Lucy Carpenter's 1996-97 Annual Research Report

Lucy Carpenter (Faculty Fellow) spent the year on leave of absence from College and her University Lectureship in Statistical Epidemiology while working with the Medical Council Programme on AIDS in Uganda. The Programme is engaged in a number of large-scale epidemiological studies of various aspects of the HIV epidemic in rural Uganda. The data collected are providing valuable information about the course of the HIV epidemic, progression of disease in HIV infected individuals, and the effectiveness and efficacy of different interventions to reduce the risks of HIV transmission and to prolong healthy life in HIV infected individuals. One specific area of research in which she has been engaged this year involved investigating the possible effect of HIV infection on fertility rates. Total fertility rates in the MRC general population cohort, which is located in rural SW Uganda, declined from 7 births per woman aged 15-49 in 1990 to 6.1 births in 1996. Women with HIV infection had 25% lower fertility rates than uninfected women after adjusting for age. Although the reasons for the reduced fertility are unclear, this finding has potentially important implications for the interpretation of data on HIV infection rates obtained from ante-natal clinic attenders, which are widely used in sub-Saharan Africa for monitoring the HIV epidemic. This work was presented at the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population conference on the socio-demographic impact of AIDS in Africa, held in Durban earlier in the year. During the year, a number of publications appeared relating to work described in previous annual reports. These are listed below.

Publications

(with A J Swerdlow, N T Fear) ‘Mortality of Doctors in Different Specialties: Findings from a Cohort of 20,000 NHS Hospital Consultants’, Occupational and Environmental Medicine, 54, 1997.

(with M F G Murphy, M J M Broeders, J Gunnarskog , D A Leon) ‘Breast Cancer Risk in Mothers of Twins’, British Journal of Cancer, 75, 1997.

(with F Sindhu, K Seers) ‘Development of a Tool to Rate the Quality Assessment of Randomized Controlled Trials using a Delphi Technique’, Journal of Advanced Nursing, 25, 1997.