Gösta Tibblin, MD

1929 — 1997

Gösta Tibblin was a pioneer of modern cardiovascular epidemiology in Sweden. Together with Lars Wilhelmsen, he started in 1963 the cohort study of 50-year-old men in Gothenburg, Men Born in 1913, with new birth cohorts of 50-year-old men added at 10-year intervals. This study eventually became the study of men born in 1913, 1923, 1933, 1943, and of men and women born in 1953. Tibblin also led with others the large population-based Gothenburg multifactorial trial of prevention, started in 1970 and completed in the 1980s.

Tibblin graduated from Lund University with a MD in 1960 and got his DMedSc degree at the University of Gothenburg in 1967. He received clinical training in internal medicine at the Sahlgrenska University Hospital in Gothenburg and training in epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

He moved in 1975 to Umeå University where he became Professor of Social Medicine. In 1982 at Uppsala University he became the first professor of General Practice in Sweden.

His personal researches in Gothenburg were on psychosocial determinants of cardiovascular disease. In Umeå and Uppsala he extended this research to other chronic diseases and their care in the community. He participated in the Ten-day Seminars for some years on the visiting faculty and in the Seven Countries Surveys. He retired in 1995. (KP)

Please click here for a description of the Goteborg Study of Men Born in 1913.