Marko Elovainio

• Professor, PhD
• Professor (Full) at University of Helsinki

Socioeconomic disadvantage at individual level is associated with poor cognitive outcomes but the link of neighbourhood disadvantage with cognitive function is unclear. We used data from Young Finns Study, a population-based cohort, to examine the associations of neighbourhood and individual-level disadvantage in childhood (age 3-21 years) and adul...

Objective: To examine associations between mental disorders and time to the first childbirth among young people in Finland, and to investigate whether partnership status mediates these associations.Design: A nationwide register-based cohort study.Setting: Primary and secondary healthcare data from Finland.Population or Sample: All individuals born...

Background Individual psychosocial work characteristics have been associated with the health and well-being of registered nurses. However, it remains to be determined whether different types of psychosocial work characteristics form patterned profiles and whether the profiles are associated with registered nurses’ health and welfare at different st...

Background Intergenerational transmission of mental disorders has been well established, but it is unclear whether exposure to a child's mental disorder increases parents' subsequent risk of mental disorders. Aims We examined the association of mental disorders in children with their parents' subsequent mental disorders. Method In this population...

Objectives Patient-sharing networks based on administrative data are used to understand the organisation of healthcare. We examined the patient-sharing networks between different professionals taking care of patients with mental health or substance use problems. Design Register study based on the Register of Primary Health Care visits (Avohilmo) t...

Objectives: To explore association between perceived stress and psychological distress (depressive symptoms and anxiety), and the stress-buffering effects of social support (parents, partners, friends, peers, teachers, social media), sense of community belonging and meaningfulness of studying. Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted in 20...

In this longitudinal study, we compared the temperament traits of 1023 teacher applicants and 120 admitted student teachers, and examined whether temperament traits were associated with the student teachers' achievement during the first year of teacher education. Student teachers scored higher in reward dependence and lower in emotionality than the...

Background Providing efficient and targeted services for patients with mental health problems requires efficient collaboration and coordination within healthcare providers, but measuring collaboration using traditional methods is challenging. Aims To explore the patient-sharing networks of professionals taking care of different groups of patients...

Cardiovascular Risk in Young Finns Study (YFS) is a prospective cohort of 3596 males and females (baseline age 3-18 years) that was established in 1980 to study cardiovascular risk factors in children and adolescents. The YFS has been instrumental in demonstrating the links between childhood risk factors and adult cardiovascular outcomes with impli...

Purpose This study aims to examine the associations of collaboration measured as social network characteristics with perceived job demands, job control and social support in primary healthcare professionals. Design/methodology/approach A cross-sectional study design incorporating social network analysis was utilized. Wellbeing surveys with a netwo...

This study investigated the associations between personality traits of the Five Factor Model and cardiovascular mortality, with a specific focus on whether pre-existing cardiovascular conditions modified these associations. We used data from 43,027 participants across five cohort studies: Health and Retirement Study (HRS); Wisconsin Longitudinal St...

A well-functioning parent–child relationship is crucial for the child’s psychological development. We examined the Emotional Availability (EA) in the early interaction of internationally adopted children with their mothers. We also studied whether the quality of the interaction was associated with the sex of the adopted children, the age at the tim...

Aim Our aim was to fill a gap in the research about the prevalence of developmental coordination disorder (DCD) among internationally adopted children. We explored the prevalence of signs of DCD and the associations between those and behavioural problems six and 18 months after adoption. Methods The data came from the ongoing Finnish Adoption Stud...

The associations between hair cortisol concentration (HCC), a biomarker of chronic stress, and behavior and sleep disturbance symptoms have not been studied in children with psychiatric disorders. While cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) has proven effective in treating psychiatric symptoms in children, its potential biological implications as dete...

Drawing on a socio-technical approach, we examined Finnish social welfare professionals’ (n = 990) perceptions of the effects of digitalization on their work and how these are associated with factors related to work and client information system usage using mixed graphical modelling. Overall, perceptions were predominantly positive. Digitally repla...

Background Comprehensive, timely, and integrated primary care services have been proposed as a response to the increased demand for mental health and substance use services especially among young people. However, little is known about the care utilization patterns of young people with mental and substance use disorders. Our aim was to characterize...

Background Psychosocial factors and socioeconomic status have been associated with incidence, survival, and quality of life among patients with head and neck cancer. We investigated the association between different psychosocial factors, socioeconomic status, and patient delays in T3–T4 oral, oropharyngeal, and laryngeal cancer. Patients and metho...

Background: Intergenerational transmission of mental disorders has been well established, but it is unclear whether exposure to a child's mental disorder increases parents' subsequent risk of mental disorders. We examined the association of mental disorders in children with their parents' subsequent mental disorders. Methods: In this population bas...

Importance Previous research indicates that mental disorders may be transmitted from one individual to another within social networks. However, there is a lack of population-based epidemiologic evidence that pertains to the full range of mental disorders. Objective To examine whether having classmates with a mental disorder diagnosis in the ninth...

Objective: To examine associations between mental disorders and time to the first childbirth among young people in Finland, and to investigate whether partnership status mediates these associations. Design: A nationwide register-based cohort study. Setting: Primary and secondary healthcare data from Finland. Population or Sample: All individuals bo...

Objective: To examine associations between mental disorders and time to the first childbirth among young people in Finland, and to investigate whether partnership status mediates these associations.Design: A nationwide register-based cohort study.Setting: Primary and secondary healthcare data from Finland.Population or Sample: All individuals born...

Evidence on the intergenerational continuity of loneliness and on potential mechanisms that connect loneliness across successive generations is limited. We examined the association between loneliness of (G0) parents (859 mothers and 570 fathers, mean age 74 years) and their children (G1) (433 sons and 558 daughters, mean age 47 years) producing 991...

Background: Psychosocial factors and socioeconomic status have been associated with incidence, survival, and quality of life among patients with head and neck cancer. We investigated the association between different psychosocial factors, socioeconomic status, and patient delays in T3–T4 oral, oropharyngeal, and laryngeal cancer. Patients and Metho...

A striking global health development over the past few decades has been the increasing prevalence of overweight and obesity. At the same time, depression has become increasingly common in almost all high-income countries. We investigated whether body weight, measured by body mass index (BMI), has a causal effect on depression symptoms in Finland. U...

Objectives: To examine with a population-based longitudinal survey design whether poor health, longstanding activity limitation, impaired cognitive functioning, mental distress, or loneliness predict poor access to healthcare and whether digital competence mediates these associations. Methods: The data were from the longitudinal FinHealth -survey g...

Introduction: Mental health disorders are recognized as considerable public health challenges that require close collaboration between professionals. Developing collaboration requires understanding the structure of how patient care is managed across professionals. Healthcare registers offer “naturally occuring” data of how different professionals a...

Aims Although seasonality has been documented for mental disorders, it is unknown whether similar patterns can be observed in employee sickness absence from work due to a wide range of mental disorders with different severity level, and to what extent the rate of change in light exposure plays a role. To address these limitations, we used daily bas...

This study aims to evaluate the directionality of the association between loneliness and cognitive performance in older adults, accounting for confounding factors. Data were from 55,662 adults aged ≥50 years who participated in Waves 5–8 of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). Loneliness was assessed with the Three-Item Lo...

OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to compare the utility of risk estimation derived from questionnaires and administrative records in predicting long-term sickness absence among shift workers. METHODS: This prospective cohort study comprised 3197 shift-working hospital employees (mean age 44.5 years, 88.0% women) who responded to a brief 8-item questionn...

Background Individual psychosocial work characteristics have been associated with health and well-being of registered nurses. However, it is yet to be determined whether different types of psychosocial work characteristics form patterned profiles and how these profiles are associated with the health and well-being. The purpose of this study was to...

This article reports the psychometric properties of both full and the abbreviated (Short) Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-being Scales (WEMWBS; SWEMWBS) in the Finnish general population. A large cross-sectional dataset (N = 5,335) was collected as part of the nationally representative FinHealth Study in 2017. Exploratory and confirmatory factor anal...

This article explores how authoritarianism as a factor in child‐rearing values (CRV) is associated with political orientation, party support, and policy preferences among voters and societal elites in the Nordic context, which is characterized by social trust and solidarity, feelings of affinity, and a modest degree of ideological polarization. Bas...

Background: Simple and efficient survey measures to predict staying in or leaving work are needed. We examined the association of single-item self-rated work ability (SRWA) with disability retirement in two large population-based samples and compared the association of SRWA to two other scales, work ability score (WAS) and self-rated health (SRH),...

Aims To identify different nursing informatics competence (NIC) profiles in nurses, examine the factors associated with profile memberships and examine the associations of the derived profiles with the nurses' perception of the usefulness of a health information system (HIS). Design A cross‐sectional study. Methods A sample of 3610 registered nur...

School grades in adolescence have been linked to later psychiatric outcomes, but large-scale nationwide studies across the spectrum of mental disorders are scarce. In the present study, we examined the risk of a wide array of mental disorders in adulthood, as well as the risk of comorbidity, associated with school achievement in adolescence. We use...

Few risk prediction scores are available to identify people at increased risk of work disability, particularly for those with an existing morbidity. We examined the predictive performance of disability risk scores for employees with chronic disease. We used prospective data from 88,521 employed participants (mean age 43.1) in the Finnish Public Sec...

Background A study was undertaken to examine the association between multiple indicators of socioeconomic position (SEP) at the age of 30 and the subsequent risk of the most common mental disorders. Methods All persons born in Finland between 1966 and 1986 who were alive and living in Finland at the end of the year when they turned 30 were include...

Background Although loneliness and social isolation have been linked to an increased risk of non-communicable diseases such as cardiovascular disease and dementia, their association with the risk of severe infection is uncertain. We aimed to examine the associations between loneliness and social isolation and the risk of hospital-treated infections...

Objectives To examine whether a single-item measure of self-rated work ability predicts all-cause mortality in three large population-based samples collected in 1978–1980, 2000 and 2017. Setting A representative sample of the population of Finland. Participants The study population comprised 17 178 participants aged 18 to 65 from the population-b...

Child eveningness has been associated with many adverse outcomes for children. The aim of this study was to assess whether child eveningness poses a risk to parental sleep quality in follow-up. A total of 146 children (57% adopted, 47% boys, mean age at follow-up 5.1 years [standard deviation 1.7]) completed a 1-week actigraph recording to analyze...

While sunlight may influence cognitive function through several pathways, associations of residential sunlight exposure with cognitive function are not well known. We evaluated associations of long-term residential sunlight exposure with cognitive function among a representative cohort of 1838 Finnish adults residing in Finland who underwent compre...

Aim To determine the extent to which change in (i.e., start and end of) workplace bullying can be predicted by employee responses to standard workplace surveys. Methods Responses to an 87-item survey from 48,537 Finnish public sector employees at T1 (2017–2018) and T2 (2019–2020) were analyzed with least-absolute-shrinkage-and-selection-operator (...

Background Several benefits of working in a self-organizing team, such as higher job satisfaction and better engagement to work have been demonstrated in previous studies. Objective To examine whether those employees working in a self-organizing team have higher job satisfaction and lower turnover intentions compared to those in non-self-organized...

Background The COVID-19 pandemic strained healthcare workers but the individual challenges varied in relation to actual work and changes in work. We investigated changes in healthcare workers’ mental health under prolonging COVID-19 pandemic conditions, and heterogeneity in the mental-health trajectories. Methods A monthly survey over a full year...

Background: Our study addressed the gap in research on the effectiveness of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) in treating children with mixed psychiatric disorders. We examined the immediate and long-term effects of group CBT (GCBT), delivered in naturalistic clinical settings, on reducing internalizing and externalizing symptoms in children with...

Background Season of birth is a risk factor of schizophrenia, and it is possible that cumulative exposure to climatic factors during childhood affects the risk of schizophrenia. We conducted a cohort study among 365,482 persons born in Finland in 1990–1995 to examine associations of 10-year cumulative exposure to global solar radiation and ambient...

Background Depression may be associated with lower likelihood of having children, but the findings are inconsistent. Previous population-based studies on the topic are limited. Objectives We examined associations between depression and the likelihood of having children, the number of children, and the age at first birth; and whether these associat...

Background Psychosocial risks and environmental changes experienced by internationally adopted children may predict sleep problems, which are incidentally among the main concerns of adoptive parents. Several questionnaire studies have found sleep of internationally adopted children to be problematic, but none of those used an objective measure in a...

Background Raising the statutory retirement age has been a common policy response to population ageing, but health problems may restrict labour force participation in older ages. We examined the development of healthy and unhealthy working life expectancies in Finland from 2000 to 2017 using different measures of health problems. Methods Healthy a...

Few risk prediction scores are available to identify people at increased risk of work disability, particularly for those with an existing morbidity. We examined the predictive performance of disability risk scores for employees with chronic disease. We used prospective data from 88,521 employed participants (mean age 43.1) in the Finnish Public Sec...

Background In health care, the benefits of digitalization need to outweigh the risks, but there is limited knowledge about the factors affecting this balance in the work environment of physicians. To achieve the benefits of digitalization, a more comprehensive understanding of this complex phenomenon related to the digitalization of physicians’ wor...

(1) Background: For decades, the temperaments of infants and small children have been a focus of studies in human development and been seen as a potential contributor to children’s developmental patterns. However, less is known about the interplay between the temperamental characteristics of mothers and their children in the context of explaining v...

We investigated the short- and long-term effects of two different evidence-based mindfulness training on students’ stress and well-being. A randomised controlled trial with three measurement points (baseline, post-intervention, and 4 months post-intervention) was conducted among undergraduate students of medicine, dentistry, psychology, and logopae...

While characteristics of psychosocial work environment have traditionally been studied separately, we propose an alternative approach that treats psychosocial factors as interacting elements in networks where they all potentially affect each other. In this network analysis, we used data from a prospective occupational cohort including 10,892 partic...

Organizational justice refers to employees’ perceptions of the fairness of decision-making rules and policies in the workplace. Lack of justice is suggested to be a significant psychosocial risk factor that affects employees’ attitudes and health. The aim of this narrative review was to compile the evidence available about the effects of organizati...

Evidence suggests that sunlight counteracts depression, but the associations of long-term sunlight exposure with specific symptoms of depression are not well known. We evaluated symptom-specific associations of average 1-year solar insolation with DSM-5 depressive symptoms in a representative cohort of Finnish adults. The sample included 1,845 part...

Background Physicians commonly suffer from workplace aggression and its negative consequences. Previous studies have shown that stressors such as job demands increase the risk of inappropriate treatment at workplace. Poorly functioning, and constantly changing information systems form a major work stressor for physicians. The current study examined...

Aims Increased mental health problems during the COVID-19 pandemic have become a major concern among young adults. Our aim was to understand which COVID-19-related questions predicted mental well-being during the outbreak. Methods Two cross-sectional datasets were used. The primary dataset was collected in May 2020 ( n = 1001), during the initial...

Background Social isolation and loneliness have been associated with increased risk of dementia, but it is not known whether this risk is modified or confounded by genetic risk of dementia. Methods We used the prospective UK Biobank study with 155 070 participants (mean age 64.1 years), including self-reported social isolation and loneliness. Gene...

Aim Parents’ psychological problems may affect children’s screen time, but research has been scarce. We examined the association between parental psychological problems and children’s screen media behaviours in a nationally representative sample. Methods The participants were from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study, recruited by prob...

Purpose: To investigate changes in healthcare workers’ mental-health under prolonging Covid-19 pandemic conditions.Methods: A monthly survey over a full year was conducted for employees of the HUS Helsinki University Hospital (n = 4804) between 4th June 2020 to 28th May 2021. Pandemic-related potentially traumatic events (PTEs), work characteristic...

Background: Identifying the most significant risk factors for physician burnout can help to define the priority areas for burnout prevention. However, not much is known about the relative importance of these risk factors. Aims: This study was aimed to examine the relative importance of multiple work-related psychosocial factors in predicting bur...

Background Infections have been hypothesised to increase the risk of dementia. Existing studies have included a narrow range of infectious diseases, relied on short follow-up periods, and provided little evidence for whether the increased risk is limited to specific dementia subtypes or attributable to specific microbes rather than infection burden...

We analysed (A) the association of short‐term as well as long‐term cumulative exposure to natural light, and (B) the association of detailed temporal patterns of natural light exposure history with three indicators of sleep: sleep duration, sleep problems, and diurnal preference. Data (N = 1,962; 55% women; mean age 41.4 years) were from the prospe...

Reports of poor work well-being and fluctuating productivity in software engineering have been reported in both academic and popular sources. Understanding and predicting these issues through repository analysis might help manage software developers’ well-being. Our objective is to link data from software repositories, that is commit activity, comm...

Abstract Background Even though child psychopathology assessment guidelines emphasize comprehensive multi-method, multimodal, and multi-informant methodologies, maternal-report symptom-rating scales often serve as the predominant source of information. Research has shown that parental mood symptomatology affects their reports of their offspring’s p...

Conservative political ideologies have been suggested to correlate with elevated sensitivity to threat. However, it is unclear whether the associations between threat sensitivity and political attitudes can be observed with clinical measures of mental health. We examined how anxiety disorders predicted attitudes on several political issues. Partici...

According to the network theory strong associations between symptoms drive the disease process. We compared those with and without diagnosed depressive disorders (DD+/DD-) and analysed the effects of differences in (a) network connectivity, (b) symptom thresholds, and (c) autoregressive loops (i.e. how strongly specific symptoms predict themselves)...

The individual variation in the circadian rhythms at the physiological level is not well understood. Albeit self-reported circadian preference profiles have been consolidated, their premises are grounded on human experience, not on physiology. We used data-driven, unsupervised time series modelling to characterize distinct profiles of the circadian...

Depression can be viewed as a network of depressive symptoms that tend to reinforce each other via feedback loops. Specific symptoms of depression may be differently responsive to antidepressant treatment, and some symptoms may be more important than others in the overall improvement of depression associated with treatment. We pooled prospective da...

Sleep problems are common in young children and may negatively affect the wellbeing of both children and parents.¹ Previous studies have reported that tired parents overestimated their children’s sleep problems.2,3 Poor maternal sleep, recorded using  sleep electroencephalography, was associated with concurrent sleep problems in children aged 7-12...

Aims: This study aimed to describe and summarize research concerning organizational justice among registered nurses. Background: Over the recent decades, a number of studies have explored organizational justice. Perceived high organizational justice among employees has been found to correlate with multiple beneficial outcomes, such as job satisf...

Lack of social contacts has been associated with an increased risk of cancer mortality, but it is not known whether living alone increases the risk of cancer incidence or case fatality. We examined the association between living alone with cancer incidence, case-fatality and all-cause mortality in eight most common cancers. All patients with their...

Objective The suggestion from cross-review comparison that lower levels of social integration (social isolation, loneliness) and cigarette smoking are equally powerful predictors of premature mortality has been promulgated by policy organisations and widely reported in the media. For the first time, we examined this assertion by simultaneously comp...

Reports of poor work well-being and fluctuating productivity in software engineering have been reported in both academic and popular sources. Understanding and predicting these issues through repository analysis might help manage software developers' well-being. Our objective is to link data from software repositories, that is commit activity, comm...

Equal access to health care is one of the key policy priorities in many European societies. Previous findings suggest that there may be wide differences in the use of health services between people of migrant origin and the general population. We analyzed cross-sectional data from a random sample of persons of Russian (n = 692), Somali (n = 489), a...

Background: Even though child psychopathology assessment guidelines emphasise comprehensive multi-method, multimodal, and multi-informant methodologies (Pelham, Fabiano, & Massetti, 2005), maternal report symptom-rating scales often serve as the predominant source of information. Research has shown that parental mood symptomatology affects their re...

Background We examined, (a) whether in early childhood exposure to risky family environment in different domains (socioeconomic, mental, parenting practices, health behavior, and child-related risks) and accumulatively across various domains (cumulative risk) is associated with child's problem behavior at age 9, and (b) whether the association is m...

Aim At arrival in new home country, internationally adopted children often have intestinal parasites. International adoptees also exhibit more behavioral problems than their biological peers. We examined whether intestinal parasite infections in international adoptees on arrival in Finland are associated with their later behavioral and emotional pr...

How sleep regulates physiological stress in healthy individuals is not well understood. We explored the associations between naturally occurring pre-sleep physiological arousal and EEG power spectral density together with rapid eye movement sleep (REMS) continuity. One hundred and fifty-four individuals (mean age 16.9, SD 0.1 years) collected five...

Objectives To examine employment and earnings trajectories before and after the first sickness absence period due to major depressive disorder (MDD). Methods All individuals (n=158 813) in Finland who had a first sickness absence period (lasting longer than 9 days) due to MDD between 2005 and 2015 were matched with one randomly selected individual...

Objectives Level of perceived interactional justice has been shown to be associated with sickness absence, but less is known about the effects of changes in interactional justice. It is also unknown to what extent unmeasured, time-invariant differences contribute to the association. We investigated the association between interactional justice chan...

PurposePutative causal relations among depressive symptoms in forms of network structures have been of recent interest, with prior studies suggesting that high connectivity of the symptom network may drive the disease process. We examined in detail the network structure of depressive symptoms among participants with and without depressive disorders...

We used crowdsourcing (CS) to examine how COVID-19 lockdown affects the content of dreams and nightmares. The CS took place on the sixth week of the lockdown. Over the course of 1 week, 4,275 respondents (mean age 43, SD = 14 years) assessed their sleep, and 811 reported their dream content. Overall, respondents slept substantially more (54.2%) but...

Objectives Poor indoor environmental quality (IEQ) in schools is related to higher respiratory symptoms of pupils, but little is known about the importance of other factors. This study examined the associations between different psychosocial factors and other pupils’ individual and allergic characteristics, beyond school IEQ, and reporting of respi...

Background: Network perspective to mental disorders suggests that depression develops due to interrelated associations between individual symptoms rather than due to a common cause. However, it is unclear whether long-term longitudinal associations between specific symptoms of depression demonstrate coherent patterns. We examined the temporal sequ...