MD, PhD
Professor in Internal Medicine and Senior Consultant in Cardiology
I am specialist in internal medicine and in cardiology, with basic clinical training completed in Örnsköldsvik. I also developed a long-standing interest in global health after spending several years working in Tanzania during the 1980s.
The Heart Centre in Umeå has been my clinical home since 1993, where I now primarily work with pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH), a serious condition affecting the blood vessels of the lungs. Over the past ten years, I have had the opportunity to build and develop the care of these patients both regionally and nationally.
My experiences in Africa sparked an interest in research, and my first project focused on HIV epidemiology in southern Tanzania. Building on these experiences, it became natural to continue working with epidemiology in northern Sweden, and the MONICA study became the focus of my doctoral thesis, which I defended in 1999. The subject of the thesis was the newly discovered adipose tissue hormone leptin and its relationship to cardiovascular disease. This led to another period abroad, and I had the privilege of working with Professor Paul Zimmet and his team at the International Diabetes Institute (IDI) in Melbourne, Australia, for a total of two years spread over several periods.
During my time in Melbourne, I had the opportunity to work with a large database generated in Mauritius, an island nation in the Indian Ocean characterized by rapid economic development and accompanying lifestyle changes. These data come from recurring health surveys conducted in Mauritius and on the neighbouring island of Rodrigues since the mid-1980s, and they constitute a unique source of knowledge about the development of diabetes and cardiovascular disease in a multiethnic population that has undergone dramatic changes in living conditions over recent decades.
Since 2007, I have had the privilege of working actively together with the Ministry of Health in Mauritius on organizing these studies and analysing the data, and lately, Umeå University has got the responsibility to curate and analyse data generated in these studies.
The MONICA (MONitoring Trends and Determinants in CArdiovascular Disease) study was initiated by the WHO in the mid-1980s with the aim of monitoring risk factors for and the prevalence of cardiovascular disease globally. Northern Sweden’s MONICA study (NSW-MONICA) has continued to monitor cardiovascular health in northern Sweden even after the main study concluded after a few years. MONICA contributes actively to several international consortia such as MORGAM, GCVRC, and NCD-RisC.
The health surveys conducted in Mauritius and in Northern Sweden (NSW-MONICA) share many similarities and are perhaps among the only studies of this kind to have followed cardiovascular risk factors over such a long period of time, providing perspectives that both challenge and enrich our understanding.
I am also Deputy Leader of the SCAPIS study in Umeå and participate in the national SCAPIS steering group.
My current research areas, in addition to cardiovascular epidemiology in Mauritius and northern Sweden, include PAH, including chronic thromboembolic pulmonary hypertension (CTEPH), and valvular heart disease.
Since 2014, I have been employed as a teacher at Umeå University, as Professor of Internal Medicine since 2017, and as Senior Professor in the same field since 2026. With this foundation, I hope to contribute to an attractive and recognized research environment in Northern Sweden.