Health and welfare

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA, life-time risk around 2%) entails a considerable burden for affected individuals (pain, reduced life-span, reduced function, reduced quality of life), for health-care, and for society (reduced work ability, and treatment costs that currently accounts for almost 10% of the total drug expenditure). Delayed or ineffective treatment leads to joint destruction, co-morbidities, and increased mortality.v

The PERAID project proposes to implement personalized medicine (PM) in severe infectious diseases, specifically focusing on the life-threatening necrotizing soft tissue infections (NSTI) as well as the large heterogeneous group of sepsis patients.

Globally, the leading cause of years of life lost is ischemic heart disease (IHD). In the EU 13.2 mio. patients are diagnosed with IHD(1) of these 700,000 live in the Nordic countries. IHD causes chest pain, myocardial infarcts, reduced physical capacity and reduces life-expectance. IHD is considered a chronic disease and may progress despite current optimal treatment.

The NORDTREAT project will build on the achievements within recent large-scale European initiatives that includes cross-disciplinary collaborations between academia, hospitals, biomedical companies and patient organisations. The overall aim is to improve Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) patients' prognosis and quality of life by introducing a novel personalized medicine algorithm that is based on recently generated -omics data.

Sleep apnea is a prevalent nocturnal breathing disorder and causes a high burden to the affected individuals, as well as to society and economy. However, current diagnostic methods for sleep apnea are complicated and labour-intensive processes involving various shortcomings related to measuring, analysing and reporting of data.

As the most commonly diagnosed malignancy and the 2nd leading cause of cancer-related death in men, prostate cancer (PC) is a major health care problem in the Nordic countries, where incidences will rise by 40% in the next 20-ys due to population aging.

With this application we want to strengthen the scientific Nordic collaboration and research infrastructure within the research area of socioeconomic consequences of long-term survival of childhood cancer. Knowledge of such late effects in childhood cancer survivors is highly requested by the survivors and their families.