Population health research aims to improve mental health and addiction problems across populations. This research examines factors that can contribute to these problems, such as housing, social status, behaviours or cultural characteristics. Another key area is to identify the economic costs of mental health and addiction.
The goals are to use this evidence to inform policy-making, and to focus prevention and treatment efforts effectively in areas of greatest need. Finally, population health research develops methods and indicators on how best to measure status and changes in population health for monitoring and outcome research.
Current projects
Alcohol use
- Global burden of diseases attributable to alcohol consumption as a risk factor
- Monitoring alcohol consumption, alcohol use disorders and related harm globally for the World Health Organization
- Consequences of reduced drinking
- Harm to others due to alcohol consumption
- Cultural differences in drinking pattern and drinking consequences
- Relationship between alcohol and intimate partner violence across different cultures
Tobacco use
Illegal drug use
- Methamphetamine use and health consequences
- Developing and evaluating safer cannabis use guidelines
- Understanding patterms of mobility among injection drug users in Northern areas
Mental health
- Identifying the effects of gender and early experiences on trajectories of depressive symptoms among adolescents
- Intimate partner violence and depression
- Identifying the prevalence and correlates of adult ADHD in the Ontario population
HIV prevention
- Behavioural and psychological factors associated with health outcomes, particularly in the area of HIV prevention
Fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD)
- Estimating mortality, morbidity, law enforcement problems, and productivity losses due to premature mortality and disability of individuals with FASD, and the associated economic cost in Canada
- Developing a population-based model for estimating the prevalence of FASD in Canada, which will be suitable for other federal/provincial/territorial Canadian jurisdictions, and piloting this model to obtain the FASD prevalence among school-age children in Canada