New research register set to advance Danish research

How are diseases passed down through generations? Why do some people develop a disease while others with the same genetic predisposition do not? And how do social conditions affect the health of families over time?

These questions will now be easier to answer thanks to the Danish Multigeneration Register (MGR) – a unique research infrastructure that gives researchers new opportunities to understand topics from hereditary diseases and mental health disorders to social inequality as a factor in health outcomes.

Denmark is internationally recognized for its high-quality research registers. However, for people born before family information became part of the Danish Civil Registration System (Det Centrale Personregister, CPR), information on family relationships is missing. The Multigeneration Register fills this gap, enabling researchers to study the relationships between genetic and environmental factors, and social conditions across more generations than previously possible.

A grant of DKK 10 million from the Novo Nordisk Foundation (Novo Nordisk Fonden) will fund a three-year continuation of the project. This will enable the register to cover all people born in Denmark from 1940 onwards, as well as a large proportion of those born between 1920 and 1939.

The Multigeneration Register is based on parish registers (kirkebøger) from the Danish National Archives, which have meticulously documented births, family relationships and deaths over several centuries. Using advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning, the archives has digitised and structured these data so they can be linked to the Danish Civil Registration System (CPR). This has required the development of specialised AI models capable of reading hand-written names, dates and family relationships with high precision.

Project manager at the Danish National Archives, Jeppe Klok Due, says:

We will see much more precise analyses of rare diseases, mental health disorders and other conditions in which family patterns play a crucial role. We will also gain a better understanding of how diseases, social conditions and demographic characteristics accumulate within families, from grandparents to grandchildren. This could improve our ability to predict the risk of hereditary diseases and, in the longer term, help the healthcare sector tailor treatments to individual patients.

When researchers can follow families across several generations, it becomes possible to answer questions that have previously been extremely difficult or impossible to address. This will benefit society as a whole.

The project has already launched a beta version of the register, which the project team has used in a study published in The Lancet Psychiatry.

Among other findings, the study showed that although mental health disorders often have a hereditary component, the vast majority of people with a close relative who has a mental health disorder do not develop the same disorder themselves. This type of research can help improve the prevention of mental health disorders and contribute to reducing stigma.