School of Social
and Community Medicine - Summer Seminar Programme
The seminars are free, and all are welcome with no booking required. If you have physical difficulties with stairs, we have a lift to provide access to the seminar rooms.
For enquiries, call +44(0)1179287221 or email epzdah{at}bristol{dot}ac{dot}uk. The forthcoming autumn seminar list can be viewed here, while the recent Spring Seminar list can be viewed here.
5th May
Prof. Simon Wessely - Vice Dean of the Institute of Psychiatry and Director of the King's Centre for Military Health Research, King's College London
Time bombs or tidal waves? The impact of Iraq/Afghanistan on the health of the UK Armed Forces
UK Armed Forces have been involved in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for longer than the First or Second World Wars. One intervention has now come to an end, the other continues. But what has been the psychological and social cost? The media tells us to expect a tidal wave of mental health problems amongst those who served there - especially given that seems to be happening in the USA. Given that we fought the same enemy, on the same terrain, facing similar threats and risks, and sadly for the last few years taking the same rate of casualties, we should expect the same over here. But what are the facts? Professor Simon Wessely, Director of the King's Centre for Military Health Research and Vice Dean, Institute of Psychiatry, will present the latest findings from the main studies of the health of the UK Forces, as well as putting these into historical context.
Room LG.08, Canynge Hall, 4.00pm
12th May
Dr. Claudia Langenberg - MRC Epidemiology Unity, Institute of Metabolic Science, Cambridge
Type 2 Diabetes: genes, lifestyle and their interaction
Type 2 diabetes (T2D) is a common, metabolic disorder with serious consequences for the health of affected individuals. The risk of diabetes is influenced by genetic and lifestyle factors, particularly those leading to obesity. Whether genetic susceptibility may influence the degree to which individual lifestyle interventions can reduce diabetes risk remains unknown. The talk will outline approaches and epidemiological methods used to study genetic determinants of type 2 diabetes and associated metabolic traits and their interaction with lifestyle factors, including examples from published and unpublished work of the MRC Epidemiology Diabetes Aetiology Group.
Claudia Langenberg is an Investigator Scientist and deputy group leader of the diabetes aetiology programme at the MRC Epidemiology Unit, Cambridge, UK. Claudia graduated with an MD from the University of Münster, Germany, and trained in epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (MSc), the University of California, San Diego, and University College London, where she obtained her PhD funded by an MRC Research Training Fellowship.
Room LG.08, Canynge Hall, 4.00pm
19th May
Prof. Sonia Bhalotra - Department of Economics, University of Bristol
Is The Captain of the Men of Death Still At Play? Long-Run Impacts of Early Life Pneumonia Exposure and the Sulfa Drug Revolution
We exploit the introduction of sulfa drugs in 1937 to identify the impact of exposure to pneumonia in infancy on later life well-being and productivity in the United States. Using census data from 1980-2000, we find that cohorts born after the introduction of sulfa experienced increases in schooling, income, and the probability of employment, and reductions in disability rates. These improvements were larger for those born in states with higher pre-intervention pneumonia mortality rates, the areas that benefited most from the availability of sulfa drugs. Men and women show similar improvements on most indicators but the estimates for men are more persistently robust to the inclusion of birth state specific time trends. With the exception of cognitive disabilities for men and, in some specifications, work disability for men and family income, estimates for African Americans tend to be smaller and less precisely estimated than those for whites. Since African Americans exhibit larger absolute reductions in pneumonia mortality after the arrival of sulfa, we suggest that the absence of consistent discernible long run benefits may reflect barriers they encountered in translating improved endowments into gains in education and employment in the pre-Civil Rights Era.
Sonia Bhalotra is Professor of Economics at the University of Bristol . Her current research is concerned with identifying and quantifying the impacts of early life health on later life health and cognitive development. In recent work she focuses on the intergenerational transmission of health and, in particular, on establishing evidence that investments made in young girls may transmit to their offspring. She also has recent streams of work on sex-selective abortion, on the political economy of health provision and the impacts of recessionary conditions on mortality and fertility. Her research uses international data sets including historical data sets from the US and Norway, cross-country micro-data compiled from across 70 countries and longitudinal, cohort and cross-sectional data from specific countries.
Room LG.08, Canynge Hall, 4.00pm
26th May
Dr. Vipin Gupta - Senior Research Fellow in Genetic Epidemiology, South Asia Network for Chronic Disease (SANCD)
SANCD's Initiatives in Genetics of Common Diseases in India
Over the course of the last two years, SANCD in India has taken several initiatives in the genetic epidemiology of common diseases such as type-2 diabetes, chronic obstructive airways disease and related risk factors. This presentation will focus on planned and ongoing SANCD projects, along with recent GWAS findings of associations of SNPs with quantitative traits related to type-2 diabetes in India.
Dr. Gupta is a senior research fellow in Genetic Epidemiology in SANCD. He is a biological anthropologist by training, and did his Ph.D. on “Genetics of Type-2 diabetes” in one caste population of India. He is currently working on genetic epidemiology-based projects in type-2 diabetes, obesity and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and has also conducted several anthropological field-works in different parts of India.
Room LG.08, Canynge Hall, 4.00pm
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Half term, no scheduled seminars.
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9th June
SEMINAR CANCELLED
16th June
Dr. Ruth Loos - MRC Epidemiology Unity, Institute of Metabolic Science, Cambridge
The genetics of common obesity - size matters
Ruth Loos is group leader of the ‘Genetic Etiology of Obesity' programme at the Medical Research Council Epidemiology Unit of the Institute of Metabolic Science in Cambridge , England . She is also associate investigator at the Medical Research Council Centre for Obesity and Related Metabolic Diseases and teaches at the University of Cambridge .
Ruth's research focuses on the discovery of genetic variants contributing to the risk of obesity and related traits, mainly through the genome-wide association approach, a hypothesis-generating approach that interrogates all common genetic variation of the human genome. Her team participates in the GIANT (Genomic Investigation of Anthropometric Traits) consortium, with whom she has already identified a series of genetic variants that were unequivocally associated with obesity-related traits through large-scale genome-wide association meta-analyses.
She has also a specific interest in gene-environment interaction to explore whether lifestyle factors, such as diet and physical activity, can reduce the genetic susceptibility to obesity. They recently showed that the more BMI-increasing effect of genetic variants is reduced by 40% in individuals who live an active lifestyle.
Furthermore, Ruth's team uses epidemiological methods in large-scale studies to provide first insights in the potential functional implications of the identified obesity-susceptibility variants as well as to assess their implications on public health and predictive value of obesity in the general population.
Ruth obtained a PhD in Medical Sciences (2001) from the University of Leuven, Belgium and spent 3.5 years as a postdoctoral fellow (2002-2005) at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge , LA , USA where her research mainly concerned the identification of genetic variants for energy expenditure and fat oxidation. In July of 2005, Ruth joined the MRC Epidemiology Unit at the Institute of Metabolic Science in Cambridge.
Room LG.08, Canynge Hall, 4.00pm
23rd June
Prof. Kelsey Hegarty - Melbourne Medical School, University of Melbourne
Domestic violence: The hidden epidemic
Kelsey Hegarty leads the Abuse and Violence research program in the Primary Care Research Unit, Department of General Practice, The University of Melbourne. During the last decade Kelsey has contributed at both national and international levels to the intimate partner violence field. She has developed a program of research in family violence, which commenced with her thesis. For this, she developed a new measure of domestic violence, the Composite Abuse Scale, which is the first validated multidimensional measure of partner abuse and is available in 6 languages. Her program of research is in three areas: definition and prevalence of family violence; mental and physical health consequences of family violence; and thirdly, screening for and responding to family violence in health care settings. She currently leads the first large domestic violence screening and intervention trial (weave) in general practice in the world.
She co-edited "Intimate partner abuse for health professionals" and collaborates on two Cochrane systematic reviews of screening and advocacy interventions for domestic violence. She played a significant role in the development of the international guidelines on clinician management of all family members. She has developed an innovative domestic violence curriculum for general practitioners and she regularly teaches domestic violence and mental health issues to undergraduates and postgraduate medical and nursing practitioners.
Room LG.08, Canynge Hall, 4.00pm
30th June
Iain Mathieson - Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genomics, University of Oxford
Differential confounding of rare and common variants in spatially structured populations
Population structure is known to be a major confounding factor for genetic association studies when genetic variation is correlated with non-genetic risk exposure. Effective methods for controlling for this structure have been extremely important in the development and interpretation of genome wide association studies (GWAS).
Until now, most GWAS and studies of population structure have focused on common variants since, until very recently, rare variants have been inaccessible and difficult to test. Thus population structure in rare variants has generally been ignored. We have investigated the effect of population structure in rare variants on association studies, using coalescent simulations to investigate how the underlying genealogical process affects the spatial distribution of genetic variation and how that, in turn, affects the results of association tests.
We demonstrate that when non-genetic risk is increased in a small spatial area, rare variants are more confounded than common variants and that this confounding is not corrected by standard correction for population structure. We also show that tests which count the burden of rare variants rather than testing them individually can still be affected by this, though to a lesser extent. The confounding of rare variants is most severe when areas of non-genetic risk are isolated and have sharp boundaries, which might result from heterogeneous environment, recruitment process, or measurement. These results raise questions about the interpretation of the next generation of GWAS, and we discuss how these could be addressed.
Room LG.08, Canynge Hall, 4.00pm
14th July
Prof. James D Neaton - Biostatistics Division (School of Public Health) and Medicine, Infectious Diseases and International Medicine (Dept. of Medicine), University of Minnesota
HIV Treatment Trials with Clinical Outcomes: the Juice is Worth the Squeeze
HIV treatment trials with morbidity and mortality outcomes are relatively rare. The International Network for Strategic Initiatives in Global HIV Trials (INSIGHT) has recently reported the results of two large clinical outcome trials, SMART, a trial of episodic use of antiretroviral therapy (ART) and ESPRIT, a trial of interleukin-2. The INSIGHT group is also enrolling a large trial on early use of ART called START. The seminar will address: 1) challenges in the implementation and conduct of these global trials; 2) how the findings of SMART and ESPRIT have changed our thinking about the treatment of HIV and use of CD4+ count as a surrogate marker; and 3) why additional clinical outcome studies should be carried out.
Room LG.08, Canynge Hall, 4.00pm