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  • Principal Investigator: Ru Jia
  • 1 November 2022 to 31 October 2023
  • Project No: 615
  • Funding round: FR5

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected the mental health of many people in the UK. Increased anxiety and depression have been reported not only by people who have had mental health problems before, but also people who have never had such difficulties. We know that mental health can affect physical health. For example, studies conducted before the pandemic have shown that stress and depression influence who gets viral infections and how serious the infections are. Similarly, research conducted during the pandemic has shown that people with mental health problems are more likely to get COVID-19, and then go to hospital, or die from COVID-19. Stress and depression can also affect how well vaccines work. However, we don’t yet know whether mental health is associated with people’s willingness to be vaccinated with COVID-19 vaccines or with the effectiveness of these vaccines?

This proposal is to undertake important preliminary work to help us to address these questions in a large database of GP health records. We will consider using the Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD) database which collects anonymised electronic health records data from GP practices across the UK. CPRD has been widely used to study mental health and physical health outcomes at the population level and so is well suited to answering questions such as those posed here

This proposal is to undertake important preliminary work interrogating the CPRD database, to help us to address these questions. However, we need to know whether the data on mental health and COVID-19 vaccines are sufficiently well recorded to enable us to answer these questions.

It is for this reason this proposal will focus on 3 activities:

An exploratory search of existing evidence to find out what is already known on these topics. This will help us refine our research questions.

An examination of the CPRD database to describe the patterns of COVID-19 vaccine uptakes among people with mental health conditions. This will help us identify the methods and analyses we need to extract to answer our research questions.

Formal and informal training of the lead applicant to ensure she has the database skills needed to complete this work. This will strengthen future fellowship applications for the lead applicant.

Amount Awarded: £22,689

Projects by themes

We have grouped projects under the five SPCR themes in this document

Evidence synthesis working group

The collaboration will be conducting 18 high impact systematic reviews, under four workstreams.