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In this paper, the famine that affected northern Sweden in the 1860s will be disaggregated to the local level. It focuses on Burträsk, a small rural parish in the county of West Bothnia (Västerbotten), which experienced a series of recurrent harvest failures during large parts of the 1860s which resulted in famine. The study covers the period 1851–1875, a longer time span than is traditionally associated with studies of the hunger years in 19th-century Sweden, trying to capture the long-term, cumulative, and protracted effects of the famine. This chapter discusses how the municipal bodies responded to the crisis, and the measures taken to alleviate the issues faced by the population, with a particular focus on the state loans, their distribution and the long-term consequences of the debt. Thanks to access to linked individual-level data covering the population in Burträsk, it has been possible to add demographic measures, including mortality, fertility, and population development, to the analysis of how the famine affected the population in a long-term perspective. Perhaps the most significant finding from this case study is the insight into the length and complexity of the 1860s crisis, which has often been narrowly attributed to the years 1867 and 1868. It also emphasises how the outcomes were shaped by several interacting mechanisms, including the effects of stapled crop failures, economic factors related to macro-economic stress and market decline, and epidemics.   

In 1920, Sweden experienced a severe outbreak of pandemic influenza, primarily affecting the rural areas in the north. The epicentre of the 1920 outbreak was Arjeplog, a small and remote parish that had escaped earlier pandemic waves. However, in 1920, the parish exhibited the highest influenza mortality in Sweden during the entire period of 1918–1920. This article examines the extensive press coverage of the outbreak in two newspapers, Norrskensflamman and Aftonbladet, focusing on how the events were reported, perceived, and analysed in relation to the newspapers’ political stances. The findings reveal that although their journalistic ambitions, motives and political stances differed, both newspapers expressed similar ideas about an underprivileged, underdeveloped, and uneducated north, where poor social conditions and ignorance had exacerbated the severe consequences of the outbreak. Norrskensflamman’s coverage, featuring substantial critical social analysis, became instrumental in political debate, while Aftonbladet’s reports, characterized by human-interest journalism, helped prompt the allocation of philanthropic relief.

The Demographic Data Base (DDB) at the Centre for Demographic and Ageing Research (CEDAR) at Umeå University has since the 1970s been building longitudinal population databases and disseminating data for research. The databases were built to serve as national research infrastructures, useful for addressing an indefinite number of research questions within a broad range of scientific fields, and open to all academic researchers who wanted to use the data. A countless number of customized datasets have been prepared and distributed to researchers in Sweden and abroad and to date, the research has resulted in more than a thousand published scientific reports, books, and articles within a broad range of academic fields. This article will focus on the development of techniques and methods used to store and structure the data at DDB from the beginning in 1973 until today. This includes digitization methods, database design and methods for linkage. The different systems developed for implementing these methods are also described and to some extent, the hardware used.

The Demographic Data Base (DDB) at the Centre for Demographic and Ageing Research (CEDAR) at Umeå University has since the 1970s been building longitudinal population databases and disseminating data for research. The databases were built to serve as national research infrastructures, useful for addressing an indefinite number of research questions within a broad range of scientific fields, and open to all academic researchers who wanted to use the data. A countless number of customised datasets have been prepared and distributed to researchers in Sweden and abroad and to date, the research has resulted in more than a thousand published scientific reports, books, and articles within a broad range of academic fields. While there has long been a clear predominance of research within the humanities and social sciences, it has always been used for research in other fields as well, for example medicine. In this article, we first give a brief presentation of the DDB and its history, characteristics, and development from the 1970s to the present. It includes an overview of the research based on the DDB databases, with a focus on the databases POPUM and POPLINK with individual-level data. A number of major traits of the research from 1973 to now have been outlined, showing the breadth of the research and highlighting some major contributions, with a focus on work that would have been very difficult to perform without data from the DDB.

Aims/hypothesis Little is known about the heritable basis of gene-environment interactions in humans. We therefore screened multiple cardiometabolic traits to assess the probability that they are influenced by genotype-environment interactions.

Methods Fourteen established environmental risk exposures and 11 cardiometabolic traits were analysed in the VIKING study, a cohort of 16,430 Swedish adults from 1682 extended pedigrees with available detailed genealogical, phenotypic and demographic information, using a maximum likelihood variance decomposition method in Sequential Oligogenic Linkage Analysis Routines software.

Results All cardiometabolic traits had statistically significant heritability estimates, with narrow-sense heritabilities (h (2)) ranging from 24% to 47%. Genotype-environment interactions were detected for age and sex (for the majority of traits), physical activity (for triacylglycerols, 2 h glucose and diastolic BP), smoking (for weight), alcohol intake (for weight, BMI and 2 h glucose) and diet pattern (for weight, BMI, glycaemic traits and systolic BP). Genotype-age interactions for weight and systolic BP, genotype-sex interactions for BMI and triacylglycerols and genotype-alcohol intake interactions for weight remained significant after multiple test correction.

Conclusion/hypothesis Age, sex and alcohol intake are likely to be major modifiers of genetic effects for a range of cardiometabolic traits. This information may prove valuable for studies that seek to identify specific loci that modify the effects of lifestyle in cardiometabolic disease.

This paper presents the longitudinal database POPLINK, which has been developed at the Demographic Data Base at Umeå University, Sweden. Based on digitized Swedish population registers between c. 1700-1950, the database contains micro-data that covers the agrarian society through industrialization and further on to the Swedish welfare state and contemporary society. It is now possible to study the profound processes of the second demographic transition using individual level data with a proper size population. POPLINK allows for a large array of longitudinal studies, such as social mobility, migration, fertility, mortality, civil status, kinship relations, diseases, disability and causes of death. International standards of occupations (HISCO) and diseases (ICD-10) have been applied, facilitating comparability. POPLINK covers two large regions in Northern Sweden and is built on complete registrations. It is one of the world’s most information-dense historical population databases, covering up to 15 generations and 350,000 individuals described by 300 variables, allowing the ability to monitor populations over time. POPLINK has been built to allow linkage to modern registries, clinical data and medical biobanks, which enables the study of transgenerational effects, heredity and genetic transfers in disease incidence of the population today. DDB serves as an infrastructure for research and is open to researchers of any nationality.