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The Department of Learning, Informatics, Management and Ethics (LIME) was established to serve as a space where medicine meets other fields of science. Now, the spotlight is on LIME’s interdisciplinary approach and unique expertise in a special issue of Socialmedicinskt Tidskrift (translates to Journal of Social Medicine).

Many common diseases and other complex traits, such as heart disease, diabetes, and psychiatric disorders, are influenced by a very large number of genetic variants, each with only a small effect. They are also shaped by environmental and lifestyle factors, which makes their causes highly complex. By analyzing genetic data from very large groups of people across the whole genome, researchers can identify these small genetic signals and better understand how they contribute to health and disease.

A new thesis from Karolinska Institutet shows the effectiveness of flexible parametric survival models in modelling multiple time-scales, providing a robust tool for complex time-to-event data analysis. The models were tested in the context of myeloproliferative neoplasms, a group of chronic hematologic malignancies in which the bone marrow makes too many red blood cells, white blood cells, or platelets.

On June 25, 2024, the National Board of Health and Welfare released the latest suicide statistics for 2023. These figures are compiled and analyzed annually by the National Centre for Suicide Research and Prevention (NASP) at Karolinska Institutet and Region Stockholm, covering national to local levels. The latest data is an increment in the overall Swedish suicide rate, from the historic low-point in year 2020, yet the overall downward trend since 2000 persists.

In a new thesis, Rickard Strandberg, PhD student at the Department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, lays the foundations for a new natural history model for breast cancer. By taking advantage of available detailed screening cohorts, Rickard’s work includes three diverse applications of this model.

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet show that different measures of psychopathology can be combined into a single factor, “p”, which predicts the patient’s prognosis and need of extra support. The general factor of psychopathology reflects the overall risk of adverse psychiatric outcomes with an accuracy equal to that currently used for intelligence, they report in a paper published in World Psychiatry.