I work in the preventive medicine of the future, with the aim of adding not just years to life, but life to years.
Medicine today is very good at diagnosing and treating disease once it has arisen. But many of the processes that later lead to cardiovascular disease, metabolic disease, osteoporosis, and cognitive decline develop over decades before they cross our diagnostic thresholds. I believe we need to start earlier.
For me, longevity is therefore above all about healthspan: how we can increase the number of years we live with our health, function, and quality of life intact. It is not about chasing an extremely long life, but about understanding which factors we can actually influence while we are still healthy.
The same perspective is central to my work with women’s health. Women live longer than men but also spend more years in poor health. Menopause is therefore not just a few years of hormonal symptoms to be treated. It is a biological turning point in midlife and an opportunity to influence a woman’s health over the coming decades. Narrowing the women’s health gap and extending our healthspan are, to me, two parts of the same idea: medicine needs to start earlier.
I have been a licensed physician since 2001, a specialist since 2013, and I am an Associate Professor in medical epidemiology at Sahlgrenska Academy. I defended my PhD at Karolinska Institutet and then did a postdoc at Harvard School of Public Health. My background is in pediatric medicine and research, but the path to what I do today also became personal.
At forty-six, I lay one night fully dressed in the on-call room and felt my whole body vibrating. The symptoms returned night after night, my sleep deteriorated, and eventually I was on sick leave for a few months. I was investigated neurologically for MS and other neurological diseases. None of the colleagues I turned to for help mentioned my sex hormones. I was in perimenopause.
When I finally received hormone therapy, while also beginning to apply the same principles of sleep, recovery, diet, and physical activity that I recommended to my own patients, the symptoms subsided. I started sleeping again.
That experience changed how I see women’s health. I had sought care myself for a range of symptoms without anyone seeing the connections or putting the whole picture together. It is an experience I share with many women. But it also led me to ask a bigger question: how much could we prevent if we started seeing risks and changes earlier, instead of waiting until they had become disease?
As a researcher and epidemiologist, I am trained to think in long time frames, to understand risk and association, and to distinguish between what we know, what we believe, and what we do not yet have good enough data on. I want to know how large an effect actually is, whom it applies to, and whether it is relevant to the particular person in front of me.
My interest in a more individualized and preventive way of working led me on to functional medicine, through four years of further training in the US with certification from the Institute for Functional Medicine and the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine.
Today I work with menopause, prevention, and longevity as parts of the same medical whole. My approach is to measure, interpret, and follow over time. I start from your history, heredity, symptoms, and lifestyle, and add laboratory tests and other investigations when they contribute relevant information. The goal is not to optimize as many values as possible, but to understand which factors affect your health today and which may affect how you feel in ten, twenty, and thirty years.
You receive a concrete, individualized written plan that we follow up and adjust when needed. Lifestyle does the heavy lifting. I use medical treatment when it is warranted, and I also say when it is not.
All consultations take place by video. I keep my patient group small so that I can prepare each visit properly and follow each person over time. It is the same physician all the way through. I read your labs, make the medical assessment, write your plan, and follow it up.
Lab work is done through Synlab, and investigations that require special equipment through selected partners. Within a membership you can ask questions between visits and receive a reply within 24 hours on weekdays.
To me, this is how the preventive medicine of the future should work: personal, long-term, and grounded in science, with its eyes on the health you want to keep, not just the diseases we want to avoid.
The certificate in hyperbaric oxygen therapy is a training credential. The treatment is not part of what I offer.
As a researcher at Karolinska Institutet and Sahlgrenska Academy, I have supervised three doctoral students to their PhD and authored a number of peer-reviewed publications. My doctoral work on HPV and cervical cancer was awarded the Chorafas Prize.
All publications in PubMed under the names Ylitalo N and Ylitalo Helm N, newest first. Checked against PubMed on September 17, 2026.
Nathalie also accepts speaking engagements on women’s health and longevity. See speaker profile →
Beyond being medically excellent, you are very skilled at the human side of patient care. I find you very present and attentive, someone who sees the whole person. With your help I feel sharper and much better. Thank you!
I don’t take everyone. That is good for you, because it means I take you seriously. For our work to produce results, we need to agree on the direction, and you need to be prepared to take the steps we arrive at.
Long-standing complaints without a clear diagnosis. Digestive, autoimmune, hormonal, fatigue. Conventional care has ruled out what is acute and what requires treatment, and you want to understand the whole picture.
Healthy, but curious about how you are aging. You want to measure what can actually be measured, and optimize while there is still time.
I take you on if I believe I can help you, and if you have the discipline to change your habits. Prescriptions rarely solve the underlying problem. Lifestyle and biology do the work.
Start with a 30-minute call or a Health Assessment. You book directly online.