Dipesh Gopal
Award title: Primary Care Clinicians Career Progression Fellowships
Project Title: Why does cancer come back? Understanding whether socio-economic or ethnic factors are associated with cancer recurrence.
Brief Summary:
More effective treatments mean that people who are diagnosed with cancer are living longer. However, a major reason why people die after initial cancer treatment is because their cancer returns. Preventing cancer returning is an important research priority. Most of the research on why cancer returns tends to focus on the initial cancer treatment and cancer cell types, as well as lifestyle factors such as diet and exercise. Lifestyle factors often exist because of larger societal factors, such as poverty or race, which may affect access to healthy behaviours. Such societal differences in health between people from richer or poorer backgrounds, or non-white and white people are unfair because they cannot be chosen.
To investigate whether there are societal differences in whether cancer returns, my research will focus on (i) summarising all the existing research looking at differences in cancer returning for people from poor compared to rich backgrounds, as well as people from different ethnic backgrounds, (ii) working with research teams to see if local or national databases could be used to investigate possible differences in whether cancer comes back for different social groups. Such work will help identify if and why cancer does return more often in marginalised groups and inform future ways to prevent cancer returning for people in those people from poor or ethnic minority backgrounds.
To investigate whether there are societal differences in whether cancer returns, my research will focus on (i) summarising all the existing research looking at differences in cancer returning for people from poor compared to rich backgrounds, as well as people from different ethnic backgrounds, (ii) working with research teams to see if local or national databases could be used to investigate possible differences in whether cancer comes back for different social groups. Such work will help identify if and why cancer does return more often in marginalised groups and inform future ways to prevent cancer returning for people in those people from poor or ethnic minority backgrounds.
Start date: September 2023
End date: August 2024