University of Edinburgh

Academic Institute

No

CCU074

This project aims to improve the design of clinical studies of intracerebral haemorrhage (ICH), a type of stroke caused by bleeding in the brain. It’s important that sufficient numbers of people take part in a research study, to get a precise result. Often, we don’t manage to recruit enough people . It’s also important that the people taking part in a study are similar to people in the general population who have the condition, but people who take part in studies are often different to the average patient. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, we and other researchers would usually invite people to take part in research either in person or by post, using basic information held about them in their electronic health records. These methods can be slow or inaccurate. More recently, studies have used more detailed information in health records to accelerate COVID-19 research . We want to use detailed information in health records to identify people to take part in a study of ICH. However, during the Covid-19 pandemic fewer people were admitted to hospital with stroke compared to the three previous years. It is unclear why this happened and if patients can be identified in the same way as they were before the pandemic. We want to find out if using detailed information in health records might help us: • identify people with ICH who could be invited to take part research, and understand if this has changed during and since the pandemic • identify people who have not been well-represented in research in the past, and see if the pandemic changed how we can identify these people for research.

We will use this knowledge to design how we approach people by post for a study funded by the BHF, which will include thousands of people diagnosed with ICH before, during and since the Covid-19 pandemic. Our findings could help researchers designing other clinical trials in the future. Visit the BHF Data Science Centre website for more detailed information about project outputs. https://bhfdatasciencecentre.org/projects/ccu074/

This project used the following derived datasets within the CVD-COVID-UK/ COVID-IMPACT TRE: - Sentinel Stroke National Audit Programme Clinical Dataset - GPES Data for Pandemic Planning and Research (COVID-19)

23/11/2023

De-Personalised

TRE