Sven Sandin

Sven Sandin

Statistician
Telephone: +46852486122
Visiting address: Nobels väg 12A, 19165 SOLNA
Postal address: C8 Medicinsk epidemiologi och biostatistik, C8 MEB Dickman Sandin, 171 77 Stockholm
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About me

  • I am a statistician and epidemiologist with more than 30 years of experience. I have a broad experience from the pharmaceutical industry running clinical trials, phases I to IV, pre-clinical, production and toxicology, on a project level as well as for individual studies in different areas such as cardiovascular and pain relief. I have been responsible for developing clinical data management systems and SAS macro libraries for clinical trial purposes.
    In epidemiology I have been involved in questionnaire based cohort and case-control studies as well as register based studies following individuals in full national populations. I have participated in planing and execution of studies collecting data using "modern techniques" such as mobile phones, web questionnaires and java applications in areas such as influenza surveillance, hearing aid and children weight control programs.

    *Training*
    * 2010 – 2014 PhD studies, Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London, UK
    * 1984 – 1988 M.Sc. Mathematical Statistics at Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden
    *Employments*
    * 2015 - current Assistant Professor Department of Psychiatry, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, USA
    * 2003 – current Applied biostatistician Department for Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden
    * 2001 – 2003 Statistician, Scania, Södertälje, Sweden
    * 1992 – 2001 Project biostatistician AstraZeneca Södertälje, Sweden
    * 1988 – 1992 Biostatistician, at Pharmacia Stockholm, Sweden
    *Other positions*
    * 1994 – current Statistical consulting
    * 2006-2012 Member of clinical trial data safety monitoring board, DSMB

Research

  • My primary research areas in epidemiology is psychiatric epidemiology with a focus on autism and related childhood disorders. I have also been involved in cancer epidemiology with focus on female cancers. I have been involved in mapping risk associated with physical activity, diet and diet patterns, parental age and co-morbidity. My interest lies at integrating modern statistical methods to solve real-life-problems in research. I have special interest in problems associated with study design, survival analysis, family and longitudinal data and correlated data and graphical presentations. I have interest and experience in data management and statistical programming using a variety of software such as SAS, R and Stata or working with relational databases using SQL.


    My research projects
    Preterm (before 37 week of gestation) and very preterm (VPT) births account for up to half of perinatal and infant deaths, children with impairments and disabilities and more than a third of the health and educational budgets for children across Europe. In the EU funded project RECAP (https://recap-preterm.eu/) ("Research on European Children and Adults Born Preterm") we are developing the RECAP preterm Cohort Platform, a sustainable, geographically diverse and multidisciplinary database of national and European cohorts of babies born very preterm or with very low birth weight (VPT/ VLBW cohorts). This network contains clinical cohorts constituted over a 30 year time span as well as register data from the national health registers in the Nordic countries and is designed to optimize the use of population data for research and innovation in healthcare, social and education policy. The overall aim of the RECAP preterm Project is to improve the health, development and quality of life of these children and adults.


    In the project PAGES ("Population-Based Autism Genetics and Environmental Study") we are trying to find specific genes and potential environmental factors that affect the risk of developing Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). For this purpose we are creating a genetic resource by recruiting Swedish born individuals diagnosed with ASD. The study is executed in close collaboration with the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, USA.


    The WLH ("Women Lifestyle and Health") cohort was set up to create a large prospective cohort designed specifically to investigate the  association between lifestyle factors (exogenous hormones and dietary habits) and cancer and cardiovascular diseases in young women. The cohort includes 50, 000 women who answered an extensive questionnaire in 1991/92, a follow-up questionnaire in 2003/04 and information on inpatient and outpatient specialist care, prescribed drugs (from 2005) and cancer diagnoses until 31 December 2012.


    Ongoing research include
    * Autism aetiology and autism risk in family perspective, e.g. studying risk across generations separating maternal and paternal risk, studying the
    role of grandparental risk and in acting in families by heritability and individual risk measures 

    * Generally, aetiology associated with pre- and perinatal risk factors
    * The effect of physical activity, diet and nutrition on female cancer, cardiovascular and psychological diseases and disorders
    * Epidemiology and surveillance of Legionnaire disease in Europe

Articles

All other publications

Grants

  • Swedish Research Council
    1 December 2021 - 30 November 2025
    Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) risk is primarily of genetic origins. One source through which environmental effects may be influential is preterm birth (PTB
    birth &lt
    37 weeks gestation) which constitutes 6% of all births in Sweden (10% world wide). PTB is primarily of environmental origin, due to disease in the pregnant woman or her fetus. The processes underlying PTB may initiate ASD. This hypothesis has not been previously studied. If true, the heritability of ASD may be much lower in PTB children suggesting that PTB defines a subset of the general population where environmental risk play the major role for ASD risk.The goal of our project is to examine the ASD-etiology in PTB children and test if the etiology is different compared to term-born
    identify risk factors for ASD in PTB children, and to estimate the public health consequences of these factors.We will create a cohort of all Swedish children born 1995-2014 using the national registers, replicate results in Finland and examine genetic markers in a Swedish genetic sample.Aims are: (1) Determine the epidemiology and risk factors for ASD in PTB children. (2) Test if the risk factors in aim 1 are due to confounding, and estimate their public health consequences. (3) Compare ASD susceptibility in PTB and term-born children using both family data and molecular genetic data. (4) Explore potentials for risk prediction in a clinical cohortThis will be the most systematic investigation ASD-etiology in PTB children to date.
  • Swedish Research Council
    1 January 2021 - 31 December 2023
  • National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases
    1 September 2019 - 30 June 2024
  • Swedish Research Council for Health Working Life and Welfare
    1 April 2019 - 31 March 2022
  • European Commission
    1 January 2017 - 30 September 2017

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