Tortoise and hare: Physical activity profiles and their impact on cardiometabolic disease risk

The ‘GW4 BioMed MRC DTP’ brings together the Universities of Bath, Bristol, Cardiff (lead) and Exeter to develop the next generation of biomedical researchers. Students will have access to the combined research strengths, training expertise and resources of the four research-intensive universities, with opportunities to participate in interdisciplinarity and ’team science’. Many of the PhD projects supported by the DTP will be co-supervised across at least two of the partner universities, allowing students to join existing and emerging research partnerships.

This project is a unique opportunity for a student with very strong quantitative skills to investigate the risk relationships between different ‘physical activity profiles’ and cardiometabolic disease outcomes. This project will help develop individualised prevention strategies, inform future policy and assist with technological innovation.

During 2013-14 there were 1.7 million hospital episodes related to cardiovascular disease in the UK, with £4.3 billion spent through NHS Clinical Commissioning Groups on treating cardiovascular disease [1]. In the same time period there were also over 3.3 million diagnosed diabetes patients in the UK [2].

It is widely accepted that physical activity has a potentially important role in prevention of cardiometabolic disease, however, there is still a lack of consensus on the strength and dose-response relationship between physical activity and non-communicable disease outcomes. Convenience for analysis has often resulted in researchers collapsing the multidimensional nature of physical activity into a relatively small number of summary statistics, which has limited our understanding of the activity-health relationship to date. Examples of such summaries include time spent in vigorous intensity, moderate intensity, or light intensity activities, sedentary time, and overall energy expenditure. A key aim of this project is to explore statistical modeling approaches which make better use of the available data. Considering information from numerous physiologically important activity dimensions together [3] may be critical in understanding associations with chronic disease and presents an important new area for epidemiological research.

This project brings together Bristol Physical Activity Epidemiologist (Armstrong), with expertise in large-scale prospective data analysis, Bath Statistician (Augustin), with expertise in methods development for physical activity profile analysis, and Bath Exercise Physiologist (Thompson), who has conducted a trial using individual physical activity profiles in patients at high risk of developing cardiometabolic disease (Mi-PACT).

This project will be best suited to a student with very strong statistical/applied mathematics skills. The student will develop practical skills related to the processing of data in very large datasets, linkage to health records, and the refinement and use of novel statistical methods in survival analyses.

This project aims to:
a) Refine statistical methods developed by Augustin and others to represent accelerometry data as functional summaries and then use these in survival analyses.
b) Apply these methods to the development of integrated physical activity profiles, that will be related to the incidence and mortality of cardiometabolic diseases identified from linkage to electronic health records. UK Biobank, a prospective UK study with accelerometry data on ~100,000 adults, have approved an application (#30473) to use their data for these analyses.
c) Develop a ‘scoring system’ that integrates information from across the activity dimensions to make it easier for people to understand the risks associated with their physical activity profiles, informed by the epidemiological results of the study.

How to Apply:
Please complete an application to the GW4 BioMed MRC DTP for an ‘offer of funding’. Those with an ‘offer of funding’ from the DTP will be invited to make an application to the University of Bristol for an ‘offer of study’
Please complete the online application form https://cardiff.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/gw4-biomed-mrc-doctoral-training-partnership-mrc-student2018 by 5pm, 24 November 2017.

The Research Theme Panels will complete the shortlisting and inform applicants by 19 December 2017.

If you are shortlisted you will need to;
• contact your chosen supervisor(s) to discuss your application between 3 and 12 January 2018
• submit two references and a copy of your academic transcript(s) by 19 January 2018
• attend an interview in Cardiff on 24 or 25 January 2018
Further details will be included in the shortlisting letter.
For informal enquiries, please contact [Email Address Removed]
For project related queries, please contact [Email Address Removed]