Daan Kromhout, PhD, MPH

Born: 1950

Daan Kromhout has been a leader in CVD epidemiology and a central collaborator on the Seven Countries Study since taking direction of the Zutphen Study from 1979. He has a major responsibility in the Seven Countries continuation since the retirement of Ancel Keys and Henry Blackburn. He collected new diet data from the field, and with Alessandro Menotti, has supervised follow-up, collation, and analysis of data up to the present day.

A major contribution has been a series of doctoral theses that he has directed based on Seven Countries data, plus the writing of many articles and a monograph on, “Prevention of Coronary Heart Disease. Diet, lifestyle and risk factors in the Seven Countries Study.” He explored new hypotheses, particularly in the area of anti-oxidants and fish consumption in CVD risk.

Kromhout, after many years as director of the Institute of Public Health at Bilthoven, is now professor at Wangeningen University and a national officer on the three-person Health Council of the Netherlands, a major policy institute of the Dutch government. In 2013, Kromhout opened a Dutch-based website on the Seven Countries Study with the collaboration of its principal investigators. (HB)