Maarit Piirtola

Maarit Piirtola
University of Helsinki and UKK Institute

Docent and PhD, MSc, PT

About

71
Publications
13,705
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Introduction
Senior scientist at the Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland (FIMM), University of Helsinki and UKK Institute. Research in Public Health related to Health Behaviors (smoking, physical activity, sedentary behavior/sitting, sleep), BMI and mental health. In addition, she has projects in Geriatrics, Physiotherapy and Rehabilitation Medicine related to Fall & Injury Prevention and Improving Functional Ability. Her current project is 'Sex difference in depression among Finnish Twin Cohort'.
Additional affiliations
January 2001 - June 2011
University of Turku
Position
  • Resercher

Publications

Publications (71)
Article
Full-text available
Background As populations are aging, it needs to be ensured that valid depression rating scales are available across old adulthood. Center for Epidemiological Studies-Depression scale (CES-D) is a common depression rating scale, however, few studies have assessed its validity in individuals with age over 90 and/or cognitive impairment. We examined...
Preprint
BACKGROUND: This follow-up study investigated the associations of smoking status and leisure-time physical activity (LTPA) with weight circumference (WC) change. METHODS: In the FinnTwin16 cohort, 3,431 twins (47% men) reported smoking status, LTPA, and WC in early adulthood and 10 years later. Regression models were conducted to investigate associ...
Article
Background and Aims Studies on adolescent alcohol use and cognition are often unable to separate the potential causal effects of alcohol use on cognition from shared etiological influences, including genetic influences or other substance use comorbidities also known to be associated with cognition, such as nicotine use. The present study aimed to f...
Article
Full-text available
Whole-body vibration training (WBV) training has shown positive effects on bone strength, muscle strength, and balance, but the evidence on fall prevention is not yet persuasive. This study aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of WBV training in preventing falls and improving physical performance among older adults at fall risk. The study was an ass...
Preprint
We investigated associations of romantic partners’ alcohol use, cigarette smoking, personality, and psychological distress with alcohol use and binge drinking within a sample of Finnish twins (N = 1620, 51% female, mean age = 33.6 years) and their romantic partners. We also used twin modeling to examine whether partner characteristics moderate gene...
Preprint
Background: We examined the exposure to adulthood traumatic life events (TLEs) and analysed their associations with depression in women and men. Then we examined whether the associations of TLEs are independent of exposure loading and vulnerability including familial confounding. Methods: Total of 8410 individuals (45% men, mean age 60 years) parti...
Preprint
This paper provides an overview of the most recent assessment, collected in early midlife, of the FinnTwin12 cohort, a population-based study of Finnish twins born in 1983-1987. The twins were invited to complete an online survey assessing a range of variables, including physical and mental health, alcohol use and problems, other substance use, and...
Preprint
Full-text available
Background: Heavy substance use, such as alcohol and tobacco use, is more prevalent among people with poor mental health. Despite the well-established correlation between substance use and mental health, the development of this association over time is unclear. The aim of this study was to examine the development and co-occurrence of psychological...
Preprint
Purpose: Studies on adolescent alcohol use and cognition are often unable to separate the potential causal effects of alcohol use on neurocognition from shared etiological influences, including genetic influences or other substance use comorbidities, such as nicotine use. The present study aims to clarify the relationship between adolescent alcohol...
Article
Introduction Relatively little is known whether the association between smoking and depressive symptoms changes with age and how the trajectories of smoking and depressive symptoms are intertwined during the life course. In this population-based study, these associations were examined from young adulthood to middle age. Methods Participants of a F...
Article
The role of genetic factors, based on twin correlations, was relatively modest, suggesting that environmental factors may play a major role in SB etiology. Notably, smoking status and nicotine dependence were strongly and significantly positively associated with SB.
Preprint
Objectives: Center for Epidemiological Studies-Depression scale (CES-D) is widely used measure for depressive symptoms. However, few studies have assessed whether the CES-D and its short forms can be used in individuals with cognitive impairment or age over 90. We examined the factor structures of 20-, 15-, and 8-item CES-D scales, their measuremen...
Article
Introduction: As smoking prevalence has decreased, there has been debate about "hardening" (smokers are more resistant to established tobacco control measures) or "softening" (smokers are more responsive to interventions) of the remaining smoking population. Despite growing evidence to reject the "hardening" hypothesis, there is lack of long-term...
Article
Background: The association of sleep bruxism with mortality has not been studied. Objectives: Altogether 12040 subjects from the nationwide Finnish twin cohort were included in the analyses. We examined whether self-reported sleep bruxism is associated with increased risk of mortality, and if so, whether the effect is independent of known common...
Article
Full-text available
Background We sought to clarify the impact of adolescent alcohol misuse on adult physical health and subjective well‐being. To do so, we investigated both the direct associations between adolescent alcohol misuse and early midlife physical health and life satisfaction and the indirect effects on these outcomes attributable to subsequent alcohol pro...
Article
Background: Due to different assessment modes employed, a clear picture of the prevalence of sleep bruxism across time cannot be formed. Moreover, studies on the persistent or fluctuating nature of sleep bruxism have yielded divergent and even contradictory results. The aim of the present study was to evaluate in a nationwide twin cohort whether s...
Article
Full-text available
Background Body mass index (BMI) shows strong continuity over childhood and adolescence and high childhood BMI is the strongest predictor of adult obesity. Genetic factors strongly contribute to this continuity, but it is still poorly known how their contribution changes over childhood and adolescence. Thus, we used the genetic twin design to estim...
Article
Full-text available
We tested the causality between education and smoking using the natural experiment of discordant twin pairs allowing to optimally control for background genetic and childhood social factors. Data from 18 cohorts including 10,527 monozygotic (MZ) and same-sex dizygotic (DZ) twin pairs discordant for education and smoking were analyzed by linear fixe...
Article
Background: While the association between smoking and depressive symptoms has been studied quite extensively, only little is known whether the association changes and how the trajectories of smoking and depressive symptoms are intertwined during the life course. In this population-based study, we examined these associations from young adulthood to...
Article
Full-text available
Abstract Background Psychological distress refers to non-specific symptoms of stress, anxiety and depression, and it is more common in women. Our aim was to investigate factors contributing to psychological distress in the working population, with a special reference to gender differences. Methods We used questionnaire data from the nationally repr...
Article
Full-text available
Aims To investigate how strongly smoking dependence and smoking dependence motives are associated with depressive symptoms among daily smokers and if these associations are independent of measured confounders and shared familial factors. Design Cross‐sectional individual‐based and within‐pair analyses. Setting Fourth wave of the population‐based...
Preprint
Full-text available
Background Psychological distress refers to non-specific symptoms of stress, anxiety and depression, and it is more common in women. Our aim was to investigate factors contributing to psychological distress in the working population, with a special reference to gender differences. Methods We used questionnaire data from the nationally representativ...
Preprint
Full-text available
Purpose Psychological distress refers to non-specific symptoms of stress, anxiety and depression, and it is more common in women. Our aim was to investigate factors contributing to psychological distress in the working population, with a special reference to gender differences. Methods We used questionnaire data from the nationally representative F...
Preprint
Full-text available
Background Psychological distress refers to non-specific symptoms of stress, anxiety and depression, and it is more common in women. Our aim was to investigate factors contributing to psychological distress in the working population, with a special reference to gender differences.Methods We used questionnaire data from the nationally representative...
Article
Full-text available
Background Sleep bruxism (SB) and awake bruxism (AB) have been considered different entities, although co‐occurrence between them has been shown. While genetic factors have a marked influence on phenotypic variance in liability to SB, this remains unclear for AB. Aim To examine the degree of co‐occurrence of SB and AB, and whether they have common...
Article
Full-text available
Background and aims: The aim of this study was to assess the effects of risk-based multifac-torial fall prevention program on maximal isometric strength in the community-dwelling aged. Methods: 591 subjects were randomized in two age groups (65-74 and ≥75 yrs), intervention group (IG) (n=293) and control group (CG) (n=298). A 12-month program consi...
Article
Full-text available
Background Women suffer from psychological distress more often than men. Our aim was to investigate the potential contribution of work-family balance to this gender difference. Methods Questionnaire data from the nationally representative 2013 Finnish Regional Health and Well-being Study (target population all adults aged 20 years or over, n = 88...
Article
Full-text available
Background Depression is more common in women than in men, but reasons for the sex/gender difference are not fully known. We analyzed sex/gender differences in the association of past life events (LE) with depression, and if the associations are independent of genetic liability. Methods In the 2011 survey of the Finnish Twin Cohort (participation...
Article
Full-text available
Objective: To determine the accuracy of self-reported height, weight, body mass index (BMI) and waist circumference (WC) compared to the measured values, and to assess the similarity between self-reported and measured values within dizygotic (DZ) and monozygotic (MZ) twin pairs. Methods: The data on self-reported and measured height, weight and...
Article
Full-text available
We aimed to investigate the associations of long‐term leisure‐time physical inactivity, body mass index (BMI) change, and education with sitting time in a 35‐year follow‐up based on self‐reports in surveys. Influences of working status in 2011 and familial confounding on the associations were tested. Data were based on the population‐based Finnish...
Article
Full-text available
The older Finnish Twin Cohort (FTC) was established in 1974. The baseline survey was in 1975, with two follow-up health surveys in 1981 and 1990. The fourth wave of assessments was done in three parts, with a questionnaire study of twins born during 1945–1957 in 2011–2012, while older twins were interviewed and screened for dementia in two time per...
Article
Full-text available
The COllaborative project of Development of Anthropometrical measures in Twins (CODATwins) project is a large international collaborative effort to analyze individual-level phenotype data from twins in multiple cohorts from different environments. The main objective is to study factors that modify genetic and environmental variation of height, body...
Article
Objective The objective of this study was to analyze how parental education modifies the genetic and environmental variances of BMI from infancy to old age in three geographic‐cultural regions. Methods A pooled sample of 29 cohorts including 143,499 twin individuals with information on parental education and BMI from age 1 to 79 years (299,201 BMI...
Article
Full-text available
Background Smokers tend to weigh less than never smokers, while successful quitting leads to an increase in body weight. Because smokers and non-smokers may differ in genetic and environmental family background, we analysed data from twin pairs in which the co-twins differed by their smoking behaviour to evaluate if the association between smoking...
Data
Individual-based and within-pair associations of former smoking with BMI compared with never smoking (reference) in twin individuals and in same-sex smoking discordant twin pairs (Twin1 = former / Twin2 = never) in the CODATwins database by sex, zygosity and time period. a Adjusted (age, age2 and twin cohort) linear regression coefficient with 95%...
Data
Contact information for the 21 twin cohorts. (DOCX)
Data
Sex-specific mean body mass index (BMI) values and standard deviations (SD) by smoking status, region, and the twin cohort (country) in the CODATwins database with 230,378 BMI and smoking observations. (DOCX)
Data
Individual-based and within-pair associations of current smoking with BMI compared with never smoking (reference) in twin individuals and in same-sex smoking discordant twin pairs (Twin1 = current / Twin2 = never) in the CODATwins database by sex, zygosity and time period. a Adjusted (age, age2 and twin cohort) linear regression coefficient with 95...
Data
Individual-based and within-pair associations of former smoking with BMI compared with current smoking (reference) in twin individuals and in same-sex smoking discordant twin pairs (Twin1 = former / Twin2 = current) in the CODATwins database by sex, zygosity and time period. a Adjusted (age, age2 and twin cohort) linear regression coefficient with...
Article
Background Stressful life events associated with forced migration increase vulnerability for adverse health consequences. Intermediate factors, such as smoking, can shed light on the mechanisms underlying this process. We investigated if and how forced migration from Ceded Karelia due to the World War II is associated with subsequent cigarette smok...
Article
Link to the full-text guideline: https://www.terveysportti.fi/dtk/sfs/avaa?p_artikkeli=sfs00003
Article
Full-text available
Background: Genes and the environment contribute to variation in adult body mass index [BMI (in kg/m²)], but factors modifying these variance components are poorly understood. Objective: We analyzed genetic and environmental variation in BMI between men and women from young adulthood to old age from the 1940s to the 2000s and between cultural-geogr...
Article
Background: Genes and the environment contribute to variation in adult body mass index [BMI (in kg/m²)], but factors modifying these variance components are poorly understood. Objective: We analyzed genetic and environmental variation in BMI between men and women from young adulthood to old age from the 1940s to the 2000s and between cultural-geogr...
Article
Full-text available
Objectives To investigate longitudinal associations of smoking and a change in smoking status with leisure-time physical inactivity. In addition, to control whether familial confounding (genetics and shared environment) influences the associations. Methods Data were based on the population-based Finnish Adult Twin Cohort of 5254 twin individuals b...
Article
Full-text available
Background: Education is associated with health related lifestyle choices including leisure-time physical inactivity. However, the longitudinal associations between education and inactivity merit further studies. We investigated the association between education and leisure-time physical inactivity over a 35-year follow-up with four time points co...
Article
Full-text available
Background: We investigated the stability and change of leisure-time physical inactivity in adult men and women during a 35-year follow-up. We also analysed the impact of long-term physical inactivity on the development of body mass index (BMI). Methods: In this population-based cohort study, 5254 Finnish twin individuals (59% women) participate...
Article
Full-text available
The aim of the study was to investigate the effects of age, sex, and body mass index (BMI) on total sitting time among the Finnish twin cohort. Also, heritability and environmental factors were analysed. The final sample included 6713 twin individuals 53-67 years of age (46% men). Among them there were 1940 complete twin pairs (732 monozygotic [MZ]...
Article
Background: in men, the concomitant use of two or more benzodiazepines or two or more antipsychotics is associated with an increased risk of fracture(s). Potential associations between the concomitant use of drugs with central nervous system effects and fracture risk have not been studied. Objective: the purpose was to describe the gender-specific...
Article
Fractures among older people are common, but there is scant evidence about the impact of fractures on functional decline in an unselected older population. The objective of this study was to analyze the impact of lower and upper body fractures on functional performance among older adults during an 8-year follow-up. A population-based cohort of 616...
Article
In Finland approximately 7,000 hip fractures occurred annually during 1996-2008. Risk of hip fracture can be diminished through efforts to prevent falls and osteoporosis. A hip fracture is treated operatively, with the aim of early mobilisation and full weight bearing. Postoperative care and rehabilitation requires multidisciplinary and multifacete...
Article
Full-text available
There is evidence that the use of any psychotropic and the concomitant use of two or more benzodiazepines are related to an increased risk of fractures in old age. However, also controversial results exist. The aim was to describe associations between the use of a psychotropic drug, or the concomitant use of two or more of these drugs and the risk...
Article
Full-text available
Falls and fall-related injuries, such as fractures, are a growing problem among older adults, often causing longstanding pain, functional impairments, reduced quality of life and excess health-care costs and mortality. These problems have led to a variety of single component or multicomponent intervention strategies to prevent falls and subsequent...
Article
Full-text available
The association between fractures and excess mortality in old age is ambiguous. The objective of this study was to analyze the long-term gender-specific association between fractures and mortality among older persons by controlling several survival related confounders. A population-based prospective cohort study in the municipality of Lieto, south-...
Article
The aim of this study was to assess the effects of risk-based multifactorial fall prevention program on maximal isometric strength in the community-dwelling aged. 591 subjects were randomized in two age groups (65-74 and > or = 75 yrs), intervention group (IG) (n=293) and control group (CG) (n=298). A 12-month program consisted of individual geriat...
Article
Full-text available
The incidence of fractures is high in older populations. More information is needed about long-term predictors of fractures, for preventive measures. The aim of this study was to analyze gender-specific predictors of fractures among persons aged 65 years or older during a 12- year follow-up. A true cohort study in the municipality of Lieto, southwe...
Article
The purpose of the study was to assess the effects of 12-month risk-based multifactorial fall prevention program on postural control of the aged. Five hundred and ninety-one (97%) eligible subjects were randomized into an intervention group (IG) (n=293) and a control group (CG) (n=298). The effects of the program were measured on standing, dynamic,...
Article
Full-text available
Overall adherence rates have usually been reported in fall prevention studies, but predictors of adherence have rarely been described. The aim of this study was to determine the adherence rates and the predictors of adherence in four key activities of a multifactorial fall prevention trial. This study is part of a multifactorial fall prevention pro...
Article
The incidence of fractures is high in older populations. The aim of this study was to describe the incidence of different fractures and to analyse the changes in age-adjusted yearly incidences among older persons. A prospective true cohort design. Information about fractures in 482 men and 695 women aged 65 or over living in the municipality of Lie...
Article
To describe the implementation and the effects of a multifactorial fall prevention trial on the specified risk factors of falling, incidence of falls and injurious falls, and on specified secondary outcome measures; to describe the design of the study and to assess the success of randomization. Randomized-controlled trial. Recruitment started in Ma...
Article
Full-text available
Poor postural balance is one of the major risk factors for falling. A great number of reports have analyzed the risk factors and predictors of falls but the results have for the most part been unclear and partly contradictory. Objective data on these matters are thus urgently needed. The force platform technique has widely been used as a tool to as...

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