Henrik Hjalgrim

Research Areas

Our group has a long standing scientific interest in the causes of chronic diseases with a focus on the role of early life exposures for diseases of the immune system such as lymphatic cancers, auto-immune and allergic conditions.

Our chief research instrument is the unique Danish registers, which we combine with other sources of data, such as administrative databases or biobanks, many of which we have established ourselves. This includes a nationwide database of daycare, recently used to demonstrate lasting health effects of early daycare enrolment; and a similarly nationwide database of blood donations and transfusions used in close to 40 papers on hemovigilance, several in high impact journals.

Our experience also covers the execution of interview-based case-control and cohort studies, e.g. the ongoing Danish Blood Donor Study with more than 100,000 participants from whom both questionnaire and blood samples are available.
We are well-versed in a wide variety of study designs and methods, from purely register-based to genome-wide association investigations. Our track-record includes both medical scientific papers in JNCI, N Engl J Med, Lancet, PNAS, Cancer Res, and Nature Genetics among others as well as statistical methods papers and tools.