Kurt Svärdsudd, MD

Born: 1942

Kurt Svärdsudd is a pioneer of CVD epidemiology in Sweden. He was educated at Umeå University and received his MD degree in 1968. He started his clinical training in internal medicine in the Central Hospital of Boden where he met Curt Furberg, who later became a trial scientist in the United States. He was at that time the Chief of the Department of Clinical Physiology in Boden and had plans to start a population-based epidemiological study of risk factors of cardiovascular disease in the Norbotten area. The plasma lipid part of that study later led to the discovery of a completely new lipid risk factor – lipoprotein (a) – by Gösta Dahlen and coworkers.

Svärdsudd joined in 1972 the research group led by Gösta Tibblin and Lars Wilhelmsen, conducting cohort studies of 50-year-old men in Gothenburg. These studies gave the basis for his DMedSc thesis, “High blood pressure, with special reference to risk factors, development and consequences” at the University of Gothenburg in 1978. He also belonged to the research group carrying out the Gothenburg multifactorial trial of prevention of cardiovascular disease. In 1980-1981 he worked as a post-doctoral research fellow in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in the Lipid Research Clinics trial and in 1982 joined Tibblin in Uppsala.

There he was appointed as Professor of Epidemiology in 1990, and, when Tibblin retired in 1995, Svärdsudd succeeded him as Professor of General Practice. (KP)