Tiina Ikäheimo  –  Professor

Anje Christina Höper  –  Researcher

Thor Eirik Eriksen  –  Associate Professor

Kristine Næss  –  Doctoral Research Fellow

Mojdeh Rafieian  –  Doctoral Research Fellow

Christoffer Lilja Terjesen

Marit Nøst Hegseth  –  Associate Professor

Krister Aune Teigen

New PhD project regarding the impact of temperature on diabetes patients

The Arctic climate is changing, and will involve not only warming, but also a higher occurrence of weather extremes and shifting weather. A big part of the working population in the Arctic is exposed to varying temperature conditions, mostly through working outdoors but also through work in special conditions, like cold storages or metal smelters.  
Type 2 diabetes is a common condition in the general population and often also occurs together with high blood pressure (hypertension). These people may have a higher risk of health problems at both high and low surrounding temperatures, compared to those without a disease. The reasons could be because their heart, blood vessels, nervous- or metabolic system can react differently than those of healthy people.  
A new PhD project will focus on these important topics. 

Our PhD student Mojdeh Rafieian started to work with the project  "Cardiovascular Responses to Short-Term Cold and Heat Exposure in Type 2 Diabetes and Hypertension." in August 2023. She has a background of nursing and a Master of Science in Global Health from the Norwegian University of Technology and Sciences in Trondheim, Norway. 

The aim of the project is to investigate how advanced type 2 diabetes and hypertension influences cardiovascular responses during short-term whole-body exposure to both cold and hot environments. The other aim is to examine the association between environmental temperature and hospitalization rates linked to cardiovascular events (heart attacks or strokes) among individuals having type 2 diabetes and hypertension. 

Mojdeh plans to utilize data derived from the "DiabColdHeat-study," a laboratory investigation, as well as data from the "Tromsø study," a population-based study reaching back to the 1970’s. 

PhD supervisors are  Tiina Ikäheimo , Anje C Höper , and Erlend Farbu Department of Community Medicine (ISM) at UiT The Arctic University of Norway,, and there is also collaboration with  Oulu university, Finland. 

For further information, contact mojdeh.rafieian@uit.no. 

Successful session on Arctic Occupational Health and Safety at Arctic Frontiers conference

In this year's Arctic Frontiers conference we could welcome over 20 researchers presenting their work on occupational health and safety in the Arctic.

Occupational health in the North was represented with professor Tiina Ikäheimo and Anje Höper as two of the chairs in the special science session on Occupational Health and Safety in the 2023 Arctic Frontiers conference in Tromsø on January 30th. 

The session covered wide-ranging topics regarding Arctic occupational health. While keynote speakers Samantha Case from The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) in Alaska and Anna-Maria Teperi from the Finnish institute of occupational health (FIOH) in Helsinki addressed prevention of fatalities in Alaska's fishing industry and systemic human factors approach for climate crisis adaptation, others presented research on health effects and challenges with personal protective equipment related to cold temperature at work and more. Topics were presented both in an oral presentation session in the morning and a poster session in the evening. You can see the oral presentations here.

Ikäheimo and Höper, as well as the two other chairs, Kirsi Jussila from FIOH and Hans Pettersson from Umeå university are members of the ongoing Arctic Five network "Occupational Health challenges and Solutions in the Arctic and subarctic regions".  The science session was an initiative from this network collaboration that also includes PhD students affiliated with the Changing Arctic research school at UiT, and Arcum research school at Umeå university.

New publication in SCINDEEP project

Our PhD student Krister Aune Teigen has published an article addressing hand eczema and skin complaints among workers exposed to particulate matter, focusing on firefighters, chimney sweepers, and ferrosilicon smelter workers in Norway. 

Analyzes found that smelter workers face a significantly higher risk of developing hand eczema and also experience more skin complaints in other body areas compared to the other groups. The research suggests that multiple risk factors combined elevate the risk of these conditions. Being a cross-sectional study, further long-term studies are necessary to establish causality. Nonetheless, several other findings support the suspicion of skin complaints in smelter workers being due to factors at work. You can read the full study here.

Scientific publications from the research group

Reports from the research group

Doctoral theses from the research group