Publications by authors named "Erik Sund"

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic's effects on adolescents' physical activity, sports involvement, and feelings of loneliness remain inadequately understood. This study aimed to explore the shifts in leisure-time physical activity, sports participation, and loneliness among adolescents before and during the pandemic, positing that the pandemic has led to decreased physical activity and sports engagement, as well as heightened loneliness, where more active adolescents experience lower loneliness levels. This study included a prior four-year follow-up cohort from the same region two decades earlier to explore the existence of typical longitudinal aging effects in a cohort not affected by the pandemic.

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Background: The purpose of this report is to examine to what extent the COVID-19 pandemic affected pre-existing trends in mental health, with a focus on subgroup differences across age, gender and socioeconomic status.

Methods: Our analysis uses data from two survey periods (HUNT4: 2017-2019 and HUNT-COVID: 2021-2023) from the Trøndelag Health Study in Norway. We estimate overall and stratified (by age, sex and educational attainment) prevalence values for above-threshold (≥8) anxiety and depression scores using the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale.

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Background: Substance use is a global health concern and early onset among adolescents increases health risks. We explore national overall trends in prevalence and trends in socioeconomic inequalities in past year alcohol intoxication, cannabis use, and use of other illicit drugs among Norwegian adolescents (ages ∼ 15-19 years of age) between 2014 and 2022.

Method: The present study builds on data from a nationwide repeated cross-sectional survey collected in 2014-2016 (T1), 2017-2019 (T2), 2021 (T3) and 2022 (T4).

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Article Synopsis
  • Individual participant data (IPD) meta-analysis allows for better understanding of interaction and effect modification compared to traditional studies, especially in public health contexts.
  • The text emphasizes the importance of focusing on additive interactions rather than just multiplicative ones, particularly using measures like Relative Excess Risk due to Interaction (RERI).
  • A three-step method is proposed to correctly estimate additive interaction across studies, ensuring valid results when analyzing factors like the link between depression, smoking, and cancer risk using available data.
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Background: Socioeconomic inequalities constitute an important focus area for public health, and it has long been established that higher educational level and longer lifespan are correlated. Little is known about decennial time trends in poor self-rated health and mental distress.

Methods: This study linked decennial cross-sectional survey data on self-rated health and mental distress from the Trøndelag Health Study (HUNT) from 1984 to 2019 with educational registry data using personal identification numbers.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study investigates how health behaviors like smoking, physical inactivity, and alcohol use may mediate the relationship between depression, anxiety, and different types of cancer, including lung and breast cancer.
  • Utilizing data from 18 cohorts with a total of 319,613 participants, the researchers performed two-stage meta-analyses to analyze these associations and calculate the mediating effects.
  • Results showed that smoking and physical inactivity significantly mediated links between depression, anxiety, and lung cancer, highlighting the importance of smoking cessation programs for individuals dealing with mental health issues.
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In recent decades, increases in mental health problems in adolescents have been reported from several large population-based surveys. This raises questions about changes in underlying risk and protective factors that can inform future intervention strategies. Population data were collected from 1995 to 2019 in three waves of the Young-HUNT studies in Norway to map decennial trends in the prevalence of established risk factors for, and their associations with, adolescent mental health problems.

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Background: Social anxiety disorder (SAD) most commonly develops in adolescence-a period of life that includes a transition to upper secondary school. The aim of this study is to investigate the extent to which social anxiety in adolescence is associated with the completion of upper secondary school and progression to higher education.

Methods: This longitudinal study includes 8,192 adolescents aged 13-19 years who participated in the Norwegian Young-HUNT 3 population-based study.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study investigates the role of psychosocial factors, like depression and anxiety, in how health behaviors (such as smoking and alcohol use) influence cancer incidence.
  • Utilizing data from 437,827 participants and 22 cohorts, researchers performed meta-analyses to assess potential interactions between psychosocial factors and health behaviors across various types of cancer.
  • Results showed no significant interactions or clear patterns; the risk of cancer linked to health behaviors appeared consistent regardless of the presence of psychosocial stress.
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To estimate occurrence of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) over the life-course in the Norwegian population, national health registries are a vital source of information since they fully represent the entire non-institutionalised population. However, as they are mainly established for administrative purposes, more knowledge about how NCDs are recorded in the registries is needed. To establish this, we begin by counting the number of individuals registered annually with one or more NCDs in any of the registries.

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Background: The study had two aims: first, to investigate trends in socioeconomic inequalities in psychological distress and loneliness among Norwegian adolescents, and second, to study variation and covariation of psychological distress and loneliness within adolescents and between siblings within families.

Methods: Multivariate mixed models were used to investigate trends in socioeconomic inequality in psychological distress and loneliness using three separate cohorts of Norwegian adolescents from the Young-HUNT study conducted in 1995-1997 (Young-HUNT1,  = 8980), 2006-2008 (Young-HUNT3,  = 8199) and 2017-2019 (Young-HUNT4,  = 8066). Register data on parental education level was used as a marker of socioeconomic position (SEP), and a unique family number was used to identify adolescents belonging to the same family.

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Objective: Assess whether engagement in a range of cultural activities, both 'passive' and 'active' (ie, receptive and creative) participation, is associated with later demand for general practitioner (GP) consultations.

Design: Longitudinal prospective cohort study.

Setting: Data from the population-based the third Survey of Trøndelag Health Study (2006-2008) in Norway was linked to an administrative register including service information from all GP offices nationwide.

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Noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) are a leading cause of premature death globally and have common preventable risk factors. In Norway, the NCDNOR-project aims at establishing new knowledge in the prevention of NCDs by combining information from national registries with data from population-based health studies. In the present study, we aimed to harmonize data on key NCD risk factors from the health studies, describe clustering of risk factors using intersection diagrams and latent class analysis, and identify long-term risk factor trajectories using latent class mixed models.

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Article Synopsis
  • Depression and anxiety have been studied as potential risk factors for various types of cancer, but previous research has produced inconclusive results.
  • The PSY-CA consortium analyzed data from 18 cohorts, including over 319,000 participants, to investigate the relationship between these mental health conditions and cancer incidence using detailed statistical methods.
  • The findings revealed no significant links between depression or anxiety and most cancer types, although there was a slight association with lung and smoking-related cancers, which diminished after accounting for other risk factors like smoking and alcohol consumption.
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Background: Neighborhood deprivation and depression have been linked to epigenetic age acceleration. The next-generation epigenetic clocks including the DNA methylation (DNAm) GrimAge, and PhenoAge have incorporated clinical biomarkers of physiological dysregulation by selecting cytosine-phosphate-guanine sites that are associated with risk factors for disease, and have shown improved accuracy in predicting morbidity and time-to-mortality compared to the first-generation clocks. The aim of this study is to examine the association between neighborhood deprivation and DNAm GrimAge and PhenoAge acceleration in adults, and assess interaction with depressive symptoms.

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Cardiovascular disease and diabetes are risk factors for depression, yet the relationship between the drug treatments for these diseases and the risk of antidepressant initiation remains unclear. This study aimed to examine possible associations between the use of angiotensin II receptor blockers (ARBs), angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors (ACEI), acetylsalicylic acid (ASA), beta-blockers (BB), calcium channel blockers (CCB), diuretics, or metformin and risk of antidepressant initiation. The Trøndelag Health Study (HUNT3), Norway, was linked to the Norwegian Prescription Database (NorPD).

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Article Synopsis
  • The study investigates how increasing life expectancy (LE) impacts the use of home care services among older adults in Norway, specifically focusing on those aged 70 and older.
  • It found that from 1995 to 2017, the percentage of older adults using home help services significantly decreased, while the use of home nursing services remained stable.
  • Despite increases in LE for both men and women, expected years receiving home help declined, with projections suggesting that the number of older people needing these services will rise drastically by 2050.
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Aims: The Trøndelag Health Study (HUNT) has collected population data through comprehensive decennial surveys over the last four decades and has so far collected data from 240,000 participants. The participants are identified with the unique Norwegian birth number, which enables them to be followed throughout different life stages, from survey to survey, and to endpoint measures in Norwegian national health registers without attrition bias.

Methods: The study design of HUNT offers several advantages: it provides an overview of the public health development in the population over decades, the data can be used in health services research, clinical epidemiology, studies of causation, trajectories, and consequences of diseases, and to study gene × environment interactions.

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Background: Depressive symptoms and mood disorders are associated with a host of physical conditions. However, it is inconclusive whether depressive symptoms are also associated with cancer onset. The aim of this study was to investigate whether depressive symptoms are associated with cancer incidence in a large population-based sample of men and women.

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Background: Cardiovascular agents, including angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors, angiotensin II receptor inhibitors, acetylsalicylic acid, statins, and metformin, have demonstrated benefits for depression. However, there is scant evaluation of these drugs' antidepressant properties in large population settings.

Objective: This study aimed to examine cross-sectional associations between depression symptoms and the use of cardiovascular agents and metformin in populations with cardiovascular diseases or diabetes mellitus.

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Objectives: Public health trends are formed by political, economic, historical and cultural factors in society. The aim of this paper was to describe overall changes in mental health among adolescents and adults in a Norwegian population over the three last decades and discuss some potential explanations for these changes.

Design: Repeated population-based health surveys to monitor decennial changes.

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Background: Restructuring labour markets offers natural population-level experiments of great social epidemiological interest. Many coastal areas have endured substantial restructuring of their local labour markets following declines in small-scale fishing and transitions to new employment opportunities. It is unknown how educational inequalities in health have developed in formerly fishery-dependent communities during such restructuring.

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