Therese Djärv

Therese Djärv is a Professor of Emergency Medicine since 1 November 2024. She graduated in medicine at Karolinska Institutet in 2007, becoming a specialist in internal medicine in 2014 and emergency medicine in 2015. At the same time, she was pursuing her doctoral studies and took her PhD from Karolinska Institutet in 2010. She became Docent in 2016. Since 2017, she has headed the clinical medicine division at the Department of Medicine in Solna. In 2021 she was made Adjunct Professor of Emergency Medicine and since 2024 she has been leading a global initiative for improving care for hospital associated cardiac arrests via the International Liaison Committee on Resuscitation (ILCOR).

Therese Djärv researches in-hospital cardiac arrest, with the aim of decreasing the number of patients who suffer cardiac arrest, primarily through preventive measures. Some 1, 500 cardiac arrests occur in Swedish hospitals every year, with a survival ratio of about one in three.

Although her clinical epidemiological research on the patients that suffer a cardiac arrest paints a very heterogeneous picture, she has found that abnormal vital values such as blood pressure, oxygen saturation and pulse are associated with a serious increase in risk. Such markers could therefore be used as an early warning system leading to preventative intervention.

Therese Djärv’s group also researches ethical healthcare decisions about  when cardiopulmonary resuscitation should and should not be given in the event of cardiac arrest. A fundamental premise for these decisions is awareness of the patients’ values, which is of particular relevance when the prognosis is poor. Their ethics research therefore covers both prediction and patient dialogue.

Course leader for medical programme year 3- Clinical medicine 1 in Solna (Internal medicine) and year 5- Emergency Medicine.

Supervision to doctoral degree

• Emma Bendz, Pulmonary embolism as the cause of out of hospital cardiac arrest in women - A Swedish population-based register study, 2021-