Archives: Research

Current religious status and impacts on overall self-reported health, mortality risk and variations in cause-specific mortality: a comparison study between individuals with an existing affiliation to a religious denomination and those without.

Current religious status and impacts on overall self-reported health, mortality risk and variations in cause-specific mortality: a comparison study between individuals with an existing affiliation to a religious denomination and those without.

There has been a long history of epidemiological analysis looking at how religion influences population health and mortality, for example in the impact of religion on both all-cause and cause-specific mortality. However, analysis has not usually concentrated on differences between current experience, religious affiliation of upbringing, and no reported affiliation. This latter aspect of religiosity is becoming more important given the increasing secularisation of developed societies and the associated rise in numbers of individuals who define themselves as non-religious.

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November 26, 2019
Vital Events Standard Outputs: Using the NILS and the NIMS to Produce Annual Standard Outputs of Births & Deaths by Demographic, Socio-Economic and Area Characteristics.

Vital Events Standard Outputs: Using the NILS and the NIMS to Produce Annual Standard Outputs of Births & Deaths by Demographic, Socio-Economic and Area Characteristics.

This project aims to use the NILS and NIMS databases to produce Vital Events Standard Outputs on an ongoing basis beginning from 2001. NILS sample members’ demographic, socio-economic and area-based characteristics will be linked to continually updated births and deaths data to produce cross-tabulations by each year available.

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November 26, 2019
Exploring the relationship between deprivation measured at individual, household and area level and cancer incidence and survival in Northern Ireland: An exemplar linkage study using the NILS and NICR databases.

Exploring the relationship between deprivation measured at individual, household and area level and cancer incidence and survival in Northern Ireland: An exemplar linkage study using the NILS and NICR databases.

Cancer is the most common cause of death in Northern Ireland accounting for 27% of all deaths with one in three people developing some form of the disease before the age of 75 years.

Exploration of inequalities in cancer incidence and survival in Northern Ireland has largely been carried out using area indicators of disadvantage (Donnelly et al, 2007). While such research is valuable and provides useful insights into service delivery on an area basis, there are obvious limitations.

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November 26, 2019
How accurate and timely are health registrations address data? An assessment using the NILS.

How accurate and timely are health registrations address data? An assessment using the NILS.

Address information from the BSO is currently useful in its own right as it is important to know where the population is for health screening and intervention.  Furthermore, its value is likely to increase as it contributes to the NILS, and, depending on developments elsewhere, could supplement the traditional census or be part of a replacement based on administrative data. Because of this, it is important to assess the accuracy and timeliness of BSO address data, to know which groups of people and places appear to be missed, and to understand more about what this might mean.

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November 26, 2019
Forecasting Fertility in Northern Ireland using a Time Varying Coefficients Model.

Forecasting Fertility in Northern Ireland using a Time Varying Coefficients Model.

The project builds upon the earlier study NILS 022, Predicting Short Run Changes in Fertility in Northern Ireland. The project assembled a panel of women from 1997 – 2007 aged between 16 and 44 years in each year, together with their characteristics drawn from the 2001 census and the births they had each year from the GRO. The analysis was based on the logit model with time dummies employed as the basis of the forecast model. This was unsatisfactory due to the importance of the trend element in the forecast – essentially the projection of the trend into the future was arbitrary.

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November 15, 2019
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pharmaco-epidemiological study of Anxiolytic and Antidepressant Drug uptake in Northern Ireland.

Recent epidemiological research highlights the importance of area factors on population health, with deprived areas having a greater proportion of physically and mentally ill inhabitants. One explanation is that these areas promote detrimental health behaviours, but increasingly the influence of individual characteristics are of interest. The social drift hypothesis suggests that individuals with poor health may migrate to particular areas, whilst selective migration suggests that the ‘healthy’ move out; collectively these effects can produce distributions of health that are erroneously suggestive of an area influence on mental health. In Northern Ireland mental ill health is increasingly becoming an issue.

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November 15, 2019
Prevalence and patterns of antidepressant use among women of reproductive age in Northern Ireland.

Prevalence and patterns of antidepressant use among women of reproductive age in Northern Ireland.

Antidepressant exposure is high among women of childbearing age in Northern Ireland. A preliminary analysis of Health and Social Care Business Services Organisation Enhanced Prescribing Database has estimated a prevalence rate at 19.2% among women aged 15-45 years for July 2008 – February 2010. It is important to regularly monitor medicinal drug use among women of childbearing age and those in early pregnancy because the teratogenicity of most prescription drugs is undetermined and many pregnancies are unplanned. A meta-analysis of studies found exposure to paroxetine (paxil) in early pregnancy to increase the risk of major birth defects, (OR 1.24, 95% CI 1.08, 1.43) and specifically cardiac defects (OR 1.46, 95% CI 1.17, 1.82) (Wurst et al. 2009). The potential public health problem of antidepressant use in pregnancy depends both on prevalence and risk of exposure.

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November 15, 2019
Income inequality and health: a small area analysis.

Income inequality and health: a small area analysis.

It is now widely accepted that income poverty is associated with increased morbidity and premature mortality. However, for a number of years now there has been some debate about the additional risk posed to health from an unequal distribution of income within society. A number of potential pathways by which income inequality may affect health status have been identified. These include an assertion that societies that tolerate a more unequal distribution of income are the ones that under invest in human, physical, social and health infrastructure, which may undermine the health system and therefore health status. An alternative psychosocial explanation has suggested that the breakdown of social cohesion in societies with a high degree of income inequality may adversely affect health by increasing stress levels.

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November 15, 2019
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