Untreated atrial fibrillation increases the risk of serious complications such as stroke, heart failure and dementia. Johan Engdahl is researching how doctors can be better at detecting atrial fibrillation so that patients can be treated in time. Meet one of the new professors of Karolinska Institutet who will participate in this year's installation ceremony at Aula Medica on 9 October.
Text: Karin Tideström, for KI's installation ceremony booklet 2025
What are you researching?
"Our research group is seeking to improve the diagnosis, follow-up and treatment of patients with atrial fibrillation. Heart rhythm abnormalities are common and usually harmless, but they can be serious, such as in the case of atrial fibrillation. The condition doesn't always cause symptoms, either. We're researching how to make it easier to detect atrial fibrillation in patients without symptoms as well as those who have palpitations."
How are you going about this?
"One way of detecting atrial fibrillation is to systematically screen large groups of people. In many of our projects, we've asked older people from different regions to come in to have their heart rhythm examined using long-term ECG. We also work with the targeted screening of groups at a high risk of atrial fibrillation, such as people who have already had a stroke. Our studies show that it's perfectly possible to do screening studies on a large scale. However, while the equipment is accepted by older people, there are challenges, in that only about half of those invited take part in the screening and that it's usually the healthiest and best educated who accept."
Why is this important?
"Untreated atrial fibrillation increases the risk of serious complications, such as stroke, heart failure, dementia and death. Some 20,000 people in Sweden suffer a stroke every year and roughly a third of these strokes are related to atrial fibrillation. A stroke can cause lasting problems that affect the patient's quality of life and drive up healthcare costs. We need to learn more about who runs the highest risk of atrial fibrillation and about which methods of examination are most efficacious, best accepted by patients and most cost-effective."
About Johan Engdahl
Professor of Cardiology with a focus on Arrhythmia Diseases at the Department of Clinical Sciences, Danderyd Hospital
Johan Engdahl was born in 1968 in Hässleholm. He studied medicine in Umeå and Gothenburg, earning his PhD at Gothenburg University in 2002 with a thesis on out-of-hospital cardiac arrest. He was senior lecturer at Copenhagen University from 2009 to 2015. He has been a consultant at Danderyd Hospital's Department of cardiology since 2016, and a senior lecturer at Karolinska Institutet since 2017. Johan Engdahl was appointed Professor at Karolinska Institutet on 1 December 2024.
