The Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study 2017 (GBD 2017) published today in The Lancet! All papers can be found here: https://www.thelancet.com/gbd
For me personally, it's a somewhat bittersweet occasion, as GBD 2017 will likely be the last GBD iteration (or at least the last for awhile) in which I will have played some kind of substantive role in 'capstone' analytic or production processes. While this is, overall, a good thing (i.e., pursuing a PhD and being involved in GBD production, especially the health-related Sustainable Development Goals [SDGs], would be extremely masochistic), I do miss aspects of it. The phenomenal and brilliant people you get to work with, the thrill of coming up with solutions for a massively challenging scientific undertaking, among others. Of course, I have far less nostalgia for the 80+ hour work weeks during Seattle summers; the mental anguish of trying to multi-task and triage everything at once; the heartbreaking conversations of asking your team to spend yet another late night or weekend rerunning models since something upstream from them and thus outside of their control didn't work; and so on.
In sum, I've had some of the most rewarding times of my career working on GBD, as well as some of the most difficult and trying. I'm honored to have worked with so many stellar individuals over the last three years, and I look forward to seeing what they, from Seattle to Senegal, accomplish going forward. Congratulations to all GBD team members and collaborators!
Today I learned...
The subtle differences between screening and testing, as well as predictive values and similar constructs, for epidemiologic studies and public health programs. Elizabeth, one of my cohortmates, helped me hone in on the differences: for example, my mother has a degenerative eye condition (retinis pigmentosa [RP]), and because it's an inheritable genetic condition, there's interest in determining if/how offspring get the disease. But since RP is fairly rare condition (1 in 4,000 people are thought to have it) and effective treatments remain in pretty nascent stages of development and availiability, recommending formal retina examinations and additional vision tests to test for RP is unlikely to provide substantial benefits at the population level. Instead, the "screening" clinicans use are brief patient histories to identify individuals who know of relatives with RP and then those higher-risk patients are recommended for retina tests (aka people like me). I used to have scans of my retinas in my gmail inbox, but sadly I can't find them anymore; in sum, my retinas are nice and clear, without any black speckles or pigment streaks. The latter would have been here even if I wasn't experiencing clinical symptoms, so it appears I'm RP-free.
Today I'm grateful for...
Nolan Myer, who generously shared his Sounders tickets with this little PhD student. I haven't been to a Sounder game in years, and the whole >60% annual salary reduction thing makes attending sports games a little less likely during my doctoral studies. Thank you so much!
Today's best part was...
Going to the Sounders game with a high school friend (Jared Berbach). Though Jared has lived out here for about three years, we haven't overlapped that much (mainly due to my nutty work schedules). We have now hung out twice in the last two months (!!), so hopefully we can maintain this positive trajectory for the remainder of 2018 and 2019.
For me personally, it's a somewhat bittersweet occasion, as GBD 2017 will likely be the last GBD iteration (or at least the last for awhile) in which I will have played some kind of substantive role in 'capstone' analytic or production processes. While this is, overall, a good thing (i.e., pursuing a PhD and being involved in GBD production, especially the health-related Sustainable Development Goals [SDGs], would be extremely masochistic), I do miss aspects of it. The phenomenal and brilliant people you get to work with, the thrill of coming up with solutions for a massively challenging scientific undertaking, among others. Of course, I have far less nostalgia for the 80+ hour work weeks during Seattle summers; the mental anguish of trying to multi-task and triage everything at once; the heartbreaking conversations of asking your team to spend yet another late night or weekend rerunning models since something upstream from them and thus outside of their control didn't work; and so on.
In sum, I've had some of the most rewarding times of my career working on GBD, as well as some of the most difficult and trying. I'm honored to have worked with so many stellar individuals over the last three years, and I look forward to seeing what they, from Seattle to Senegal, accomplish going forward. Congratulations to all GBD team members and collaborators!
Today I learned...
The subtle differences between screening and testing, as well as predictive values and similar constructs, for epidemiologic studies and public health programs. Elizabeth, one of my cohortmates, helped me hone in on the differences: for example, my mother has a degenerative eye condition (retinis pigmentosa [RP]), and because it's an inheritable genetic condition, there's interest in determining if/how offspring get the disease. But since RP is fairly rare condition (1 in 4,000 people are thought to have it) and effective treatments remain in pretty nascent stages of development and availiability, recommending formal retina examinations and additional vision tests to test for RP is unlikely to provide substantial benefits at the population level. Instead, the "screening" clinicans use are brief patient histories to identify individuals who know of relatives with RP and then those higher-risk patients are recommended for retina tests (aka people like me). I used to have scans of my retinas in my gmail inbox, but sadly I can't find them anymore; in sum, my retinas are nice and clear, without any black speckles or pigment streaks. The latter would have been here even if I wasn't experiencing clinical symptoms, so it appears I'm RP-free.
Today I'm grateful for...
Nolan Myer, who generously shared his Sounders tickets with this little PhD student. I haven't been to a Sounder game in years, and the whole >60% annual salary reduction thing makes attending sports games a little less likely during my doctoral studies. Thank you so much!
Today's best part was...
Going to the Sounders game with a high school friend (Jared Berbach). Though Jared has lived out here for about three years, we haven't overlapped that much (mainly due to my nutty work schedules). We have now hung out twice in the last two months (!!), so hopefully we can maintain this positive trajectory for the remainder of 2018 and 2019.
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