Socioeconomic disparities and its impact on health (Prof. Nathalie Conrad)

Supervisor

Prof. Nathalie Conrad

Second supervisor (if known)

Project title

Socioeconomic disparities and its impact on health

Description of project (400 words max)

Socioeconomically deprived populations are at increased risk of developing a series of health conditions, do so earlier in life, and have more limited access to preventive therapies or treatments - all of which results in considerably lower life expectancy.

Increased risk of ill-health in socioeconomically deprived populations is often driven by higher exposures to key determinants of health, such as smoking, alcohol, unhealthy diets, unsafe living environment, different forms of pollution, chronic stress, sleep disturbance, and many more. Yet underlying biological mechanisms vary by individual disease, likely reflecting different relative contributions of genetic versus environmental factors or different contributions of individual risk factors, and more research is needed to understand these more fully. The overall healthcare costs associated with socially constructed inequalities are also not fully understood, and this project will aim to better describe and quantify these.

This project will build up on our group’s work that investigated socioeconomic disparities and cardiovascular risks. Different large-scale biomedical datasets are available for analysis, including large-scale electronic health records from the Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD) and the UK Biobank.

We hope that this project will help the scientific community to better understand socially constructed disparities and their broader impact health. Depending on the exact nature of our findings, this research could support the future development of improved or more targeted health prevention measures in certain populations.

Our group has led important research that reported on the importance of socioeconomic disparities and (mostly cardiovascular) health, showing for example that socioeconomic disparities increase an individual’s risk of developing cardiovascular disease by about twofold, a few examples listed below.

Conrad N, Molenberghs G, Verbeke G, Zaccardi F, Lawson C, Friday J, Su H, Jhund PS, Sattar N, Rahimi K, Cleland JG, Khunti K, Budts W, McMurray JJV, Trends in cardiovascular disease incidence among 22 million people in the UK over 20 years: population based study, The BMJ, 2024. doi: 10.1136/bmj-2023-078523.

Conrad N, Judge A, Tran J, Mohseni H, Hedgecott D, Crespillo AP, Allison M, Hemingway H, Cleland JG, McMurray JJV, Rahimi K. Temporal trends and patterns in heart failure incidence: a population-based study of 4 million individuals, The Lancet, 2018. doi:10.1016/S0140- 6736(17)32520-5.  

Candidates should have strong data analysis and statistics skills. Experience/training in a clinical specialty, public health, and/or epidemiology is not required but would be preferred.

Training opportunities (200 words max)

The DPhil student will receive advanced training in epidemiological methods, data processing and data analysis for large-scale biomedical datasets, and biostatistics.

Further to that, the DPhil student will receive training in systematic literature reviews, scientific writing, presentation skills, and will work with a strong inter-disciplinary team of epidemiologists, immunologists, cardiologists, and statisticians to conduct high-quality research.

Funding information (if applicable)

The position is not currently funded, however, we will assist the DPhil candidate in securing funding.