And we’ve started!
Last October, Dr. Niels van den Berg (LUMC) and I received funding from Riksbankens Jubileumsfonden to study how exceptional health clusters in families. Now we’re really starting with this project – at least, Niels is. I will start in January, after wrapping up my work in the Landskrona Population Study where I study long-run changes in health in the city.
The next 3 years, Niels and I will study how family-shared SES, lifestyle, and robustness shaped exceptional survival and healthy aging in the past centuries. We’ll use Swedish register data linked to historical records to trace families with a history of exceptional survival, who we’ll follow over time and across generations. Families with histories of exceptional survival have also been traced in the Netherlands where they were interviewed about a range of socioeconomic indicators. We also know about their medicine use, diagnoses from general practitioners, andbiomarkers were collected. Taken together, we can generate a deeper understanding of what drives exceptional good health in families across contexts and time.
For the start of this project (the first where we’re leading!) we managed an in-person meeting, a nice change of pace after 2 years and four months with many online meetings. We also managed a reunion with our longtime collaborator Rick Mourits for overdue celebrations of jobs and papers.
Find out more about the project here.
Congrats 🙂