ADHD across the Lifespan Network
| “Our group is the outcome of a long-lasting, European research consortium that managed to publish in high-ranking journals for several years. The friendship and collaboration that came along with this network is both a professional as well as personal highlight of our career. Our effort was rewarded with four successful EU-funded projects: Aggressotype, MiND, CoCA and Eat2BeNICE. With this enormous boost in funding, we managed to put ADHD across the lifespan on the research agenda, generated public awareness, trained a new generation of interdisciplinary researchers and, first and foremost, published numerous articles in top journals.” |
| Barbara Franke and Antoni Ramos-Quiroga |
Mission statement/aims
The overarching goal of this ECNP Network is to bring together excellent clinical and basic researchers across disciplines from Europe and beyond, to study the etiology of ADHD across the lifespan – i.e., from childhood through adolescence to adulthood and, finally, senescence – in order to enable progress in clinical strategies of ADHD diagnosis, prognosis and treatment. Importantly, this will also result in a reduction of the societal burden brought about by the disorder in all stages of the lifespan. This goal should be achieved through the following specific aims:
- Providing a platform facilitating collaboration between researchers to perform multi-level, interdisciplinary research into ADHD etiology, persistence and remission, and using a lifespan perspective.
- Lobbying with policy makers on the national and international level to increase the research budget for ADHD research.
- Submission of collaborative international multi-centre study proposals to the EU Commission and comparable agencies.
- Maximization of study power through sample and data sharing, and homogenization of research protocols to facilitate large-scale European research.
- Optimization of the collaboration between researchers and mental health professionals working on ADHD in children and adolescents, adults, and elderly people.
- Development of a shared database for collaborative research.
History
The ECNP Network ADHD across the lifespan has its roots in the International persistent ADHD Collaboration (IMpACT), an international collaboration consisting of researchers interested in ADHD biology and the factors that cause persistence of the disorder into adulthood. The members of IMpACT have been working together since 2007. Additional groups interested in ADHD across the lifespan have been added to this core group to form the current ECNP Network.
