Mortality in Sweden [antikvár]

ForewordThis work has been carried out as part of a research programme on the epidemiology and genetics of mental and neurological diseases in Sweden. This programme is supported by the National Institutes of Health, U.S.A. (U.S. Public Health Service, research grant NB 04108), directed by Professor Torsten Sjögren, M. D., and sponsored by the Institute for Medical Genetics of the University of Uppsala, Sweden.As a teacher of statistics and research worker at the University of Lund many years ago, as an actuary of the Skandia Insurance Group and later the head of its life department, and not least during a very long period of collaboration with Professor Sjögren, I have had much occasion to study the interaction between mortality, on the one hand, and other demographical changes, heredity, environmental factors, medical progress and social evolution on the other.Some of the aspects and results submitted in this monograph have been presented earlierat the international congresses of human genetics in Copenhagen (1956) and Rome (1961), the session of the International Statistical Institute in Tokyo (1961), the meeting of the International Union for Population Research in New York (1961) and the international congress of gerontology in Copenhagen (1963). In a series of monographs, published together with Professor Sjögren (1949, 1954, 1957, 1959, 1960 and 1963) and dealing in the first place with different forms of neuropsychiatrie disease, great significance has been assigned to the questions of analysing demographic trends and of evaluating selective factors and displacement effects of various kinds; in particular, mention may be made in the present connection of the studies of a large west Swedish rural population (AB-bo, 1954), an isolated parish in the north of Sweden (X-sjö, 1960) and the City of Stockholm (1963).An important problem is to investigate how mortality has developed and how medical and social progress as well as other changes in the community have affected mortality (and morbidity). Another and equally important problem is to analyse how changes in mortality may affect future mortalitj' (and morbidity). The main object of this study is to elucidate in a concrete way the mechanism of these interactions.