Ailish Katherine Byrne
Award title: NIHR SPCR Studentship
Project Title: Using Big Data to Understand Healthcare Utilisation by Patients with Fibromyalgia in English Primary Care
Brief Summary: Fibromyalgia is a long-term condition causing persistent pain throughout the body. It is common and affects around 1 in 20 people. Fibromyalgia is thought to result from abnormal levels of certain chemicals in the body’s nerves, which change how people with fibromyalgia experience pain and other sensations. People with fibromyalgia can experience many different symptoms. This means they often use many different healthcare services. They see their GPs often, undergo many tests for their symptoms with normal results, and are treated with lots of ineffective pain medicines. This can be very frustrating for people with fibromyalgia, who are best served by receiving education about their condition, exercise, talking-type treatments, and anti-depressant therapy. It is also an ineffective use of limited healthcare resources. Understanding how to reduce excessive healthcare use in patients with fibromyalgia is important. This PhD will help us better understand how people with fibromyalgia use healthcare services in English primary care. Its findings may then be used to help with healthcare service planning. It has three parts. Part 1 will systematically look at all published studies examining healthcare use in people with fibromyalgia to see its overall levels, if it varies across countries, if it is changing over time, and if there are features that patients have that associate with high levels of healthcare use. Part 2 will look at a big dataset of anonymised medical records from across England (called the “Clinical Practice Research Datalink”) to see if there are groups of people with fibromyalgia that have very high levels of healthcare service use over time. Part 3 will look in the Clinical Practice Research Datalink to see if treatment with an anti-depressant called “Duloxetine”, which has been shown to help pain in people with fibromyalgia, reduces how often they use healthcare services.
Start date: 8 January 2024
End date: January 2027