CURRICULUM VITAE - LARS BRATTSTRÖM

Before his medical education and training LB was a seaman, become educated sea captain and worked until 1967 in the Swedish merchant navy. He is also captain in the Royal Swedish Navy reserve. After business school 1968 he was sales manager but quit and attended in1976 medical school at the University of Lund, Sweden. He became MD 1982, and specialist in neurology in 1988. Since 1991 he is senior consultant neurologist at the Department of Medicine, Kalmar Hospital, Kalmar, Sweden and since1992 associate professor of neurology, University of Lund, Sweden.

In 1981 LB became interested in homocysteine and cardiovascular disease. Since then almost all his research has been within this field and he is an author of 38 papers on this subject. His group was first to show elevated plasma homocysteine levels in cerebrovascular disease (1984), the marked homocysteine-lowering effect of folic acid therapy in normal subjects(1985, 1988) and in hyperhomocysteinemic patients with vascular disease (1990). They were also first to study plasma homocysteine in patients with venous thromboembolism (1991) and early in showing elevated plasma homocysteine levels in vitamin B12 deficiency and their normalisation after vitamin B12 replenishment (1988). Recently, LB and David Wilcken, who is the Nestor of the homocysteine-cardiovascular disease field of research, have in a perspective paper highlighted several factors that contradict a causal role of mild hyperhomocysteinemia in atherogenesis and proposed a Reverse Causality Hypothesis.