Analysing + understanding + learning + communicating
Medical, social, audiovisual anthropology
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Medical anthropology: Three lives taking part in a clinical trial
July 2018
These three people suffer from high blood pressure. They come from different places, they have a personal life story, but all three decided to enrol in a clinical trial to better treat their condition. How this fact changed their lives? I produced a piece that will help you discover it.
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More evidence that could help complement clinicians criteria
April 2018
People experiencing the set of symptoms that are catalogued as "depression" by the standard diagnosis manuals followed by most of psychiatrists and psychologists, can be treated in many ways, these including psychological, psychoanalytical and pharmacological approaches that can be considered as main or complementary treatment.
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Regardless of whether a pharmacological treatment was the most suitable treatment approach, in this work we have studied why some people treated with antidepressants responded well to some specific drugs, whilst some others did not improve substantially. What we found was that it may be necessary to combine multiple patient information, including biological measures as genetic information, and clinical measures as for example the patient's severity or the specific symptoms that were present before starting the treatment, to be able to predict reasonably well who will respond to a specific antidepressant drug.
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The results are preliminary and they need further confirmation in a separate set of patients. The information it provides has the only intention to complement clinician's criteria to select the best treatment for a given person. The results of our study published at Scientific Reports can be read here.
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How to better treat minority ethinc groups
June 2017
People from different ethnic backgrounds, as for example white European and black African, respond in a different way to some drugs. Many scientific studies analysing drug effects and safety only include people of white ethnicity. In this series of conversations that I had with some of the investigators of the AIM-HY study, we will discover their investigation on whether a genetically defined ancestry (which is the proportion of a person’s ancestors from Europe, Asia and Africa), can be used to select the best type of drug to treat a person with high blood pressure.
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Another step in our understanding of neuroblastic tumors
November 2016
We have previously reported that the CaSR gene, which is involved in regulating the amount of calcium in the blood, is active in benign neuroblastic tumors and silenced by epigenetic factors (other factors that have an effect on the organism but do not alter the DNA sequence) in malignant cases. In our last paper we add some more evidence to this hypothesis.
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How machine learning methods can help face the challenges in the analysis of big data sets in psychiatry
14th July 2016
In this review, that I have written with my colleagues Peter McGuffin and Daniel Stahl, we aim to outline the potential benefits of statistical learning methods in clinical research. We first introduce the concept of Big Data in different environments. We then describe how modern statistical learning models can be used in practice on biological Big Datasets in psychiatry to extract relevant information. Finally, we discuss the strengths of using statistical learning in psychiatric studies, from both research and practical clinical points of view. This is an open access work, that you can read here.
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This week: Prediction modelling summer school!
11th-15th July 2016
This week I am happy to be one of the lecturers of the Summer school on prediction modelling and personalised medicine in psychiatric research using modern statistical methods at the Biostats Department, IoPPN, King's College London. This 4 day course for PhD students and researchers in clinical prediction modelling in mental health will provides a comprehensive introduction to the fundamentals of prognosis and stratified medicine research. It will cover all steps of developing and assessing a prediction model. Computer based teaching introduces students the theory and practical implementation of cutting-edge predictive statistical and machine learning modelling techniques using the R statistical software. In addition, of FRIDAY we organise the 1st UK Prediction modelling workshop in Psychiatric research, with Prof David Hand speaking! More information here
31st March 2016
Our last work about optimisation of prediction of antidepressant treatment outcome has been just published at the Journal of Psychiatric Research. In this paper we do preliminary work that can indicate how easily obtained demographic and clinical information from patients could help clinicians and complement their criteria when selecting the best antidepressant drug for a given patient.
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14th - 15th March 2016
What is Personalised medicine? Listen to some possible answers that I got from interviewing Simon Wood (Bath Uni), Aedin Culhane (Harvard), Jonathan Marchini (Oxford), and Giovanni Montana (King's College).
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26 and 27 November 2015
I will be talking and interviewing the speakers of the Workshop in biomedical data analysis at the Centre Recerca Matemà tica - Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
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Award!
21st October 2015
I feel very honoured to have been awarded with the best oral communication award in the World Congress of Psychiatric Genetics, held in Toronto. Many thanks to the committee and the attendants.