Mental illness, especially among young people, is a growing problem in the Nordic countries in the 21st century. 60 precent of young people aged 16–24 report that they suffer from mental health problems, according to new data from the Swedish Agency for Youth and Civil Society. The Public Health Institute (FHI) shows an increase in mental health problems among young people in Norway during and after the coronavirus pandemic, and in Finland the number of visits to public health services due to mental health problems has increased significantly among young people, according to the National Institute for Health and Welfare (THL). Similar data is reported in Denmark.
The Nordic university co-operation Leveraging Nordic Opportunities to Transform Mental Health Care through Precision Medicine (PreciMENT) was established to promote and develop mental health care through precision psychiatry. The co-operation is led by Professor Ole Andreassen at the Centre for Precision Psychiatry at the University of Oslo. The co-operation also includes the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, the University of Iceland and Copenhagen University Hospital.
“The main goal of the network is to create a strong research-based co-operation between universities in the Nordic countries to train the next generation of researchers in precision psychology. It is a new research area and therefore it is important to exchange knowledge about it. We try to create networks and contribute to mobility so that researchers can travel between the different centres," says Andreassen.
Facts about precision medicine
- Also called personalised medicine.
- New technologies enable us to obtain large amounts of biological data from individuals. Precision medicine is based on this data.
- Precision medicine enables personalised prevention, diagnosis, treatment and follow-up, based on the unique characteristics of each patient, such as genetic profile and specific biomarkers.
- Sources: Det här är precisionsmedicin (Karolinska University Hospital 2024), Persontilpasset medisin eller presisjonsmedisin? (Kashif Waqar Faiz, Tidsskrift for den norske legeforening 2025)
Treatment according to individual needs
Precision psychiatry is about finding personalised treatments for different types of mental disorders.
“Many medicines for mental health problems have side effects and a third of them work poorly for individual patients. So, one of the aims is to be able to determine in advance whether a medicine is likely to work for an individual based on health data. That way we don't have to treat someone for a long time and then realise that the medicine doesn't work but only causes side effects for that particular patient. The same goes for other types of treatment such as counselling, social measures and so on, everyone responds differently to treatments, and we want to be able to adapt the treatment to the patient", says Ole Andreassen.
Precision psychiatry is also about prediction and early detection of disease. Using new analytical tools, the idea is to be able to predict the effect of treatment, but also the risk of developing mental disorders in the future.
“The aim is that if someone comes to the clinic with non-specific symptoms, it should be possible to quickly determine what type of treatment and possible medication might be right for that particular patient. Ideally, our research will lead to more effective treatments and fewer people being given the wrong medication."
There are many synergies between precision psychiatry and other forms of precision medicine.
“Both the approach and the methods are quite similar. There is a lot of overlap in terms of big data and GDPR. The Nordic registers and biobanks we use are also the same. It's not that there is a psychiatric biobank or a cancer biobank; it's the same data that is used for all kinds of precision studies, but we study different diseases. For us, as mentioned, it's about trying to predict, for example, whether a medicine with a lot of side effects is worth using for a patient, while for cancer, for example, it's about early detection of tumors", says Andreasson.
Valuable Nordic health data
Nordic societies are highly digitalised and there are many similarities in the public health care services in the Nordic countries. This supports the work of the PreciMENT university co-operation, according to Andreassen.
“The Nordic region has a unique advantage in that we have access to so much health data. China has a large population, the US has very good technology, and the Germans are good at production, but by far the biggest advantage we have in life science research in the Nordic region is our data banks. We have not only good health registries but also very good hospitals with systematised information practices. This allows us to coordinate quality across the Nordic countries so that they can act as a kind of Real World Discovery platform. Following ethical approval and in line with the GDPR, we can use healthcare data for research in various ways, for example to train models from population cohorts”, he says.
Based on the available data, researchers are identifying risk factors such as environmental, genetic and clinical factors and developing new analysis technologies. Among other things, the project is developing new methods based on artificial intelligence and validating algorithms using health data from longitudinal studies.
