Research

Projects List:

• Breast and Bowel Cancer Screening
• Risk Estimates of Developing Breast Cancer into routine breast screening practice
• Policy Research Unit on cancer awareness, screening and early diagnosis
• Faecal immunochemical testing (FIT) for adenoma surveillance
• The validation of interim outcome measures for the evaluation of interventions promoting increased cancer awareness and early detection
• Strategies to reduce social gradient in Bowel Cancer Screening
• Natural history estimation for screening evaluation and planning
• A Comparison of TOMosynthesis with digital mammography in the UK NHS breast screening programme
• Promoting breast awareness and early presentation among Black women 25-50
• UKLS Lung Screening Trial
• Overdiagnosis in the Mammography Breast

Other Activities

• Member of the National Screening Committee
• Screening Editor, European Guidelines Development Group for Breast Cancer Screening and Early Diagnosis
• Member of the Breast Screening Advisory Committee
• Member of the Bowel Screening Advisory Committee

Major Funding

• 2019-2023- NIHR, Policy Research Unit in Cancer Awareness, Screening and Early Diagnosis, £5M 

Recent Publications

Patient barriers and facilitators of colonoscopy use: A rapid systematic review and thematic synthesis of the qualitative literature. Kerrison RS, Sheik-Mohamud D, McBride E et al. Prev Med (2021) (2) 106413
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33412167

A combination of urinary biomarker panel and PancRISK score for earlier detection of pancreatic cancer: A case-control study Debernardi S, O'Brien H, Algahmdi AS et al. PLoS Medicine (2020) 17(7)

EARLY DETECTION OF PANCREATIC ADENOCARCINOMA IN ‘AT-RISK’ POPULATIONS USING A BIOMARKER PANEL IN URINE (UROPANC) Crnogorac-Jurcevic T, Debernardi S, Jach D et al. Pancreatology (2020) 20(10) e14

Use of a GP-endorsed non-participant reminder letter to promote uptake of bowel scope screening: A randomised controlled trial in a hard-to-reach population Kaushal A, Hirst Y, Tookey S et al. Preventive Medicine (2020) 141(7)

Psychological outcomes of low-dose CT lung cancer screening in a multisite demonstration screening pilot: The lung screen uptake trial (LSUT) Kummer S, Waller J, Ruparel M et al. Thorax (2020) (1)

Mammography screening for breast cancer—the UK Age trial – Authors' reply Duffy SW, Sasieni PD The Lancet Oncology (2020) 21(7) e510

The Evaluation of Cancer Screening: Concepts and Outcome Measures Duffy SW, Smith RA Medical Clinics of North America (2020) 104(7) 939-953

Liverpool lung project lung cancer risk stratification model: Calibration and prospective validation Field JK, Vulkan D, Davies MPA et al. Thorax (2020) (1)

Reply to wilson Quaife SL, Ruparel M, Dickson JL et al. American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine (2020) 208(7) 1193-1194

Calculating, Using and Improving Individual Breast Cancer Risk Estimates Brentnall AR, Duffy SW (2020) (10) 309-324

Team

Statistician
Oleg Blyuss, Amanda Dibden, Roberta Maroni, Daniel Vulkan

Study Coordinator
Jonathan Myles

Senior Data Manager
Dharmishta Parmar

Administrator
Oley Begum

Biography

I am a statistician by training, educated at the University of Edinburgh and Imperial College, London. I have worked in the UK, Singapore, France, Sweden and Russia.

For the last three decades, my research has been mainly in cancer epidemiology, prevention and screening. I worked on the pioneering Swedish Two-County Trial of breast cancer screening, on which the UK's national breast screening programme was based.

Since then I have taken a major role in a number of other trials of cancer screening, in breast, colorectal and lung cancer. These include the UK Trial of Flexible Sigmoidoscopy whose results changed national policy within weeks of publication, and the FH01 study of annual mammography in young women at enhanced familial risk of breast cancer, which contributed to the NICE guidelines on breast cancer risk management.

I am currently Director of the Policy Research Unit in Cancer Awareness, Screening and Early Diagnosis, funded by the Department of Health.

It is a collaboration between researchers from seven institutions (Queen Mary University of London, UCL, King's College London, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Hull York Medical School, Durham University and Peninsula Medical School). The aim of the unit is to carry out research to inform policy to promote earlier diagnosis of cancer, symptomatically or by screening, and as a consequence bring down mortality from cancer.

In our strand of the Unit in Queen Mary University of London, our team concentrates on research aimed at evaluating cancer screening programmes, and devising innovations to these which will improve their effect on death from cancer, enhance their acceptability to the public and minimise side effects of screening, such as false positive rates.