dr. Janita Bralten PhD

About Janita Bralten

Janita Braltens's research line focusses on psychiatric disorders, which are prevalent, have a great impact on individuals and their surroundings and currently have very limited treatment options. Diagnostic criteria for frequently occurring psychiatric disorders, like Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) currently have no biological basis. This is not surprising, as (1) diagnosis relies on (subjective) reporting and observations of symptoms and impairment only, and (2) “cases” comprise individuals with very different clinical manifestations, as classification is based on a spectrum of symptoms of which only a subset needs to be present. As a result of the lack of biological validity, comorbidity is highly frequent among psychiatric disorders and also extends to somatic disorders (e.g. obesity), and patients frequently receive multiple and/or different diagnoses over time. As it is well known that these disorders are (highly) heritable, studying their genetics can be an important tool to have a significant impact, as it allows us to learn more about their underlying biological mechanisms. However, previous research has shown that the gold standard case-control comparisons are suboptimal with heterogeneous samples like the ones we have in psychiatry. Therefore, in my research, I step away from comparing individuals with and without a psychiatric disorder, but I try to capture the complete spectrum of variability. Building on evidence that disorders are the extremes of traits/symptoms present across the whole population, in my research line, my group and I study the genetics of symptom-based or trait-based measures of relevance to disease in the population, including other health measures like somatic features, and using state-of-the-art statistics.

Personal prizes & awards

• Personal VENI grant in 2020 from the Dutch Research Council NWO ZonMW (250 000 euro)
• European Horizon 2020 project, called PRIME. I am in the coordination team and the workpackage leader of the genetics workpackage
• Radboud Galilei trajectory 2017; talent programme of the Radboudumc
• Prompt PhD scheme 2015; for finishing your PhD project within four years
• Dr. I.B.M Frye Stipend 2013; for promising female PhD candidate in her third year, to perform part of her research abroad
• Early Career Award, international Eunethydis conference Barcelona 2012; for promising scientist in their first 3 years of science
• UMC St Radboud Master Prize 2010; for outstanding scientific work by a student