Jaakko Tuomilehto

Jaakko Tuomilehto is a Finnish physician and epidemiologist specialising in public health, diabetes prevention, and cardiovascular disease. He is Professor Emeritus of Public Health at the University of Helsinki and Chief Scientific Officer of the Dasman Diabetes Institute in Kuwait. He is widely recognised for initiating the Finnish Diabetes Prevention Study (DPS), which demonstrated that lifestyle intervention can reduce the incidence of type 2 diabetes by 58% in high-risk individuals.

Education

Tuomilehto received his MD from the University of Turku, Finland, in 1973. He subsequently earned a Master of Arts in sociology, statistics, and psychology from the same institution in 1975, and completed his PhD in Epidemiology and Community Medicine at the University of Kuopio, Finland, also in 1975.

Career

Academic and institutional positions

Tuomilehto has held positions at several institutions throughout his career. He served as Professor of Public Health at the University of Helsinki, where he is now Professor Emeritus. He has been affiliated with the Diabetes and Genetic Epidemiology Unit of the National Institute for Health and Welfare (THL) in Helsinki. He also held a professorship at Danube University Krems, Austria, and has been associated with King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. He currently serves as Chief Scientific Officer at the Dasman Diabetes Institute in Kuwait.

He supervises doctoral programmes in Biomedicine and Population Health at the University of Helsinki, and has supervised more than 130 PhD theses.

North Karelia Project

Early in his career, Tuomilehto contributed to the North Karelia Project, launched in 1972 in North Karelia, Finland — the world's first community-based programme for the prevention of cardiovascular disease mortality. The project addressed key risk factors including smoking, serum cholesterol, and blood pressure, and was later expanded nationally. Between 1972 and 2012, cardiovascular disease mortality for working-age men and women in Finland declined by over 80%.

Finnish Diabetes Prevention Study

Tuomilehto initiated the Finnish Diabetes Prevention Study (DPS), a landmark randomised controlled trial demonstrating that intensive lifestyle intervention — targeting weight reduction, dietary changes, and increased physical activity — reduced the incidence of type 2 diabetes by 58% among adults with impaired glucose tolerance. The study's findings, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2001, were subsequently confirmed by similar trials in the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Japan, China, and India. The experiences gained from the DPS contributed to the design and implementation of the first national diabetes prevention programme in Finland.

FINDRISC

Tuomilehto contributed to the development of FINDRISC (FINnish Diabetes RIsk SCore), a non-laboratory screening tool for estimating an individual's risk of developing type 2 diabetes within ten years. FINDRISC has been validated and widely adopted across Europe and beyond.

WHO DIAMOND Project

Tuomilehto served as Principal Investigator of the WHO DIAMOND Project, which mapped the worldwide incidence of childhood type 1 diabetes during the 1990s, encompassing data from more than 100 countries.

FINMONICA, DECODE, DECODA, and FUSION

He was involved in several major international epidemiological studies, including FINMONICA (the Finnish component of the WHO MONICA Project), the DECODE and DECODA studies (Diabetes Epidemiology: Collaborative Analysis of Diagnostic Criteria in Europe and Asia), and the FUSION study on the genetics of type 2 diabetes, conducted in collaboration with the National Institutes of Health and several US universities.

FINGER trial

Tuomilehto contributed to research into the aetiology of dementia and Alzheimer's disease, which showed that cardiovascular risk factors and unhealthy lifestyle habits predict dementia risk. This work informed the design of the FINGER (FINnish GERiatric Intervention Study to Prevent Cognitive Impairment and Disability) trial, a multidomain lifestyle intervention study that reported positive results in preventing cognitive decline.

Research impact

Tuomilehto's research spans the epidemiology and prevention of non-communicable diseases, including diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer, and dementia. He has been involved in epidemiological studies across Europe, China, India, Japan, Pacific Islands, Latin America, the Middle East, the United States, and Mauritius.

As of 2026, he has authored or co-authored more than 1,025 peer-reviewed publications and holds a D-index of 263 with over 349,000 citations, ranking him first nationally in Finland in medicine. He has served as editor-in-chief of the journal Primary Care Diabetes and as an editorial board member of numerous scientific journals.

He has been a Steering Committee Member in more than 40 international collaborative studies and research programmes, and has participated as faculty or organising committee member in more than 80 international postgraduate courses, seminars, and scientific conferences.

Awards and honours

Tuomilehto has received numerous national and international scientific awards, including:

Kelly West Award, American Diabetes Association (1998) Harold Rifkin Award, American Diabetes Association Claude Bernard Award, European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD) Camillo Golgi Award, EASD Geoffrey Rose Award on Population Sciences, European Society of Cardiology (ESC) Fredrick H. Epstein Award and David Kritchevsky Award, American Heart Association (AHA) UNESCO–Hellmut Mehnert Award on aetiology and prevention of diabetes Hans Chiari Memorial Lecture Award, Austrian Stroke Research Society Khwarizmi International Award, Iran Great Sheikh Hamdan International Award in Diabetes Research, Dubai Folksam Prize in Epidemiological Research, Karolinska Institute, Sweden Peter Bennett Diabetes Epidemiology Award, International Diabetes Epidemiology Group Bradford Hill Seminar Series invitation (2005) Anita Carlson Memorial Lecture (2006) Research.com Medicine in Finland Leader Award (2022, 2023, 2025, 2026) Research.com Best Scientists Award (2025)

He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2018, 2019, and 2020.

He is a member of the Academia Europaea and has served as Chair of the Finnish Epidemiological Society and the Neuroepidemiology Science Panel of the European Federation of Neurological Sciences. He is a past president of the Finnish Society of Hypertension and the International Diabetes Epidemiology Group.

Selected publications