Western European Countries Research Articles

HOUSEHOLD INSURANCE AWARENESS VS. INSURANCE SALES IN POLAND

The insurance market world-wide is developing dynamically. New products are being created, but current offers are also being improved; albeit they come with new areas of responsibility. Changes in the market and insurance products are also visible in Poland. Although they are not so dynamic as in the countries of Western Europe, an increase in sales of mainly non-life insurance has been noted year on year. That said, the dynamics of these changes is much lower than in other European countries; as is the expenditure on insurance. So the question arises, what is the cause of this situation? Could it be due to low insurance awareness? Insurance awareness is not only defined in the work as the state of knowledge of the insurance company’s client, but also as the ability to find and use this knowledge and information, to choose a product consciously, to assess this product properly, and the ability to make independent decisions based on objective information, and not subjective opinions and views. The article attempts to assess insurance awareness and the factors that define and influence the same. The work uses the available bibliography, statistical data from the Central Statistical Office, as well as the data from the Polish Chamber of Insurance and the Polish Financial Supervision Authority. An original survey was also conducted, and its results are presented in the last part of the article. As a result of the study, it turned out that insurance sales in Poland are growing. If only on this basis, insurance awareness is assessed, it can be said that the sales are also growing year on year. The respondents of the conducted survey highly assessed their knowledge of the insurance market and products. Unfortunately, the verification of their actual knowledge did not confirm this self-assessment. The average grade was only “satisfactory”; if we followed school grades. The dominant sources of information on insurance, apart from the knowledge of insurance agents, are, primarily, the Internet, as well as friends and family. These sources cannot be treated as fully objective.

Creating a favorable working environment as a long-term goal of EU labor law

The article examines current trends to take place in the EU and Western European countries, providing for the adaptation of the working environment to the characteristics and needs of a particular employee. The article also analyzes legal and theoretical approaches to understanding of the working environment in the Russian Federation and foreign countries.

Polygraph Testing in Criminal Proceedings: Safe and Sound or Swimming Against the Tide?

Abstract In contrast to other Western-European countries, polygraph testing is being used in police investigations in Belgium for about twenty years now. However, until recently, its use was not legally regulated. On 1 January 2021 an amendment to the law came into force which officially regulates the use of the polygraph in the Belgian Code of Criminal Procedure. Yet, in light of findings from academic research polygraph testing in criminal proceedings is controversial. Therefore, these Belgian practices and developments could be considered to be an outlier. Against this background, this article examines the recent legal regulation on polygraph testing and its use in practice from both a legal and criminological-psychological perspective. As such, the article offers important insights for law and practice on polygraph testing and the use of comparable other techniques across Europe and beyond.

FEATURES OF THE STATE NATIONAL POLICY AND INTERETHNIC INTERACTION IN THE REGIONS OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION (BASED ON THE MATERIALS OF BASHKORTOSTAN, TATARSTAN AND CHUVASHIA). PART 2

Studying various aspects of the national policy of the Russian Federation in modern conditions attracts the attention of many researchers. This is due, firstly, to the rapid development of ethnic processes in the countries of Western Europe, and secondly, to the uniqueness of our country as a multinational and multi-confessional state.
 
 The purpose of the research is to study the peculiarities of the state national policy in modern conditions on the example of three multinational republics of the Russian Federation.
 
 Materials and methods. The theoretical and methodological basis of the article was made by the fundamental principles for organizing research: scientific objectivity, historicism, consistency, comprehensiveness and complexity, recognizing legitimacy of pluralism in the research process, focusing on studying the events and phenomena of the past in all their complexity, inconsistency, mutual conditionality, in accordance with the specifics of the historical era, in connection with modernity. Besides methodological approaches, studying the topic of the article assumes mandatory knowledge of the literature and sources that make up the basic part of the research process.
 
 Results. The article characterizes current state of interethnic relations in Russia on the example of three national republics: Bashkortostan, Tatarstan and Chuvashia, which are polyethnic and multi-confessional subjects of the Russian Federation. Choosing these regions of the Ural-Volga region is conditioned by the fact that the titular ethnic groups here are cognate Turkic peoples: the Bashkirs, the Tatars and the Chuvash. When implementing the policy in the field of interethnic interaction in the country, the state authorities rely on such fundamental documents as the “Concept of the State National Policy of the Russian Federation” (1996), the Law of the Russian Federation “On National and Cultural Autonomy” (1996), the “Strategy of the State National Policy of the Russian Federation for the period up to 2025” (2012) and others.
 
 The article discusses the activities of regional authorities on forming mutual understanding and consent between ethnic groups living within individual republics. Each subject adopted special programs to implement the Strategy of the state national policy of the Russian Federation, taking into account its socio-economic and ethno-cultural development. Some attention is also paid to the activities carried out by national cultural autonomies in the national republics under consideration.
 
 Conclusions. In order to solve the research tasks set in the article, the authors analyzed the data of sociological surveys conducted to study ethno-cultural processes in the subjects of the Russian Federation, and examined the assessment of various aspects in interethnic relations by the population pf three republics; a separate emphasis is placed on the views and assessment of young people regarding the relationship between representatives of different peoples, about the level of well-being in the confessional and interethnic spheres. The analysis of the state national policy of Russia at the present stage testifies to the great attention on the part of the governing bodies of the Russian Federation to interethnic problems in the multinational state: timely adoption of conceptual and regulatory legal acts; formation and control of authorities and public institutions responsible for issues of interethnic interaction, as well as organization of their activities; involvement of politicians and researchers in the study of state policy in order to improve it. However, despite concrete steps in the field of interethnic interaction both in the center and on the ground, often of a preventive nature, it is not always possible to overcome inconsistency of the national issue in full, especially for multi-ethnic subjects of the Russian Federation. To one degree or another, there are manifestations of conflict situations in them, they are primarily associated with such a factor of modernity as the desire of peoples to preserve and fully develop national languages and culture. Migration flows and population changes are beginning to play an important role in the regions, which is proved by the population censuses of recent years, but the main thing is the state of interethnic coexistence in the country, for example, on the materials of the Republics of Bashkortostan, Tatarstan and Chuvashia.

From Sordid Sexuality to Ruin in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land

Eliot’s poem, The Waste Land, in the wake of the Great War or the First World War, which was a time particularly in Western Europe when civilization had fallen to pieces, and it was literally, quite literally in ruin as trenches were dug across the fields of France and Belgium and other countries in Western Europe and as the landscape itself is torn apart, finds only death and self-destruction instead of rebirth or any sense of revivification or any sense of life. The poem deals, in its fragmentary way, not only with the aftermath of the war in its physical repercussions but also with the breakdown of social norms, which earlier ensured cultural sureties. In the process the poem, while vindicating the despair of the individual pitted against the unmanageable disillusionment, shows that this urbanscape is devoid of love and seems to be unable to heal itself. What is left is a poetics of despair where the inhabitants of this ruin wait for redemption from their purgatories, and the search for love is laid to rest in pieces. The paper attempts to demonstrate that the fundamental problem of The Waste Land is the broken bonds of love and sordid sex, the primal cause of ruin and waste, all packed inside a montage of myths, left to the readers to sort out the mess till it dawns on them that all the voices, through their different tales, bemoan, chiefly, the lack of love, an idea that sounds essentialist but keeps in tune with its resonance with the poem.

Epidemiological Study of Autoimmune Bullous Dermatoses in Northeastern Romania.

Autoimmune bullous diseases (ABDs) are a rare but significant group of dermatoses that pose great challenges to the treating dermatologist. ABDs are characterized by the presence of tissue-bound and circulating autoantibodies directed against disease-specific target antigens of the skin. Most epidemiological studies have focused on a single ABD. More than that, there are few data about the incidence and prevalence of autoimmune blistering diseases in Romania. In this study, between 2015 and 2019, we retrospectively investigated a total of 225 patients with autoimmune bullous diseases from the northeastern region of Romania. The diagnosis was based on the clinical and histo- and immunohistological findings. Pemphigus was the most frequently encountered ABD, with an incidence of 8.16/1,000,000 inhabitants, representing 58.7% (132 cases), followed by 24% cases of bullous pemphigoid (54 cases), 15.4% of patients were diagnosed with dermatitis herpetiformis (37 cases), and 0.9% other subepidermal autoimmune bullous dermatoses. The average age of onset of pemphigus vulgaris was 59.4 years, the majority of patients being male, while the average age of patients diagnosed with bullous pemphigoid was 73.8 years, the majority being female. Pemphigus vulgaris is the most frequently encountered ABDs in the northeast of Romania, with a higher incidence than in Western European countries, and this may be due to specific peculiarities of the geographical area, as well as to a genetic susceptibility of the population in this region.

Копейный бой в военном искусстве калмыков и джунгар XVII – начала XIX вв.

Introduction. The article examines the features of the formation and evolution of the Oirat light cavalry armed with spears of the Late Middle Ages and early Modern times. The purpose of the study is to identify the role of spear fighting in the military practice of the Dzungars and Kalmyks of the XVII – early XIX centuries on the basis of a comprehensive analysis of written, pictorial and material sources. Results. It has been established that in the Central Asian region for centuries shock spears and pikes remained mainly the weapons of armored cavalry, while light nomads without armor used them only sporadically. During the military transformations carried out by the Oirat and Mongol military leaders of the second half of the XVI–XVII centuries, mounted archers were equipped with shock spears and pikes, which led to the emergence of a new type of cavalry composed of lightly armed spearmen capable of conducting both remote and close combat. During the military campaigns of the Oirats, which covered most of steppe Eurasia, the idea of mass light cavalry with spears was adopted by many peoples of the Great Steppe, including Russian Cossacks and Turks of Eastern Europe (Nogais, Crimean and Polish-Lithuanian Tatars). In turn, the battle on the spears of the Polish-Lithuanian Tatars (Lipkov) formed the basis of the military practice of the Polish lancers, which became a model of such cavalry for the countries of Central and Western Europe of the XVIII – early XIX centuries. Based on the analysis of Mongolian, Oirat, Ottoman, European and Qing written sources, the original name of the Oirat long–barrel weapon of the XVII–XVIII centuries was revealed, which sounded like “jida” (“dzida”). The design features of the Oirat spears were established, the spear fighting technique and tactics of mounted Kalmyk and Dzungarian warriors armed with spears were reconstructed. Conclusions. The collected materials indicate that spears and pikes were the main type of melee weapons of the Oirat warriors of the XVII – early XIX centuries. Spear fighting was one of the key elements of the military art of the Dzungars and Kalmyks of this period. The Oirats had a significant impact on the development of the practice of equestrian spear fighting among the peoples of Eurasia of the XVII–XVIII centuries.

Structuring “education – migration – labour market” chain

Purpose. This study aims at analysis of the research landscape with the current trends, gaps, and potential directions for future publications in education, migration, and labour markets in preventing “brain drain” in Ukraine during the war. Methodology. The research method is based on analysis of chronological nature of educational, migration and labour markets and building geographical, interconnections maps and utilizing Scopus and Web of Science databases within VOSviewer software. Findings. The comparison of subject areas demonstrated the interdisciplinary nature of the study, where “social sciences sector” (48.8 %), “economics, econometrics, and finance” (14.8 %) are leading in scientific literature. Four clusters and three clusters of scientific publications were determined in Scopus and Web of Science accordingly. The following trends were obtained: effect of migration on labour market outcome, economic opportunities of high-quality human capital, student professional development to avoid economic crisis were actively investigated by scientists, as well as crisis due to migration flow among young people at universities, positive effect of immigrants and connection with formal education. The highest number of relevant articles are in the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom. The spatial analysis demonstrates intercontinental connection between researchers of six clusters (North American and Pacific countries, Countries of Northern Europe and the Middle East, Central European countries, island, and peninsular countries of the European contingent and the Gulf of Mexico, Central and Western European countries, Western European countries, and Intercontinental cluster). Ukrainian authors regularly collaborate with scientists from Poland, the Netherlands, France, Switzerland, and the United States. Originality. For the first time, a comprehensive analysis covering all three aspects (education, migration and the labor market) was conducted in order to study the interrelationships and mutual influence of these sectors of the economy. The analysis was carried out on geographical-chronological maps built by the authors based on the Scopus and Web of Science databases. Practical values. The results can be utilized to develop new strategies, policies, and legislative initiatives to ensure improve economical and organizational management of education at universities in a country.

Overcoming the Second Cold War: The Conference on Disarmament in Europe and the Relaxation of East-West Tensions, 1983–1986

This article focuses on the Conference on Disarmament in Europe (CDE), held under the framework of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) in the mid-1980s. By drawing on archival materials from the UK, France and the US, the article shows that the CDE, designed to discuss Confidence-Building Measures ranging from the Atlantic to the Urals, played an important role in overcoming the Second Cold War. Specifically, the article demonstrates that the CDE contributed in three ways. First, by becoming a sole-functioning arms control forum at its overture in January 1984, it de-escalated international tensions through dialogue. Second, by providing a first step in superpower arms talks in 1985, it underpinned US-Soviet cooperation. Third, by becoming the very first arms control agreement since the 1970s, it paved the way for subsequent arms control agreements, both nuclear and conventional. The article pays particular attention to the Western European countries, which played a vital role from its preparations in 1983 to the agreement in 1986. The findings make us reconsider the function of the oft-overlooked arms control framework in the process leading up to the end of the Cold War.

Lower Extremity Amputation and Peripheral Revascularisation Rates in Romania and Their Relationship with Comorbidities and Vascular Care.

(1) Background: This retrospective Romanian study aimed to calculate the rate of, and comparison between, amputation and revascularisation for patients with either cardiovascular or diabetic comorbidities. (2) Materials: In our hospital-based database, we analysed patient-level data from a series of 61 hospitals for 2019, which covers 44.9% of the amputation patients for that year. The national database is compiled by the national houses of insurance and was used to follow amputations and revascularisations between 2016 and 2021. (3) Results: During the six-year period, the mean number of amputations and revascularisations was 72.4 per 100,000 inhabitants per year for both groups. In this period, a decline in open-surgical revascularisation was observed from 58.3% to 47.5% in all interventions but was not statistically significant (r = -0.20, p = 0.70). The mean age of patients with amputation (hospital-based database) was 67 years. Of these patients, only 5.1% underwent revascularisation in the same hospital prior to amputation. The most common comorbidities in those undergoing amputations were peripheral arterial disease (76.8%), diabetes (60.8%), and arterial hypertension (53.5%). Most amputations were undertaken by general surgeons (73.0%) and only a small number of patients were treated by vascular surgeons (17.4%). (4) Conclusions: The signal from our data indicates that Romanian patients probably have a high risk of amputation > 5 years earlier than Western European countries, such as Denmark, Finland, and Germany. The prevalence of revascularisations in Romania is 64% lower than in the Western European countries.

Wystawy polskich awangardzistów w Danii, Finlandii i Norwegii w latach 1967, 1985 i 1986 jako element polityki kulturalnej PRL

During the Cold War, the authorities of the Polish People’s Republic tried to use the native culture to maintain relations with Western European countries, trying to establish a warmer image of Poland in the international arena. An important role in this activity was played by Polish avant-garde painting, presenting a high artistic level and recognition abroad, including in the Nordic area. The aim of the article is to explain the influence of the Polish People’s Republic’s foreign policy on the exhibitions of Polish abstract painting in Denmark, Norway, and Finland in 1967, 1985, and 1986. The research postulate was implemented through the analysis of previously unused file sources from the State Archives in Łódź, as well as articles from the press of Nordic items stored in the Museum of Art in Łódź. Confronting these materials with the literature on the subject made it possible to examine the specificity of the presented exhibitions against the background of the international situation.

High self-selection of Ukrainian refugees into Europe: Evidence from Kraków and Vienna.

Almost eight million Ukrainians have fled their country to escape the Russian full-scale invasion. To provide empirical evidence on how beneficiaries of temporary protection who reside in the immediate proximity of Ukraine differ from those who went further and reside in Western European countries, two large-scale rapid-response surveys were conducted in Kraków, Poland, and Vienna, Austria, in spring 2022. Data include information on socio-demographic characteristics, human capital, and return intentions of 472 and 1,094 adult Ukrainian refugees in Poland and Austria, respectively. Contributing to the growing empirical evidence on consistent assortative patterns in refugee inflows into Europe, our findings show that regularities in patterns of self-selection also occur in forced migration contexts where legal routes to safety apply. According to the analysed convenience sample, a tentative conclusion is that the further Ukrainian refugees moved to the West, the more self-selected they tend to be in the key dimensions of formal educational attainment, previous employment, language skills, and urbanity. Results indicate that willingness to stay in Kraków is significantly lower than willingness to remain in Vienna. This suggests that public financial support and living conditions, rather than diaspora networks, are decisive factors in shaping the decision to stay, move to another location or return to Ukraine. The aim to start a new life elsewhere may drive the motivation to choose a more distant destination instead of a neighboring country that allows to return rather quickly. Host countries should be aware of these specific characteristics of their refugee populations and adapt their integration policies accordingly.

International mobility characteristics, effects of, and effects on elite scientists

Understanding the international flows of elite scientists is critical to science and talent policies. In this study, using the Scopus data of 78,815 top h-index scientists between 1921 and 2020, we investigate the characteristics of the international mobility of elite scientists, including geographic features, mobility types, and disciplinary characteristics. Our results reveal an increasing number of countries participating in international mobility over the past 2 decades, with North America and some Western European countries still serving as centers. Emerging economies have also become important mobility hubs in recent decades. Mobile scientists who have returned to their home countries have become the dominant mobility type, mainly in the form of short-term mobility. The disciplines of physics and astronomy and engineering have larger shares of mobile scientists than other disciplines, and the average flow frequency of elites varies among 26 observed disciplines. We use a difference-in-differences model to analyze how global mobility affects the individual productivity of elite scientists by distinguishing flow paths. The results indicate that international mobility improves the research performance of elite scientists who move to more scientifically advanced countries and that research quality is most positively impacted when elite scientists move to the United States or move from China.

CURRENT ISSUES OF THE PURCHASE OF SOCIAL SERVICES IN INTERNATIONAL PRACTICE

The article reveals issues of social order that are relevant for modern Ukraine. It is emphasized that social ordering contributes to the development of social services. It is designed to improve the quality of such services in the community, create conditions for the activation of the public sector, and promote the effective and joint use of budget funds. The purpose of the article is to analyze the international experience of procurement of social services; description of the features of the modern process of introducing the purchase of social services by local authorities from non-state providers in different countries of the world. Based on the study of the provisions of regulatory and legal sources, the analysis of modern scientific sources of foreign researchers on the research topic, a generalization is made that social services form a general system of protection and inclusion of the European Community. The development of social order has become an effective tool of the market of social services, part of the neoliberal agenda of the countries of Western and Central Eastern Europe, one of the components of the change of the general system of public administration. It was noted that developed countries in the field of social protection followed a common trend of delegating their own powers to provide social services to non-state providers. At the same time, European countries paid attention to their own socio-cultural prerequisites and traditions. In particular, it was important for Germany to apply the principle of subsidiarity, to give greater initiative and authority to local communities to solve their own problems. For Great Britain, the competitive system of selecting a provider of social services in market conditions became a decisive factor. For the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, the acquired experience of other countries in combining both of these factors worked. The development of the individual dimension of social order took place in the Scandinavian countries, Germany, France, the Netherlands and other countries.

Moving beyond the political trust crisis debate: Residual analyses to understand trends in political trust

AbstractFor decades, political scientists have hotly debated longitudinal trends in political trust rates. An important undercurrent in the debate is that any decline in political trust might signal a legitimacy crisis. Yet, descriptive figures are unable to distinguish between two interpretations of these downward trends: (i) declines that can reasonably be expected as a reflection of declining political trustworthiness (i.e., procedural or output performance) and thereby reflect critical citizens who monitor their democratic institutions; and (ii) downward trends that are not warranted by democratic performance and thereby suggest a more fundamental disconnect between citizens and their democratic institutions.This research note argues that residuals to multilevel models of political trust allow us to distinguish between these two types, and thereby provide a better understanding of trends in political trust. These residuals do not only reveal short‐term aberrations to the explanatory model (often reflecting short‐lived, country‐specific events), but also the extent to which a country's trust rate systematically underperforms in the middle‐ to long‐term. To the extent that declining trust rates are lower than explanatory models predict, the residuals express excessive distrust. To the extent that declining trust rates are in line with the explanatory models, the residuals reflect critical, monitoring citizenship.We outline the approach of residual analyses as a tool to better understand trends in political trust. We illustrate the use of these residual analyses on a cross‐national, longitudinal data set (the Eurobarometer), covering 15 Western and Southern European countries between 1999 and 2019. While political trust rates fluctuate in all these countries, we only find evidence for a structural decline in two of these countries. In France and Spain political trust failed to recover in line with improving economic and institutional performance after the Great Recession. We then test the versatility of the tool to different conditions, including retests on an alternative set of countries (11 Central and Eastern European countries between 2004 and 2019) and an alternative dataset with different measures and time points (the European Social Survey).Finally, we elaborate on the two main conditions under which residual analyses offer a useful tool to the trend debate in political trust research: (1) a firm understanding of the object‐driven determinants of political trust, and (2) a detailed coverage of country‐wave combinations to separate structural trends from short‐term fluctuations.

Coalition bargaining time and governments’ policy‐making productivity

AbstractWhat is the purpose of lengthy negotiations when a coalition government forms? Do they make a difference in coalition policy‐making? Negotiations that produce policy agreements between coalition partners have been suggested to strengthen the capacity of coalition governments to make policy reforms. We argue that bargaining time, regardless if it results in a written policy agreement or not, is an investment in future government reform productivity. Longer negotiation periods indicate that the bargaining parties have negotiated deals over conflicting policy issues and have allowed parties to build trust between them and gain support for future policies within the party organization, promoting reform productivity. Further, we expect that longer negotiation periods can mitigate problems of policy conflict within cabinets, thereby resulting in higher reform productivity. We evaluate our theoretical expectations using a data set on economic reform measures introduced in 10 Western European countries (1978–2017), based on a coding of more than 1000 periodical country reports issued by the Economist Intelligence Unit and the Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development. The results show support for our expectations, demonstrating that economic reform productivity is higher in coalition governments that have bargained for a longer time when forming. We also find support for the claim that bargaining time mitigates the negative effect of intra‐cabinet ideological conflict on reform productivity.

The Prophetic Character of Christian-Oriented Sexual Freedom in the Conjugal Relationship in the Thinking of Moral Theologians

In 2023, people on the European continent find themselves recovering after several social upheavals caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as several military conflicts, especially the war in Ukraine. At the same time, however, there is a significant wave of migration to the so-called safe (socially secure) countries of Western Europe. Despite the significant problems that this migration causes for a politically polarized Europe, Western European, but also other countries are experiencing an astoundingly strong demand for labor (e.g. Germany openly talks about the economic need for up to 400,000 jobs per year). This year marks the 55th anniversary of the publication of the long-awaited encyclical of Pope Paul VI, Humanae Vitae, which rejected all methods of artificial contraception. In this contribution, the author attempts to look at the problems of the culture of life in European space through the lens of several ethical and philosophical thoughts. This contribution, therefore, seeks to reflect both upon the rejection of Humanae vitae by modern Western society, as well as consider the propositions of future steps that will help stabilize European society, including the concepts of economics, family, and values according to the said encyclical.

Liability rules protecting waste management in the light of the right to a healthy environment

Some European countries use a complex system of liability to protect the environment through civil, criminal, and administrative law. The purpose of this work is to present and evaluate the constitutional background of the complex liability system protecting the order of waste management in Hungary, in addition to examining the constitutional provisions of three Western European countries – namely France, Spain and Germany – in relation to the topic. Paying particular attention to how the Constitution of the given country regulates the right to a healthy environment.

Housing policy in the social and economic sphere. Housing policy relationships and other specific policies

Abstrakt Housing policy aspiring to have a general social impact, subtracting from the scale of the state, like any other policy in this scope, is conducted in the European Union countries by the public sector. This sector remains a significant point of reference for this policy. The activity of the public sector in the countries of post-war Western Europe varies in intensity over time and is carried out at different spatial levels - also in relation to housing. The public sector has been subject to a tendency towards apparent self-limitation for at least the last four decades. This occurs mainly by reducing the importance of the state and its agencies in socio-economic development. Housing policy is one of the important sectoral policies of the state - including the government and local authorities - engaging public entities, political and social organizations and private entities to achieve the main and long-term goals in the area of housing, which are: creating conditions for purchasing or renting apartments by all citizens; ensuring the availability of the housing stock, i.e. implementing an appropriate scale of housing investments using primarily the market mechanism, and supporting the appropriate quality of the housing stock throughout the entire period of use of the property.

The Southern European Atlantic diet and all-cause and cause-specific mortality: a European multicohort study.

The Southern European Atlantic diet (SEAD) is the traditional dietary pattern of northwestern Spain and northern Portugal, but it may resemble that of central, eastern, and western European countries. The SEAD has been found associated with lower risk of myocardial infarction and mortality in older adults, but it is uncertain whether this association also exists in other European populations and if it is similar as that found in its countries of origin. We conducted a prospective analysis of four cohorts with 35 917 subjects aged 18-96 years: ENRICA (Spain), HAPIEE (Czechia and Poland), and Whitehall II (United Kingdom). The SEAD comprised fresh fish, cod, red meat and pork products, dairy, legumes and vegetables, vegetable soup, potatoes, whole-grain bread, and moderate wine consumption. Associations were adjusted for sociodemographic variables, energy intake, lifestyle, and morbidity. After a median follow-up of 13.6 years (range = 0-15), we recorded 4 973 all-cause, 1 581 cardiovascular, and 1 814 cancer deaths. Higher adherence to the SEAD was associated with lower mortality in the pooled sample. Fully adjusted hazard ratios and 95% confidence interval per 1-standard deviation increment in the SEAD were 0.92 (0.89, 0.95), 0.91 (0.86, 0.96), and 0.94 (0.89, 0.99) for all-cause, cardiovascular, and cancer mortality, respectively. The association of the SEAD with all-cause mortality was not significantly different between countries [Spain = 0.93 (0.88, 0.99), Czechia = 0.94 (0.89,0.99), Poland = 0.89 (0.85, 0.93), United Kingdom = 0.98 (0.89, 1.07); P for interaction = 0.16]. The SEAD was associated with lower all-cause, cardiovascular, and cancer mortality in southern, central, eastern, and western European populations. Associations were of similar magnitude as those found for existing healthy dietary patterns.