The Research Unit in the Child Guidance Clinic (CGC) was established in 2008. Its first major research project was to support a large scale randomized controlled trial comparing the effectiveness of Omega-3 essential fatty acids with social skills training for children and adolescents with anger and aggression problems. This was funded by an Institutional Research Grant (IRG) from the National Medical Research Council (NMRC).
With a multidisciplinary team of child psychiatrists, allied health specialists, and research staff, this Research Unit has expanded, since its inception, to offer expertise to a number of research studies within the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Our research efforts aim to examine the influence of genes and brain mechanisms on behaviour, risk and protective factors of psychopathology, as well as evidence-based assessments and treatments of paediatric psychiatric conditions. To date, we have established research collaborations with various local and foreign institutions, including Nanyang Technological University, A*Star, DUKE-NUS Graduate Medical School, and the University of Pennsylvania.
The Research Unit believes that modern clinical care goes hand in hand with research. We want only the best, most empirically robust care for the children we see in the clinic by keeping abreast of the most modern and systematic intervention approaches for managing children with behavioural problems.
There is now a small amount of preliminary data from our research study assessing whether a nutritional approach (fish oil supplementation) coupled with social skills training might be effective in reducing aggression, and improving attention amongst children with disruptive behaviour disorder.
Click
here to read about our initial findings.
