Did you know that half a million children die every year of a completely treatable disease? Can you imagine what it would be like to be pregnant or have children in a low-income country where this disease is prevalent? This is the reality for many people all over the world. And while it is indeed preventable, malaria kills millions each year because of sparse access to health care. Danish postdoc Line Hjort saw the extent of this when she went to a rural village in Tanzania. There, she joined a local research team studying the impact of malaria on children and pregnant women, such as malaria d ..read more

How many child development issues go unnoticed in the flurry of short doctor's appointments and limited home visits? How do you properly detect and identify mental health issues in adolescents living with chronic disease? Maybe it’s time to prioritise and optimise a sometimes overlooked screening tool in clinical practice: Questionnaires. MD and PhD Kevin Mark’s talk “Missing Maria, Identifying Anna” revolves around implementing and improving identification systems for developmental and mental health in childhood and adolescence. In Kevin’s talk, we are first introduced to Maria – a child wh ..read more

Is the scientific publication, as we know it, dead? This was the central question behind the theme for this year’s DDEA Postdoc Summit Challenge. Researchers learn early on to think in terms of impact factors and citation metrics. In an overflowing ocean of scientific content, the pressure to make your publications matter seems higher than ever. Yet according to recent studies, the impact of Danish research has been on an overall steady decline, and papers are generally becoming less disruptive over time. But what is scientific impact and how is it measured? And is it time to look at alterna ..read more

Did you know that having diabetes can affect sexual function? It can even cause erectile dysfunction (ED). And, for a proportion of people living with diabetes and cardiovascular diseases, drugs like Viagra have little to no effect. So how do we find new ways of treatment for a growing segment of the population that is missed by current treatment options? For most men, ED is caused by physical, rather than psychological, problems and is often seen as an early warning sign of cardiovascular diseases. ED is most commonly treated with drugs inhibiting an enzyme called phosphodiesterase 5, PDE5 fo ..read more

AI is dramatically changing the landscape of drug discovery in research today, but what is needed for the best outcomes? How do we overcome the challenges? Artificial intelligence is not the future anymore; it is happening now – and it is happening on a grand scale. Academic researchers and pharmaceutical companies have started utilising AI to aid in drug discovery. Drug discovery is a lengthy and costly process, with average research and development for new drugs taking 10-20 years and costing billions of dollars. New approaches are needed, and looking to AI might unlock potential that we h ..read more

Nowadays science is often driven by patterns in big data. What can we learn from the data and how does finding patterns help us understand chronic diseases better? And, where do we start?  Perhaps we start with human genetics research on a little island in the North Atlantic with about 350,000 inhabitants. Iceland is a small society with a healthcare system rooted in clinical and health registries. As a result, people have been contributing to biomedical research over the years by sharing their genetic and medical data with researchers around the world. Combining this wealth of data with ..read more

How far do you live from a healthcare clinic? Around the corner or across the country? In the Western world we have come to expect easy access to healthcare facilities, but that's not always the case. And, access to health care is essential for people living with diabetes or other chronic diseases, because they need regular treatment and screenings for complications. For some very remote locations, as is the case some places in Greenland, accessing health care can take days. In addition, Western influence has caught up with Greenland and started what could be the beginning of a diabetes epidem ..read more

The open science train has already left the station, but how do we get everyone on board? Perhaps the road to systemic change is paved with incremental change? Our society is driven by scientific advances. As such, studies ought to be highly transparent and easily verifiable, yet that is not always the case. Openness in science is the way forward for improving scientific application and increasing public trust. Pre-registering studies, sharing data and code, and making analyses publicly accessible are just a few of the ways to incorporate more openness in scientific work. In the near future ..read more

Why does one person gain weight differently than another? What are the molecular events that dictate fat tissue function, and how can we use this information to narrow the gap between lab bench and disease prevention? Fat is an intelligent organ. Our fat tissue can be influenced by a myriad of different factors, and it can differ vastly from one person to the other, depending on things like genetics. One person with obesity might be predisposed to type 2 diabetes, but another might not. We need an understanding of how these processes are regulated at the molecular level if we wish to develop ..read more

Might glucagon help us understand diabetes better? And what are the challenges with studying this largely unexplored hormone? The year 2022 marks the 100th anniversary of the first evidence of glucagon-mediated metabolism. From a research perspective, glucagon has long stood in the shadow of insulin. Until now. We are on the edge of a paradigm shift towards understanding the biology of glucagon. Diabetes is a bi-hormonal disease affected by both insulin and glucagon. Research on the overlooked hormone is important, as it could hold the key to new treatments. Listen as an expert in the regula ..read more