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Albert Hofman is a Dutch clinical epidemiologist. He is currently the Stephen B. Kay Family Professor of Public Health and the chair of the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. [1] [2]
Hofman was born in 1951 in Hardenberg, the Netherlands. He attended medical school at the University of Groningen and graduated in 1976 with his MD. He went on to complete a second research fellowship within the department of epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1982. [2] He then completed his PhD at the Erasmus University of Rotterdam in 1983. [2]
His research fellowship was completed within the department of community medicine at the University of Groningen, 1975; and his clinical residencies were completed in the departments of internal medicine at the Academic Hospitals Groningen and Leiden in 1977.
In 1981 he became an assistant professor at Erasmus University Medical School, Rotterdam; he was promoted to associate professor in 1984, and to full professor in 1988. In 1988 he became chairman of the department of epidemiology, Erasmus Medical Center, Rotterdam, Netherlands, in which he served until 2016. He also served as the science director of the graduate school of the Netherlands Institute for Health Sciences (NIHES) since its inception in 1992 to 2015. [2] Hofman has served as the editor-in-chief of the European Journal of Epidemiology since 2000.
Hofman is the initiator and principal investigator of two population-based, prospective cohort studies in the city of Rotterdam, the Netherlands: the Rotterdam Study and the Generation R study. Data collection for these studies started in 1990 and 2002, respectively. These cohort studies both target multiple common diseases, have very extensive and state-of-the-art assessments of the putative determinants of these diseases, and employ many new technologies not previously applied to epidemiologic population studies.
The study of multiple outcomes, in particular of neurological, cardiovascular and endocrine diseases, has enabled the investigation of the interrelations of diseases, and thereby of the co-morbidity and co-etiology of various diseases with a large population burden. This has made the findings in these studies generally useful for public health purposes, as well as for clinical medicine.
These studies included the first use of genome-wide assessment and large-scale imaging of whole cohorts in epidemiological studies. The Rotterdam Study was one of the five founding cohorts of the very productive CHARGE consortium which has performed many successful genome-wide association studies that have found a large number of genes associated with common diseases. The Rotterdam Study has also pioneered new population imaging modalities, including magnetic resonance imaging since 1995.
In addition to contributing to over 2,000 publications during his career, he is also the faculty director of the clinical epidemiology program within the department of epidemiology at the Harvard Chan School.
A cohort study is a particular form of longitudinal study that samples a cohort, performing a cross-section at intervals through time. It is a type of panel study where the individuals in the panel share a common characteristic.
A case–control study is a type of observational study in which two existing groups differing in outcome are identified and compared on the basis of some supposed causal attribute. Case–control studies are often used to identify factors that may contribute to a medical condition by comparing subjects who have that condition/disease with patients who do not have the condition/disease but are otherwise similar. They require fewer resources but provide less evidence for causal inference than a randomized controlled trial. A case–control study is often used to produce an odds ratio, which is an inferior measure of strength of association compared to relative risk, but new statistical methods make it possible to use a case-control study to estimate relative risk, risk differences, and other quantities.
The Women's Health Initiative (WHI) was a series of clinical studies initiated by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 1991, to address major health issues causing morbidity and mortality in postmenopausal women. It consisted of three clinical trials (CT) and an observational study (OS). In particular, randomized controlled trials were designed and funded that addressed cardiovascular disease, cancer, and osteoporosis.
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Sir Richard Peto is an English statistician and epidemiologist who is Professor of Medical Statistics and Epidemiology at the University of Oxford, England.
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The Rotterdam Study or ERGO is a prospective, population-based cohort study. The aim of the Rotterdam Study is to investigate etiology, preclinical phase, prognosis and potential intervention targets of chronic diseases in mid- and late-life. The study focuses on several diseases, such as cardiovascular, neurological, ophthalmological, hepatic, endocrine, dermatological, otolaryngological, respiratory, locomotor and psychiatric diseases.
Brian MacMahon was a British-born American epidemiologist who chaired the Department of Epidemiology of the Harvard School of Public Health from 1958 until 1988. Best known for his work on the epidemiology of breast cancer, he also pioneered research on associations between passive smoking and lung cancer, and between diet and risk of cancer.
Reperfusion therapy is a medical treatment to restore blood flow, either through or around, blocked arteries, typically after a heart attack. Reperfusion therapy includes drugs and surgery. The drugs are thrombolytics and fibrinolytics used in a process called thrombolysis. Surgeries performed may be minimally-invasive endovascular procedures such as a percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI), which involves coronary angioplasty. The angioplasty uses the insertion of a balloon and/or stents to open up the artery. Other surgeries performed are the more invasive bypass surgeries that graft arteries around blockages.
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The Study of Health in Pomerania (SHIP) is a population-based epidemiological study consisting of two independent cohorts. The SHIP investigates common risk factors, subclinical disorders and manifest diseases with highly innovative non-invasive methods in the high-risk population of northeast Germany. The study is not interested in one specific disease. The SHIP study´s main aims include the investigation of health in all its aspects and complexity involving the collection and assessment of data relevant to the prevalence and incidence of common, population-relevant diseases and their risk factors.
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Phosphatase and actin regulator 1 (PHACTR1) is a protein that in humans is encoded by the PHACTR1 gene on chromosome 6. It is most significantly expressed in the globus pallidus of the brain. PHACTR1 is an actin and protein phosphatase 1 (PP1) binding protein that binds actin and regulates the reorganization of the actin cytoskeleton. This protein has been associated with coronary artery disease and migraines through genome-wide association studies. The PHACTR1 gene also contains one of 27 SNPs associated with increased risk of coronary artery disease.
Frank B. Hu is a Chinese American nutrition and diabetes researcher. He is Chair of the Department of Nutrition and the Fredrick J. Stare Professor of Nutrition and Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and Professor of Medicine at the Harvard Medical School.
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Monique Maria Bernadette Breteler is a Dutch neuroepidemiologist. She is Director of Population Health Sciences at the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE), Professor of Population Health Sciences at the University of Bonn, and Adjunct Professor of Epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts. She has been a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2015.
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