As a neuroscientist investigating pregnancy complications and their impact on neurodevelopment in offspring and maternal mental health, Laura Wortinger is a researcher in the Division of Mental Health and Addiction, Adult psychiatry department Vinderen, at Diakonhjemmet Hospital. Her position is also affiliated with the Biological Psychiatry research group, Institute of Clinical Medicine, at the University of Oslo. Her longstanding research interest is in the pre- and perinatal environment and mental health with the goal of identifying early risk and protective factors for later mental illness, particularly psychosis. Dr. Wortinger was recently awarded over 8-million NOK in Open Project Support from the South-Eastern Norway Regional Health Authority to lead investigations into placenta biology and mental health in a study coined PlacMENT. Her study will be the first large-scale study to assess offspring placental genomics and transcriptomics and in utero environmental changes, due to multiple types of complications, on long-term maternal and child mental health outcome. By using both placental genomic risk variants and placental transcriptomics, she will be applying cutting-edge methods to the already unique Norwegian population-based pregnancy cohort of over 90,000 pregnancies, the Norwegian Mother, Father and Child Cohort Study (MoBa), which provides a wealth of clinical and biological information accumulated from midgestation. Her ambition is to identify placental biomarkers and mechanisms of risk that can predict females who are at risk of having a complicated pregnancy that can be the target of pre- and postnatal strategies of prevention. Studying pregnancy is not only crucial for the health of the mother and offspring during and after pregnancy, but also for society, as improved knowledge will lead to better treatment that will benefit multiple generations to come.
