dr. Niels van den Berg

Senior researcher

  • Tel.: +31 (0) 71 526 9734
  • Department of Molecular Epidemiology
    postzone S05-P
    P.O. Box 9600
    2300 RC LEIDEN

I am trained as a behavioral scientist (with distinction) with a PhD in molecular epidemiology (2020). In my research I successfully combine these expertises to achieve my main goal, which is to understand the molecular and behavioral mechanisms underlying healthy aging and longevity and identify related markers that predict health and may ultimately lead to interventions and policy changes. My work showed that multidisciplinary research is highly valuable to achieve my main goal and in fact, I was invited by Aging-US to write a perspective on this topic5.

I am dedicated to multidisciplinary research into human aging, mechanisms protecting against (multi)morbidity, and increasing longvity. As researcher at the LUMC and research fellow at the Netherlands Twin Register (NTR, Biological-Psychology) and Lund University I am uniquely positioned to combine expertises and translate findings of the longest-lived to the general population. To accomplish my main goal, I worked with large molecular and genealogical databases from Utah (UPDB), the Netherlands (LLS, NTR) and Sweden (SEDD) as well as register data (National statistics data). I collected novel data, resulting in the HSN-LongLives database which connects over 16.000 living persons to three ancestral generations and made the data publicly available4. I received a Swedish personal grant (250K; 2021), where I connect multigenerational behavioral data to contemporary molecular data to investigate gene/environment interactions in health and mortality from a familial perspective and I recently obtained an internal TFA grant (20K; 2023) to investigate new (genetic) methods of capturing familial longevity. I further received funding together with Prof. Slagboom, LUMC in the ZonMw open-competition (980K; 2021) to include ~800 of the longest-lived HSN-LongLives persons in a novel behavioral-genomics study of longevity and health. Moreover, in 2018 I received two travel grants (8K) to visit Utah for 4 months. Currently I am involved in multiple consortium grant applications aiming at novel data collection.

In my research, I worked with geneticists, statisticians, and behavioral scientists, and performed state-of-the-art research in big data by using novel methodology and statistical techniques. As such, I was the first to observe that longevity is primarily transmitted if persons belong to the oldest 10% survivors of their birth cohort. Based on these results I developed a novel method  to capture familial longevity and used it to show that an increasing number of long-lived ancestors associates with a life-long decreased mortality  and up to a decade of healthspan extension as well as a healthy metabolomic profile in mid-life. The results fuel my current work into the role of social factors, family structure, biomarkers, and disease loci underlying multimorbidity. This work is externally funded with 2 personal grants obtained in 2023/2024: LUMC (200K) and LUF (35K) and further substantiated with a part-time research position at the Health Campus The Hague. My work is highly cited and continuously published in the most influential aging and multidisciplinary journals with open access articles in Aging Research Reviews, Nature Communications, Aging Cell, and Journals of Gerontology.

I developed a large (inter)national network of collaborations for example with the Netherlands and Danish Twin Register, Swedish EpiHealth Center, and Prof Smith’s lab, Utah (US) and I am involved in large-scale initiatives such as the CLARIAH and ODISSEI consortium. I co-founded the health demography network which is embedded within the Netherlands Demographic Institute. I further organize symposia with my collaborators for example in Leiden (2024) Leuven (2022), Utrecht (2020) and Nijmegen (2019). I present my work frequently at (inter)national conferences and university talks (Demography, Biogerontology, DUSRA, VU) for which I am increasingly invited as a speaker (Italy, Sweden, US). Moreover, my work is often covered by (inter)national newspapers and social media (Volkskrant, NRC, New-Scientist, NOS-Radio, Nu). Currently I am supervising multiple MSc students and two PhD students as co-promotor. I am involved in teaching statistics, R-programming, and yearly MSc courses at the LUMC. I was guest editor for a special issue on familial longevity and I am a frequent reviewer for the journals I publish in.

prof. Angelique Janssens

Areas of interest and collaboration:

  • Multigenerational family studies
  • Demography
  • Genealogy
  • Social history
  • Healthy Ageing
  • Statistics
  • Genetics

Main Study populations:

Key scientific publications (Google Scholar):

van den Berg, N., Rodriguez-Girondo, van Dijk., I. K, Slagboom, P. E., & Beekman, M. (2023). Increasing number of long-lived ancestors marks a decade of healthspan extension and healthier metabolomics profiles. Nature Communications, 14(1), 4518. –> Impact factor 2022: 16.60

van den Berg, N., Rodríguez-Girondo, M., van Dijk, I. K., Mourits, R. J., Mandemakers, K., Janssens, A. A. P. O., Beekman, M., Smith, K. R., Slagboom, P. E. (2019). Longevity defined as top 10% survivors and beyond is transmitted as a quantitative genetic trait. Nature Communications, 10(1), 35. –> Impact factor 2022: 16.60

van den Berg, N., Rodriguez-Girondo, M., Mandemakers, K., Janssens, A. A. P. O., Beekman, M., & Slagboom, P. E. (2019). Longevity Relatives Count score defines heritable longevity carriers and suggest case improvement in genetic studies. Aging Cell, 19(6). –> Impact factor 2021: 11.05

van den Berg, N., Beekman, M., Smith, K. R., Janssens, A., & Slagboom, P. E. (2017). Historical demography and longevity genetics: Back to the future. Ageing Research Reviews, 38, 28–39. Impact factor 2022: 13.10

de Kat, A., Roelofs, F., Broekmans, F., Beekman, M., van den Berg, N. (2024) Late reproduction is associated with extended female survival but not with familial longevity. Reprod Biomed –> Impact factor 2022: 4.57

van den Berg, N. (2020). Family matters in unraveling human longevity. Aging (Albany NY), 12(22). –> Impact factor 2022: 5.20

van den Berg, N. (2022). “HSN Long-Lives 2020_01”, https://hdl.handle.net/10622/MVUAIP

van den Berg, N., Rodríguez-Girondo, M., de Craen, A. J. M., Houwing-Duistermaat, J. J., Beekman, M., & Slagboom, P. E. (2018). Longevity Around the Turn of the 20th Century: Life-Long Sustained Survival Advantage for Parents of Today’s Nonagenarians. The Journals of Gerontology: Series A, 73(10), 1295–1302. –> Impact factor 2022: 5.10

van den Berg, N., van Dijk, I. K., Mourits, R. J., Janssens, A., Slagboom, P. E., & Mandemakers, K. (2020). Families in Comparison: An individual-level comparison of life course and family reconstructions between population and vital event registers. Population Studies, 75(1), 91-110.

Slagboom, P. E., van den Berg, N., & Deelen, J. (2018). Phenome and genome based studies into human ageing and longevity: An overview. Biochimica et Biophysica Acta (BBA) – Molecular Basis of Disease, 1864(9). –> Impact factor 2022: 6.20

GRANTS AND PRIZES

2024:  LUF project grant – Understanding the role of genetic cardio-metabolic risk factors in familial longevity (Main applicant: 35K)

2023:  LUMC research grant – Socio-genetic mechanisms of healthspan extension using a novel family approach (Main applicant: 200K)

2023:  LUMC Data analytics collaboration – Unravelling the complex interplay of environment and genetics in healthy aging: a novel approach based on penalized reduced rank regression for time-to-event outcomes (Main applicant; 20K)

2021:  Riksbanken Jubileumsfond – An age-old advantage? Healthy aging in two centuries of Swedish and Dutch long-lived families (Main applicant; 250K)

2021:  ZonMw Open Competition – Socio-genetic mechanisms underlying familial longevity and the protection from (multi)morbidity (Co-applicant; 980K)

2016:  The Professor van Winterfonds (Main applicant; 5K)

Key public press publications :