Benefits and harms of statins in the UK population: doses versus effects
Applications
Applications are open for entry in the 2021-22 academic year, and the main deadline is 12:00 noon on Friday 8 January 2021.
If you have an idea for your own project, or would like to express your interest in applying for a DPhil in Primary Care, then please contact us.
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Potential graduate research projects 2021/2022
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- Prevalence, safety and efficacy of deprescribing cardio-protective medications in older adults
- How people with long-term health conditions use digital health technologies
- Improving smoking cessation training for undergraduates in UK medical schools
- Developing and testing peer-led interventions to promote switching from smoking to vaping
- Interventions to encourage healthier food purchasing
- Organisation and delivery of primary care
- Feasibility of “fitness age” as a motivator for positive physical activity behaviour and improved health outcomes in UK primary care
- Progressing the role and evidence-base for ‘Exercise as Medicine’ in UK primary care settings
- Benefits and harms of statins in the UK population: doses versus effects
- Workload in primary care and quality of care
- The epidemiology of UTI and antibiotic resistant uropathogens
- Evaluating temporal patterns in diagnostic meta-analysis
- Insomnia in menopause
- Prediction modelling in big data: exploring methodological challenges and optimising approaches
- A framework for developing and implementing early phase economic modelling for diagnostic interventions
- Diabetes research utilising the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) Research and Surveillance Centre (RSC) network and Real World Evidence (RWE) database
- Supporting the implementation of self-monitoring of blood pressure
- Scaling up the use of remote video consultations: supporting a socio-technical systems approach to implementation and evaluation
- Using Behavioural Insights to Improve Effectiveness of Digital Weight Loss Interventions
- Preventive care and children’s emergency admissions in the UK
- DPhil in Cancer Science Programme
- Interventions for healthier and sustainable diets
- The effect of dietary interventions in treating essential hypertension in primary care
- Exploring the impact of public health messaging on lifestyle behaviours during the COVID-19 pandemic
- Supporting smoking cessation in people living with serious mental illness
- Real-time benefit-risk assessment of vaccine exposure across a nationally representative primary care sentinel network: cutting edge technologies to prevent disease
Statins, such as simvastatin and atorvastatin, are cholesterol-lowering drugs proven to reduce the risk of heart disease, but they also have known adverse effects, such as muscle pain, rarely leading to muscle damage, and an increased risk of diabetes mellitus.
Both the benefits and harms of any medication depend on the dose, and the relation between dose and effect is typically described by an equation called the Hill equation. However, there is little information on the relation between the doses of different statins and their beneficial or harmful effects.
This doctoral proposal aims to understand the relation between the doses of statins, their benefits, and their adverse effects (harms) by:
- systematically searching the literature for studies comparing different doses of a wide range of different statins;
- using the data to generate dose-response curves using network meta-analysis;
- estimating the parameters of the Hill equation for benefits and harms of statins, allowing comparisons between the different statins;
- analysing large databases of routine healthcare data from the UK. Looking for evidence of benefits and harms;
- combining the dose-response data with the clinical data to assess the risks of adverse outcomes in the general population.
Together, these results will shed light on the appropriateness of different doses of statins, and help inform the trade-off between benefit and harm.
Supervisors
Medical Statistics Group
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