Previous inconsistent evidence on effects of green space on the development of allergic rhinitis could be explained by the season of exposure. We explored whether the season and timing of exposure to green space play a role in the development of allergic rhinitis during the first 27 years of life. Methods: In a longitudinal study of 256...

Objectives. To test the a priori hypothesis that out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) is associated with cold weather during all seasons, not only during the winter. Methods. We applied a case‒crossover design to all cases of nontraumatic OHCA in Helsinki, Finland, over 22 years: 1997 to 2018. We statistically defined cold weather for each case an...

Geographic accessibility of health services is one of the key dimensions affecting health care access, utilisation and may impact population health. We analysed countrywide space-time accessibility to primary health services by private car and multimodal walk-ride-walk travel chains of public transport in Finland. The analysis utilises register-bas...

There is accumulating evidence that prenatal exposure to air pollution disturbs fetal growth and development, but little is known about these effects in cold climates or their season-specific or joint effects. Our objective was to assess independent and joint effects of prenatal exposure to specific air pollutants on the risk of low birth weight (L...

There is accumulating evidence that prenatal exposure to air pollution disturbs fetal growth and development, but little is known about these effects in cold climates or their season-specific or joint effects. Our objective was to assess independent and joint effects of prenatal exposure to specific air pollutants on the risk of low birth weight (L...

Background: In the past two decades, the number of maternity hospitals in Finland has been reduced from 42 to 22. Notwithstanding the benefits of centralization for larger units in terms of increased safety, the closures will inevitably impair geographical accessibility of services. Methods: This study aimed to employ a set of location-allocatio...

The latitudinal diversity gradient hypothesis suggests that species richness should be highest at low latitudes, whereas Rapoport's rule states that largest ranges ought to be found for species at high latitudes. However, there is no consensus over these patterns and their underlying drivers in the freshwater realm. We investigated species richness...

Background: Previous studies have provided evidence that prenatal exposure to low-level air pollution increases the risk of preterm birth (PTB), but the findings of the effects of short-term exposure have been inconclusive. Moreover, there is little knowledge on potential synergistic effects of different combinations of air pollutants. Objectives...

Background: There is some evidence that prenatal exposure to low-level air pollution increases the risk of preterm birth (PTB), but little is known about synergistic effects of different pollutants. Objectives: We assessed the independent and joint effects of prenatal exposure to air pollution during the entire duration of pregnancy. Methods:...

Objective To test the a priori hypothesis that the association between cold spells and ischaemic sudden cardiac death (SCD) is modified by the severity of coronary stenosis. Methods The home coordinates of 2572 autopsy-verified cases of ischaemic SCD aged ≥35 in the Province of Oulu, Finland, were linked to 51 years of weather data. Cold spell was...

Objective To test a priori hypothesis of an association between season-specific cold spells and sudden cardiac death (SCD). Methods We conducted a case–crossover study of 3614 autopsy-verified cases of SCD in the Province of Oulu, Finland (1998–2011). Cold spell was statistically defined by applying an individual frequency distribution of daily te...

Little is known about the levels of exposure to grass pollen in urban environments. We assessed the spatio-temporal variation of grass pollen concentrations and the role of urbanity as a determinant of grass pollen exposure in the Helsinki Metropolitan area. We monitored grass pollen concentrations in 2013 at 16 sites during the peak pollen season...

The Helsinki grass pollen data 2013. (XLS)

Dispersal is one of the key mechanisms affecting the distribution of individuals, populations, and communities in nature. Despite advances in the study of single species, it has been notoriously difficult to account for dispersal in multispecies metacommunities, where it potentially has strong effects on community structure beyond those of local en...

The determination of an appropriate catchment area for a hospital providing highly specialized (i.e. tertiary) health care is typically a trade-off between ensuring adequate client volumes and maintaining reasonable accessibility for all potential clients. This may pose considerable challenges, especially in sparsely inhabited regions. In Finland,...

Sudden cardiac death (SCD) is the leading cause of death. The current paradigm in SCD requires the presence of an abnormal myocardial substrate and an internal or external transient factor that triggers cardiac arrest. Based on prior mechanistic evidence, we hypothesized that an unusually cold weather event (a cold spell) could act as an external f...

Background: Despite the recent developments in physically- and chemically- based analysis of atmospheric particles, no models exist for resolving the spatial variability of pollen concentration at urban scale. Objectives: We developed land use regression (LUR) approach for predicting spatial fine-scale allergenic pollen concentrations in the Helsin...

Emergency medical services are an important part of trauma care, but data comparing urban and rural areas is needed. We compared 30-day mortality and length of intensive care unit (ICU) stay for trauma patients injured in rural and urban municipalities and collected basic data on trauma care in Northern Finland. We examined data from all trauma pat...

Metacommunity research relies largely on proxies for inferring the effect of dispersal on local community structure. Overland and watercourse distances have been typically used as such proxies. A good proxy for dispersal should, however, take into account more complex landscape features that can affect an organism's movement and dispersal. The cost...

The wolf (Canis lupus) population in Finland is recolonizing its former range after an absence of about 100 years. During its absence, the boreal forest environment has been significantly altered by humans and has become a patchwork of managed forests and human-modified areas. Wolf recolonization has raised a need for information on the potential o...

During past decades, effects of accessibility to growth have been considered extensively. In previ-ous studies, however, matter of scale has been largely ignored. In this study, relevance of travel accessibility and essential socio-economic variables for explaining population change analysed with a multi-scalar study setting by the case of Finland....

In recent decades, routing based on Geographic Information Systems (GIS) has become a major branch of technology, which has been used especially in applications related to transport and logistics. However, in terms of the development of methods, routing in a cross-country environment is more difficult, and hence research into it has been relatively...

Reitinoptimointi maastossa ei ole ollut laajasti tutkittu aihe. Metsäkeskuksen metsäninventointityöhön soveltuvaa reitinoptimointimenetelmää on kehitetty muutaman vuoden ajan. Tämän tutkimuksen tavoitteena oli testata menetelmää ensimmäisen kerran todellisen maastotyön yhteydessä. Testauksessa selvitettiin reitinoptimointityökalun toimivuutta, reit...

A fair amount of research has been carried out on pathfinding problems in the context of transportation networks, whereas pathfinding in off-network space has received far less interest. In geographic information systems (GIS), the latter is usually associated with the cost surface method, which allows optimum paths to be calculated through rasters...

The case study of Finland analyses accessibility in one of the most sparsely populated countries in Europe. The findings of this study are based on grid cell analyses which are free from administrative divisions. In the analysis of accessibility of the population and jobs, the presence of both urban densities and extreme scarcity is evident, and th...

The conventional raster‐based least‐cost path technique, in which the connectivity graph is constructed by treating each raster cell as a node and linking each node to its adjacent neighbors, has been widely used to determine optimum paths in space. Unfortunately, paths calculated with this method are subject to distortions that stem from the impos...

Finland is currently undergoing a restructuring of the municipal and public service structure. This restructuring is an effort to react, in addition to tightening economy, to the changing circumstances with regard to the demographic structure, especially in rural areas. This paper examines the use of geographical information systems (GIS) to analyz...

The matter of scale is often ignored when analysing accessibility and its effects on population change. While accessibility has a concentrating effect on the activities of society on a regional scale, it also has a decentralising effect within urban areas in developed countries, including Finland. Population change is the outcome of numerous indivi...

Cross-country path finding is essentially different from path finding in transportation networks, due to the fact that cross-country terrain can be traversed anywhere and any direction that is free of obstacles. While several studies on pedestrian movement across Finnish terrain have been carried out, they are not accurate enough to be utilized in...

The aim of this thesis is to study the effect of transport accessibility on population change in Finland and the matter of scale to this relationship. During the research period, 1880-2009, Finland has urbanized, changed from an agrarian to a post-industrial economy and the transport system has developed from being manually powered to one that is f...

This study analyzes the relation of accessibility by road and railway network to population change between the years 1970–2007 in Finland. Accessibility is evaluated at built-up area unit and municipal levels by potential accessibility analysis and by measuring accessibility to network. Analyses are done in decadal periods by using geographical inf...

Analysis based on historical geographical information systems (hgis) databases can be used to trace the relationship between railway infrastructure and population change in Finland from 1880 to 1970. The use of accessibility calculations, statistical analyses, and gis reveals that Finland's population was almost evenly distributed in 1880, when rai...

Everyday traffic accounts for a significant share of overall greenhouse gas emissions, in particular carbon dioxide (CO2). While several solutions have been proposed for decreasing the emissions, a new kind of land use planning is required in order to achieve long-term effects. This study focuses on the effect of large retail store locations in the...

The inventory practices concerning non-industrial privately owned forests are undergoing significant changes in Finland. In the future, the collection of information will be increasingly carried out by the means of remote sensing technologies, which is bound to have strong implications for the traditional and extensive field inventory practices. Th...

Path optimization, understood as the purpose of determining optimum movement paths through geographic space by minimizing the overall distance or a function of it, has become an increasingly popular subject in recent years. Especially, this holds true to applications involving the transportation network. However, path optimization in the crosscount...

This research addresses the subject of cross-country terrain path finding using forest inventory route planning as a case study. Although the subject is closely related to the key concepts of geography, so far it has not been studied in academic geography in any significant extent. Accordingly, an additional motive for the research is to attempt to...

Tourism is a key business sector for many geographically and economically marginal regions. The main form of tourism in these regions is nature-related tourism, consisting of activities such as hiking, fishing and various types of winter sports. The tourism resorts in marginal regions face the constant challenge of improving their tourist product t...

This paper presents foundations for building mobile environmental information systems (MEIS) that require a multidisciplinary approach. MEIS require expertise from environmental biology, geography and mobile technology. MEIS are very promising in bringing added value in the acquisition of environmental information with a multitude of mobile devices...

Tourism is a key business sector for many geographically and economically marginal regions. The main form of tourism in these regions is nature-related tourism, consisting of activities such as hiking, fishing and various types of winter sports. The tourism resorts in marginal regions face the constant challenge of improving their tourist product t...

Environmental information systems (EIS) have been in professional use for quite a long time. Applications of this domain often include features of quite common location based services (LBS). This means utilization of space-, time- and content-oriented data for positioning and routing services with various maps. Firstly, new integrated technology an...

Improved data management technology and data availability have performed a key role in facilitating the increased use of GIS in (spatial) health research. However, whilst GIS is an enabling technique offering new opportunities for research, some questions on appropriate ways to develop the GIS-based approach remain unanswered. The main problems per...