tåg (train)

I'm on the SJ X2000 train, from Stockholm to Lund, to meet A. and her family for dinner, then an hour train ride to Köpenhamn tonight. It is a four-hour train ride to Lund and I'm just settling into my big cozy window seat. I haven't been on an Amtrak train recently, but the trains here have real-time maps of your location and time to the destination which is great for my cartographic obesssion.

It took approximately two minutes after leaving Central Station for the scenery to become totally beautiful. We've passed all sorts of lakes, and maroon and yellow farmhouses with white trim, vast stark fields dotted with sheep and cows, whole forests of very tall, solemn pine trees. The amount of undeveloped land so close to major urban centers is staggering - Sweden is the fourth largest (Western) European country and has only 9 million people.

This morning I went into CHESS for a brief meeting with Ilona, the professor who I'll be working with most. She is so nice and and welcoming, and we decided on two projects that I'll assist with to start. I believe most of the data analysis for both studies is mostly complete so they're mostly in the writing stages, which I think will be nice for me since my statistical skills are not that impressive.

The general topic of the work at CHESS is the developmental origins of adult disease - i.e. how do social conditions experienced by someone in utero or in early childhood affect later risk of developing various diseases. The first paper I'll be working on looks at correlations between cortisol levels in families. Cortisol is considered a marker of stress, and using data from Uppsala, a big university town north of Stockholm, there appears to be a significant relationship between cortisol levels in parents and children. I've always had a thing for cortisol & glucocorticoids so this is very exciting.

The second project is quite different - we will be looking at cancer incidence in survivors of the siege of Leningrad during the second world war. In the 70s when people started becoming aware of factors that influence the development of circulatory diseases (e.g. cardiovascular diseases), three cohorts were started in the US, in Moscow, and in St. Petersberg, aka Leningrad. I haven't read this stuff yet but apparently the director of CHESS and Ilona and many others have produced very good work looking at circulatory disease in survivors of the starvation/famine in Leningrad during those years (and who, I believe, were either in utero or very young children). What we're going to do now is work on a paper about how cancer incidence was affected. It is similar in nature to the Dutch hunger winter work but the situation in Leningrad was much more severe and lasted much longer, and the study is now funded in Sweden.

Ilona also invited me to the European Public Health Association conference in Helsinki in October, to all sorts of meetings at CHESS and with the collaborators in Uppsala, as well as to a dissertation defense at the Karolinska Institute next week. Apparently in Sweden dissertation defenses are public spectacles, with family and friends and whoever else wants to come, so that should be fun.

It's cloudy and rainy now, and we're passing through some very ugly towns, and I didn't think to reserve a seat with a power outlet so my battery is going to run out. Pictures to come later.