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Lisa Dinkler

Affiliated to Research

Department of Psychiatry and Neurochemistry
Visiting address
Blå stråket 15, vån 3 SU/Sahlgrenska
413 45 Göteborg
Postal address
Blå stråket 15, vån 3 SU/Sahlgrenska
413 45 Göteborg

About Lisa Dinkler

Research field: child and adolescent psychiatry, psychiatric and genetic epidemiology

Focus area: eating disorders, avoidant restrictive food intake disorder (ARFID)

Current research: I completed my PhD at Gillberg Neuropsychiatry Centre, Institute of Neuroscience and Physiology at University of Gothenburg, in December 2020. Currently, I am a postdoc in psychiatric epidemiology at Centre for Eating Disorders Innovation (CEDI), Department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics at Karolinska Institutet (KI), with primary research interest in eating disorders and neurodevelopmental disorders. My current research is mainly focused on ARFID. Using epidemiological and twin designs as well as genome-wide association studies, I am trying to understand the genetic and environmental causes of ARFID, its comorbidities (e.g., with autism, ADHD, and anxiety), and its course over time.

CEDI's website: https://ki.se/en/meb/cedi-centre-for-eating-disorders-innovation

My profile at KI: https://staff.ki.se/people/lisa-dinkler

Previous research and thesis work: My PhD focused on the restrictive eating disorders anorexia nervosa and ARFID. I studied the intricate link between anorexia nervosa and autism spectrum disorder, first, by prospectively examining autistic traits in children who later developed AN in a large Swedish twin cohort, and second, by studying experimentally whether specific social-emotional difficulties are common to anorexia nervosa and autism, using eye tracking methodology. My research also examined the prevalence of ARFID in children, which is still largely unknown, and the comorbidity of ARFID with autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders in a birth cohort of Japanese children. Furthermore, my thesis investigated whether diagnosed eating disorders can be conceptualized as the extreme manifestation of disordered eating behaviors that are continuously distributed in the population when it comes to the underlying genetic risk factors, using twin methodology. In addition, I have also been conducting research on child maltreatment and neurodevelopmental disorders, studying the potential causal impact of child maltreatment on neurodevelopmental disorders using twin methodology, as well as examining their association with mania symptoms in adolescence prospectively.