I’m interested in long-term developments in health and survival. My research is about three main topics: Inequalities in health and survival between families; health and survival over the life course; and women’s health and the health of their children. I’m currently running three research projects: My ERC Starting Grant “Relative Health”, the Forte-funded project “Short-lived Equality” on health, social mobility, and the emergence of social inequalities in Sweden and the Riksbanken-funded project “An Age Old Advantage” on intergenerational health advantages shared in families. Summaries of a few of these can be found below.
Relative Health. Long-Run Inequalities in Health and Survival Between Families and Across Generations. ERC Starting Grant (2025-2029). Worldwide life expectancy has increased strongly over the past decades, but social inequalities in health and mortality are large and increasing. In contrast to trends in socioeconomic inequality and social mobility, long-term developments in inequality in health and mortality have been poorly documented. “Relative Health” aims to quantify the level of inequality in health and mortality from a family perspective 1800-today. Characteristics that affect health and mortality accumulate in families, and thus the level of inequality in health and mortality can be quantified by addressing similarities within families in health and mortality (same-generation relatives) and intergenerational persistence of health and survival (ancestors and descendants). State-of-the-art population reconstructions cover up to 9 generations of relatives (grandparents, parents, children) in Sweden, Netherlands, and US 1800-today and contain lifespan and health information. The project lays the groundwork to generalize these estimates of family health inequality to many contexts with less abundant data sources, using survey data.
Short-lived equality? Intergenerational persistence of survival and SES, Sweden 1850-today. FORTE (2025-2028). In the project, together with co-applicants Gabriel Brea Martinez, researcher, associate professor Luciana Quaranta, and doctoral candidate Isa Barraclough, we study the dynamics of health and social mobility over the life course and between generations. We are all located at the Centre for Economic Demography, Department of Economic History, Lund University. For the project, we predominantly use conscript records from Sweden to determine health in early adulthood, and it’s interaction with socioeconomic outcomes and health over the lifecourse.
An Age-Old Advantage? Healthy aging in two centuries of Swedish and Dutch long-lived families 1813-2021 (Riksbanken Jubileumsfond, 2021-2025). In this project, we study healthy ageing families and factors contributing to long lives and healthy ageing within them. The three-year project was funded in autumn 2021 by the National Bank of Sweden foundation (Riksbankens Jubileumsfond). Co-applicant and postdoctoral researcher on the project is Niels van den Berg, expert on healthy ageing families. Niels works at the Leiden University Medial Centre in the Netherlands. More information here.
Finished projects:
Long Live the Family: The Rise of Familial Health Advantages in Sweden (Crafoord Foundation, 2022-2024). This project is motivated by the wide gap in the length of life by socioeconomic status: the social gradient in mortality, which emerged in Sweden in the 1950ies for women and 1970ies for men. Historically, large disparities existed in lifestyle between lower and higher classes, and higher classes in particular had increased risk of lifestyle-related disease related to smoking, drinking and a sedentary lifestyle. In turn, among lower socioeconomic status groups infectious disease mortality may have been relatively higher and persisted longer. Causes of death analyses from historical Sweden confirm this broad picture, but leave open the question when family-shared factors started to contribute to inequalities in mortality. In this project, we identify long-lived families and investigate their survival advantage over time. Even in the absence of a population-level social gradient in mortality, patterns of health and survival are and were shared in these families. The project is funded by Crafoordska Stiftelse and executed with doctoral student Isa Barraclough.
Maternal and Infant Health and Their Change over Time. This digitization grant was awarded in summer 2021 by the Ebbe Kock Foundation, for the digitization of hospital birth records from Landskrona. The digitized birth records will be used for research on the relation between mother’s infectious disease exposure in early life and her reproductive career in mid-life, including her children’s weight at birth. This project was initiated and executed together with Therese Nilsson and Luciana Quaranta. Previously, we already received funding from Gyllenstiernska Krapperup Stiftelse (PI Therese Nilsson) and Ebbe Kock Stiftelse (PI, co-applicants Therese Nilsson and Luciana Quaranta) in 2020 and 2021 for two digitization projects of obstetric records, both funding research assistants entering historical records. These digitization projects are now finished and a link to our first research paper using the wonderful records can be found here.