Rainbows over the world's public health: determinants of health models in the past, present, and future.

The need to visualise the complexity of the determinants of population health and their interactions inspired the development of the rainbow model. In this commentary we chronicle how variations of this model have emerged, including the initial models of Haglund and Svanström (1982), Dahlgren and Whitehead (1991), and the Östgöta model (2014), and we illustrate how these models have been influential in both public health and beyond. All these models have strong Nordic connections and are thus an important Nordic contribution to public health.

Milestones in Nordic Health Promotion research.

Based on the storytelling tradition and analyses of conference material, this article provides an overview of the evolving Nordic Health Promotion Research Network (NHPRN) and its conferences over the last 20 years. The story goes from the planning of the first conference in Bergen, Norway, back in 1996 to the eighth conference in Jyväskylä, Finland, in 2016. There have been three phases of development.

Follow-up of an age-period-cohort analysis on alcohol-related mortality trends in Sweden 1970-2015 with predictions to 2025.

Background And Aims: Several studies have indicated that birth cohorts are important in explaining trends in alcohol-related mortality. An earlier study from Sweden with data up to 2002 showed that birth cohorts that grew up under periods of more liberal alcohol policies had higher alcohol-related mortality than those cohorts growing up under more restrictive time periods. In spite of increasing alcohol consumption, predictions in 2002 also indicated lower alcohol-related mortality in the future.

Effects of ultrasound pregnancy dating on neonatal morbidity in late preterm and early term male infants: a register-based cohort study.

Background: Assessing gestational age by ultrasound can introduce a systematic bias due to sex differences in early growth.

Methods: This cohort study included data on 1,314,602 births recorded in the Swedish Medical Birth Register. We compared rates of prematurity-related adverse outcomes in male infants born early term (gestational week 37-38) or late preterm (gestational week 35-36), in relation to female infants, between a time period when pregnancy dating was based on the last menstrual period (1973-1978), and a time period when ultrasound was used for pregnancy dating (1995-2010), in order to assess the method's influence on outcome by fetal sex.

Individual-based versus aggregate meta-analysis in multi-database studies of pregnancy outcomes: the Nordic example of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors and venlafaxine in pregnancy.

Purpose: Compare analyses of a pooled data set on the individual level with aggregate meta-analysis in a multi-database study.

Methods: We reanalysed data on 2.3 million births in a Nordic register based cohort study.