Gaining the upper hand over risks

Jaakko Tuomilehto knows the impact of lifestyle factors on risks of disease – throughout history and across continents. He is particularly familiar with high blood pressure conditions and diabetes.

If you are afraid of universities being populated by overspecialised people and theoreticians unconnected from reality, a quick review of the career of medical researcher, Professor Emeritus Jaakko Tuomilehto may bring some comfort.

His career shows great variety whether measured by the research topics or approaches. In his research, Tuomilehto has focused on diabetes and cardiovascular diseases, especially high blood pressure, but he has also examined dementia, rheumatism, Parkinson’s disease, kidney and liver ailments as well as cancer. “I am particularly interested in intervention studies,” Tuomilehto explains.

Much of his work aims at understanding and preventing lifestyle risks. Coffee and salt are some of the substances Tuomilehto has studied, but he has also looked into medicinal treatment of risks. “Some of my long-term epidemiological studies have described changes in risks, while others have dealt with the geographical or temporal variation in the occurrence of diseases.

Father of treatment recommendations

Many of Tuomilehto’s results have had a direct and global influence on the diagnosis of diseases, development of treatment recommendations and creation of new research hypotheses.
“My most extensive cooperation projects have involved determining the occurrence of type 1 diabetes worldwide,” Tuomilehto recounts. “Finland unfortunately holds a clear first place in this respect, and has apparently done so for decades.”

Risk assessments have also resulted in forays into genetic research, especially into the unexpectedly complex genetics of diabetes.

75,000 citations

As a result of Tuomilehto’s international and broad-minded approach, his work has accumulated a considerable number of citations: over 75,000 to date.
“I believe my most frequently cited article on diabetes, published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 2001, is also Finland’s most often cited medical article. The second place goes to a study which for the first time linked the risk of cardiovascular disease to the metabolic syndrome as it is defined today. In the third most cited work, we showed that an elevated systolic blood pressure needs to be treated in order to reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease.”

Tuomilehto’s landmark research projects

*The North Karelia Project, which helped to prevent cardiovascular disease in the community of Eastern Finland

*The Finnish Diabetes Prevention study — the first proper randomised controlled lifestyle intervention trial to prevent type 2 diabetes

*Several randomised controlled trials on hypertension that have formed the current evidence base for the management of hypertension

*Wide range of epidemiological studies of type 1 diabetes mapping the incidence worldwide and trying to understand why in Finland the incidence of type 1 diabetes is the highest in the world

*Studies on the importance of asymptomatic elevated glucose leading to the evidence base to diagnose diabetes and other disturbances in glucose regulation

* Studies to demonstrate the importance of vascular risk factors in the development of dementia and Alzheimer's disease

* Development of non-invasive risk scores to predict type 2 diabetes

* Mapping genes predisposing to type 2 diabetes

Research Database TUHAT: Jaakko Tuomilehto