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The paper presents some ideas and modeling approaches that are feasible for the study of socio-technical systems. The emphasis in the paper is to discuss two approaches concerning modeling of social and technical systems, and how they can be integrated in order to assess the vulnerability of a socio-technical system. The Swedish railway system will serve as the example of a socio-technical system

Critical infrastructure systems must be both robust and resilient in order to ensure the functioning of society. To improve the performance of such systems, we often use risk and vulnerability analysis to nd and address system weaknesses. A critical component of such analyses is the ability to accurately determine the negative consequences of various types of failures in the system. Numerous mathe

The purpose was to elucidate the interplay between current smoking, anthropometric measurements, and endogenous hormone levels in women ≤ 40 years. Questionnaires on lifestyle and reproductive factors were completed by 269 healthy women from high-risk breast cancer families between 1996 and 2006 in Sweden. Blood samples for analyses of plasma testosterone, estradiol, androstenedione, sex hormone-b

BackgroundResting pulse is robustly and inversely associated with the risk for externalizing disorders and may be positively associated with internalizing disorders. We know little about the causal nature of these associations.MethodsWe examined resting pulse at conscription examination in 369 301 males born 1960-80 with a mean (s.d.) follow-up of 29.1 (7.7) years. From pulse rates, we predicted,

Second primary cancers (SPCs) account for an increasing proportion of all cancer diagnoses and family history of cancer may be a risk factor for SPCs. Using the Swedish Family-Cancer Database on non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL), we assessed the influence of family history on risk of SPCs and of SPCs on survival. NHL patients were identified from the years 1958 to 2015 and generalized Poisson models wer

Autoimmune diseases are characterized by the irregular functioning of the immune system that leads to the loss of tolerance to self-antigens. The underlying nature of autoimmune diseases has led to speculation that the risk of malignancy might be higher or lower in patients with such diseases. However, the rarity and heterogeneity of both autoimmune diseases and malignancies is the main challenge

Background: Positive psychology indicators like well-being and life satisfaction may play a pivotal role in pain-related outcomes. In this study, we aimed to examine the prospective associations of positive well-being and life satisfaction with pain severity. Methods and Subjects: This longitudinal study, with a follow-up of 2 years, included 9361 participants (4266 males, 5095 females; mean age:

Background: Coffee consumption has been shown to be associated with various health outcomes in observational studies. However, evidence for its association with epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC) is inconsistent and it is unclear whether these associations are causal.Methods: We used single nucleotide polymorphisms associated with (i) coffee and (ii) caffeine consumption to perform Mendelian randomiz

Background: BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutation carriers are at high risk of breast and ovarian cancer. Oral contraceptive preparations (OCPs) may reduce ovarian cancer risk, but its effect on breast cancer risk remains unclear. Methods: Combined data from three cohorts of 5705 BRCA1 and 3521 BRCA2 mutation carriers (IBCCS, BCFR and kConFab) were analyzed using age-dependent Cox regression models stratified

Introduction: The purpose of the study was to elucidate the association between smoking and estradiol (E2) and testosterone (T) levels in young healthy women from highrisk families. Cigarette smoke contains multiple carcinogens and is considered a risk factor for breast cancer. However, tobacco also contains aromatase inhibiting substances, but the impact on hormonal levels in young women at the a

Introduction: The purpose of this study was to investigate potential associations between body composition and current smoking in young healthy women from high-risk families. Cigarette smoke contains >7000 chemicals of which 69 are established carcinogens and smoke also acts as an aromatase inhibitor. Smoking is now recognized as a carcinogen for the breast and influences both risk and prognosis.

An increasing number of patients with central nervous system (CNS) tumour could survive to reproductive age. However, it is largely unknown whether the history of CNS tumour might affect pregnancy outcome. We aimed to explore the risk of being born pretem among children of CNS tumour survivors. By linking several nationwide registers in Sweden, we identified 1369 children whose parents were childh

Background: Arm lymphedema after breast cancer surgery affects women both from physical and psychological points of view. Lymphedema leads to adipose tissue deposition. Liposuction and controlled compression therapy (CCT) reduces the lymphedema completely. Methods and Results: Sixty female patients with arm lymphedema were followed for a 1-year period after surgery. The 36-item short-form health s

The development of good writing skills is fundamental not only to publish scientific results, but also to have a deeper understanding of complex subjects. However reports from the Swedish Higher Education Authority from 2012-2015 suggest that engineering students at Lund University have unsatisfactory academic writing skills. Our paper investigates how students of the Faculty of Engineering at Lun

Aim: Species distribution models (SDMs) are widely used to make predictions on how species distributions may change as a response to climatic change. To assess the reliability of those predictions, they need to be critically validated with respect to what they are used for. While ecologists are typically interested in how and where distributions will change, we argue that SDMs have seldom been eva

At present, air conditioning (AC) is the most effective means for the cooling of indoor space. However, its increased global use is problematic for various reasons. This is a correspondence to the supplementary opinion provided by Dr. Bin Yang, Dr. Stefano Schiavon, and Dr. Faming Wang to our paper titled “Challenges of using air conditioning in an increasingly hot climate.” The paper explored the

Long term effect of testosterone (T) deficiency impairs metabolism and is associated with muscle degradation and metabolic disease. The association seems to have a bidirectional nature and is not well understood. The present study aims to investigate the early and unidirectional metabolic effect of induced T changes by measuring fasting amino acid (AA) levels in a human model, in which short-term

Climate change is pushing species ranges and abundances towards the poles and mountain tops. Although many studies have documented local altitudinal shifts, knowledge of general patterns at a large spatial scale, such as a whole mountain range, is scarce. From a conservation perspective, studying altitudinal shifts in wildlife is relevant because mountain regions often represent biodiversity hotsp

Despite a large number of studies, out of all drivers of radiative forcing, the effect of aerosols has the largest uncertainty in global climate model radiative forcing estimates. There have been studies of aerosol optical properties in climate models, but the effects of particle number size distribution need a more thorough inspection. We investigated the trends and seasonality of particle number