Ingmar Skoog

At a glance

• Psychiatrist and professor at the University of Gothenburg, linked to the Department of Neuropsychiatry at Sahlgrenska University Hospital.
• Leads the Gothenburg H70 Birth Cohort Studies: since the early 1970s, successive generations of 70-year-olds in Gothenburg have been examined in depth and followed for years.
• This unique design allows generations to be compared: today’s 70-year-olds turn out to be fitter and cognitively stronger in many ways than those of a few decades ago.
• Studies dementia, depression and mental health in older adults, and how factors such as blood pressure, diet, alcohol and hearing play a role.
• Recent work looks at how common high blood p-tau217 levels are among 70-year-olds and how that risk changes over five years, and at the role of parental longevity and polygenic ‘longevity scores’.
• Relevant because long-running population studies like H70 show how ageing really unfolds in ordinary people — and that much of it can be influenced.