Blog

Age at menopause and the risk of stroke

In this study, we investigated the relationship between age at menopause and different types of stroke in >200,000 postmenopausal women using data from the EPIC-CVD study and the UK Biobank. We obtained observational associations and performed Mendelian Randomisation analysis to study causality. We found a significant association between earlier menopause and higher risk of stroke […]

Read More

Towards a European strategy to address the COVID-19 pandemic

  • November 22, 2021
  • Comments off

How should Europe deal with the COVID-19 pandemic in the future? Which strategies should be pursued and what specific risks should be considered? In September 2021, we published a call in the Lancet for closer European collaboration in addressing the COVID-19 pandemic. Together with this call in the Lancet, we published an expert opinion paper […]

Read More

Sensitivity and specificity of antigen-based self-testing in Austrian schools

  • November 22, 2021
  • Comments off

This study evaluates the performance of the antigen based anterior nasal screening programme that was used at Austrian schools to detect SARS-CoV-2 infections. We combined nationwide antigen-based screening data obtained in March 2021 from 5,370 schools (Grade 1 to 8) with an RT-qPCR-based prospective cohort study comprising a representative sample of 244 schools. Considering a […]

Read More

Prevalence of RT-PCR-detected SARS-CoV-2 infection at schools: First results from the Austrian School-SARS-CoV-2 Study

  • January 6, 2021
  • Comments off

There is much debate about the role of schools and children in the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. In a consortium of four Austrian universities (Medical University of Innsbruck, Medical University of Graz, Medical Faculty of the JKU Linz, University of Vienna), we set out to reliably quantify the prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 infections at schools detected with reverse-transcription […]

Read More

Design and rationale of the Proof-ATHERO consortium

  • January 5, 2021
  • Comments off

This paper – published in Gerontology – outlines the broad aims of the Proof-ATHERO consortium and describes the principal methodology of data management and analysis of study data. The Proof-ATHERO consortium collates individual-participant data of studies with information on atherosclerosis measures, risk factors for cardiovascular disease, and incident cardiovascular events. More details about the consortium […]

Read More

Carotid intima-media thickness progression as surrogate marker for cardiovascular risk

  • January 5, 2021
  • Comments off

In this paper – published in Circulation – we quantified the association between the intervention effects on carotid intima media thickness (cIMT) progression and the intervention effect on cardiovascular risk. Therefore, we systematically reviewed the literature and collected aggregated literature based data and individual participant data from 119 randomised controlled trials involving a total of […]

Read More

Which body mass index is associated with the greatest survival?

  • October 2, 2019
  • Comments off

Overweight and obesity are increasing worldwide. To help assess their relevance to mortality in different populations we meta-analysed prospective studies of body-mass index, limiting confounding and reverse causality by restricting analyses to never-smokers and excluding pre-existing disease and the first 5 years of follow-up. Of 10 625 411 participants in Asia, Australia and New Zealand, Europe, and […]

Read More

Reductions in life expectancy with cardiometabolic disease

  • October 2, 2019
  • Comments off

Cardiometabolic diseases often occur in one and the same individual. In this paper published in JAMA, we aimed to estimate by how much life expectancy is reduced in individuals suffering from cardiometabolic multimorbidity. In our analysis, we calculated mortality rates and hazard ratios (HRs) adjusted for age and sex using individual participant data from the […]

Read More

Improving cardiovascular disease prediction with lipoprotein(a)

  • October 2, 2019
  • Comments off

Lipoprotein(a) [Lp(a)] is a causal risk factor for cardiovascular disease. In this paper published in JACC we aimed to investigate whether Lp(a) modifies clinical risk assessment in the general community. We measured Lp(a) in 826 men and women (age range, 45 to 84 years) and recorded incidence of cardiovascular diseases over 15 years of follow-up. […]

Read More