Ill-health linked to sedentary lifestyles and poor diets is a growing problem. Ylva Trolle Lagerros develops apps designed to help people make more healthy everyday life choices. 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?
"Much of my research is about lifestyle habits, particularly diet and exercise, and the short and long-term effects they have on our health. An important part of my research concerns how we can help people make healthier lifestyle choices. Digital tools like apps and AI can give feedback and personal advice. I'm especially interested in how such solutions can be integrated into healthcare and used preventatively."
What are your most important findings to date?
"I've studied a whole series of lifestyle habits, such as diet, exercise, sedentariness and sleep, and how they relate to physical and mental health. It's hard to point to any one finding as the most important, but overall, the studies show that lifestyle has an important impact on future health. Research shows that there are effective methods that can help people change their habits. Digital solutions work for many people, including groups that we first thought wouldn't respond."
What's your next step?
"We'll carry on developing and refining digital solutions that can help people make healthier lifestyle choices. The technology allows us to widen our net, to offer sustained support and lift the burden from the healthcare services. At the same time, we must also work with prevention at all levels of society, from individual and care provider to a structural and political level. It's a matter of combining technical solutions with a system perspective. Promoting healthy lifestyles is more than individual responsibility, it's a collective societal challenge."
About Ylva Trolle Lagerros
Professor of Cardiovascular Prevention at the Department of Medicine, Huddinge
Ylva Trolle Lagerros was born in 1969 and grew up in Ystad. She graduated with a degree in medicine at Uppsala University in 1998, and then took her Master's in public health a year later from the Harvard School of Public Health in the USA. She earned her PhD at Karolinska Institutet in 2006, becoming a docent in 2011 and an internal medicine specialist in 2017. Since 2018, she has been a senior consultant at the Region Stockholm Center for Obesity. In 2019, she was entered on the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences 100 list of key contributors to the field of digitisation for her work on a self-care app for persons with diabetes, amongst other things. Ylva Trolle Lagerros was appointed Professor at Karolinska Institutet on 1 October 2024.
