Cancer Projects
Cancer diagnosis in emergency setting, type of cancer, and socioeconomic inequalities
Cancer diagnosed following an emergency department attendance is often associated with late cancer diagnosis and poor outcomes. We do not know which cancer types or which patient groups are more likely to get their cancer diagnosis via emergency department attendance.
We will compare the rate of cancer diagnosed via emergency department attendance across different cancer types, age, sex, and socio-economic status. We will compare these rates vary based on the number of health conditions that people have. Finally, we will compare the cancer diagnosis rates before and after the Covid-19 pandemic to study the influence of the pandemic on cancer diagnosis trends.
Lead Investigator: Dr Bhautesh Jani
Characterising risk factors and pathways of cancer patients leading to heart failure
Innovative and effective therapies have increased the survival of patients with cancer substantially but might cause cardiovascular (CV) toxicity, potentially leading to cardiac dysfunction or overt heart failure (HF). Advances in the treatment of HF mean that fewer patients are dying of CV disease and more are dying from infections and cancer.
We aim to characterise risk factors and pathways of disease leading to HF in patients with various forms of cancer and vice versa and study the associations with outcomes, including hospitalisations and risk of premature death, in patients who have one, both, or neither conditions.
This proposal is ambitious, complex and will require linkage with ECG and echocardiography data, but it will lead to a series of publications that can contribute to addressing an important, growing clinical problem. This work will also strengthen ongoing, international, multi-disciplinary collaboration.
Lead Investigator: Dr Antonio Iaconelli
Improving early detection of pancreatic cancer
Pancreatic cancer continues to be a devastating cancer with poor outcomes despite improvement in outcome of many other cancer types. Unfortunately, the low annual incidence of pancreatic cancer makes routine screening extremely difficult and therefore a strategy to identify at-risk population is urgently needed to enable a screening programme for early detection of pancreatic cancer.
Recent studies have shown some relationship between new onset diabetes, with unusual presentation, and pancreatic cancer development. Whilst diabetes is a common diagnosis, pancreatic cancer is relatively low in incidence, and therefore, performing a CT scan on every new diabetes diagnosis is not practical or economical. This project will look to develop a pancreatic cancer risk prediction tool in patients with new onset diabetes, using population-based dataset of new diabetes diagnosis with and without development of pancreatic cancer, compared to groups of people without a diabetes diagnosis.