Jaakko Tuomilehto MD, PhD, FRCP, FESC

Jaakko Tuomilehto is Professor Emeritus of Public Health of the University of Helsinki and affiliated with the National Institute for Health and Welfare in Helsinki Finland. His past affiliations include the World Health Organization, University of Kuopio, Finland, Danube-University Krems in Austria, and Dasman Diabetes Institute, Kuwait. He qualified as MD in 1973, MA in Sociology in 1975, and Ph.D. in Public Health in 1975. His research interests include epidemiology, etiology, and prevention of diabetes and other non-communicable diseases.

He has been involved in several epidemiological studies in many regions of the world. He initiated the Finnish Diabetes Prevention Study (DPS) that demonstrated a 58% reduction in the incidence of type 2 diabetes with lifestyle intervention. This finding was confirmed by similar trials elsewhere. He developed a simple, non-laboratory type 2 diabetes risk score FINDRISC (Finnish Diabetes RIsk SCore) that has been validated and applied widely in other countries. He has been involved in studies attempting to find out environmental and genetic risk factors with a primary focus on diabetes and cardiovascular risk factors. The most prominent study is the FUSION on type 2 diabetes genetics that has been carried out in Finland in collaboration with NIH and several US universities since the mid-1990s.

He was the Principal Investigator of the WHO DIAMOND Project mapping the incidence of childhood type 1 diabetes worldwide including 100 countries. He also established the DECODE/DECODA studies that have assessed the importance of postprandial glucose for the detection and prognosis of type 2 diabetes and other disturbances of glucose regulation. He has been acting as a member of the American Diabetes Association (ADA), the International Diabetes Federation (IDF), the European Society of Cardiology (ESC), and WHO committees and expert groups on diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

He has been a faculty member in many international postgraduate training courses on diabetes and cardiovascular disease. He has been actively involved in several editorial and advisory boards nationally and internationally. Currently, he serves as the Editor-in-Chief of Primary Care Diabetes. He has received many prestigious scientific awards including Camillo Golgi Award from EASD, Kelly West Award and Harold Rifkin Award from ADA, Geoffrey Rose Award from ESC, and Fredrick H. Epstein Award, and David Kritchevsky Award from AHA. He has over 1700 peer-reviewed publications with >128,000 citations and h-index 164.