Three independently funded projects for Professor Linda Sharp and Dr Laura Woods. By Dr Laura Woods

Three independently funded projects for Professor Linda Sharp and Dr Laura Woods. By Dr Laura Woods

 

Across multiple independently-funded projects Professor Linda Sharp and Dr Laura Woods are seeking to develop a more comprehensive understanding of what underpins social differences in the proportion of patients whose cancers are diagnosed too late to be treated effectively, and what specific impactful routes exist to reduce these inequalities. Each of the three research projects make use of existing, routinely collected data on cancer patients, their diagnoses, their treatment and healthcare, as well as other, widely available data on the nature of different communities, geographies and localities.

The first project seeks to identify areas with particularly low take up of cancer screening, going on to use new statistical techniques to find out if there are similarities between such places. The results from this project will offer a different perspective on the challenges associated with screening attendance, as well as enable screening services to be more appropriately designed to reach communities where fewer people are screened.

A second project will develop a better understanding of patterns in head and neck cancer incidence (who has cancer?) and survival of these patients (how long do they live?) across England, with a focus on the pre- and peri-pandemic periods. The will examine how patterns in head and neck cancer vary by stage, age, deprivation and region, and whether these have changed (or not) over time. The planned analyses will provide crucial data to head and neck cancer clinicians and policy makers on current needs and priorities in head and neck cancer care, information which has not been unavailable for many years, and will help them better identify the current challenges in this very lethal cancer.

The third project will examine adherence to endocrine therapy (tamoxifen and similar drugs) amongst women in England who have been diagnosed with breast cancer, in order to better understand whether this is a factor in explaining inequalities in long-term survival between different deprivation groups and amongst different ethnicities. They will utilise primary care data to determine the proportions of women who take endocrine therapy as recommended, for how long, and whether patterns of therapy adherence explain inequalities in breast cancer outcomes.