About the Project
The project involves viewing the joint effects of tobacco smoking and alcohol drinking in the UK. The key risk factors of oral health include tobacco smoking1 and alcohol drinking2,3. Smoking and drinking can cause oral cancer/precancer, periodontal disease, caries, tooth loss, gingival recession implant failure and other benign mucosal disorders. However, even though abundant studies have shown the negative effects of smoking and alcohol drinking on oral health independently, they overestimate the independent effects4 but ignored the joint effects of smoking and alcohol drinking in the multivariate analyse. So far, studies on joint effects of smoking and drinking on oral health are still very scarce.
This PhD project proposes to view the joint effects of tobacco smoking and alcohol drinking in the UK, starting from assessing the relative importance of each independent environmental factors (lifestyle, age, sex, social-economic status, global region and etc.) and the joint effects of smoking and drinking, using the Adult Dental Health Survey 2009 self-reported oral health status data obtained from Office for National Statistics. At the second stage we will focus on linking the discovery from the self-reported oral health data to NHS dental practice data with cross-validation. Finally, the last stage of the project will focus on one or two aspects of oral health, such as oral cancer and periodontal disease, and systematic review and meta-analysis will be performed to examine how smoking and drinking will deteriorate those oral diseases, independently and jointly.
This PhD project is inter- disciplinary and combines the fields of population health, epidemiology, and biostatistics. If time permits, future investigation of cessation effects of smoking and alcohol drinking will also be performed, including cessation of smoking only, cessation of drinking only, and the joint effect of cessation of both smoking and drinking. The result of this PHD research will benefit people’s understanding on those substance use abuse, its consequences, (how and when to intervene), and its relation to quality of life.
Additional Supervisor: Dr K Vinall-Collier
Funding Notes
Established in 1904, The University of Leeds is one of the UK’s largest universities and is internationally recognised as a centre of excellence in a wide range of subject areas. The University of Leeds have a thriving postgraduate community with more than 3,000 postgraduate researchers studying here. We encourage applications from students of all nationalities able to fund their studies through PhD scholarships, Government scholarship schemes, Self-funding etc.