Chaitra Srinivas started as a PhD student in May 2021. Her research focus is in pharmacoepidemiology and understanding the treatment patterns and outcomes related to ADHD medication use in pregnancy. She has a background in pharmaceutical sciences and obtained her master’s degree in medical science with a major in public health sciences - epidemiology at Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. Her master’s thesis project was a nationwide cohort study in Sweden on the comparative safety of biologic drugs among individuals with psoriasis.

Prior to joining CeFH, she worked as an Associate Epidemiologist with Clarivate in Bangalore, India. There, she was involved in understanding the descriptive epidemiology of chronic and rare diseases, catering to multiple global pharmaceutical markets.

At CeFH, Chaitra will be working on her PhD research to address fertility concerns and maternal and perinatal risks conferred by ADHD treatment and discontinuation of use in pregnancy. She will be working under the supervision of Jacqueline Cohen and co-supervisor Hein Stigum and collaborating closely with CeFH members Kari Furu and Siri Håberg.

Chaitra has joined us remotely from India for the time being.

Jacqueline joined the Centre in November 2020. She obtained her PhD in Epidemiology at McGill University in 2015 and was a postdoc at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health before coming to the Norwegian Institute of Public Health in 2018. In addition to her role as project manager of the ADHD medication in pregnancy project, she is a researcher in the International Pregnancy Drug Safety Studies (InPreSS), an international collaboration to study the short and long-term safety of drug use in pregnancy. Her current research is mainly focused on the safety of prescribed medicines during pregnancy based on observational studies in Nordic population-based health registers.

In November 2020, we began a new project at CeFH, “ADHD medication in pregnancy: understanding the population and outcomes related to treatment use and discontinuation.” Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) became an increasingly common diagnosis among adults in the last two decades. The project sets out to understand risks associated with use or discontinuation of drug treatment for ADHD during pregnancy. The project will use valuable existing data sources including popula­tion-based national health registers from Norway and Sweden and the Norwegian Mother, Father and Child Cohort Study (MoBa). We will be collaborating with researchers in Canada and Sweden for high quality studies that aim to gener­ate new knowledge that will empower women with ADHD to make informed treatment choices and advance research on the safe use of medicines during pregnancy.

The project is funded by the Research Council of Norway’s FRIPRO - Young Research Talents program. Jacqueline Cohen is the project manager and Chaitra Srinivas is a new PhD student who is an integral member of the project team.

Read more about the project:

• ADHD medication in pregnancy: understanding the population and outcomes related to treatment use and discontinuation