Publications by authors named "Andy Boyd"

To critically evaluate sport nutrition services available to male and female international rugby unions. Fifteen participants, representing 16 international rugby unions, including nine female and seven male teams (one participant worked with both a female and male union), responded to an online survey. Twelve of the unions recruited were ranked in the top 10 globally by World Rugby.

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Introduction: Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD) is one of the leading non-genetic causes of developmental disability worldwide and is thought to be particularly common in the UK. Despite this, there is a lack of data on FASD in the UK.

Objective: To conduct public and professional involvement work to establish stakeholder views on the feasibility, acceptability, key purposes, and design of a national linked longitudinal research database for FASD in the UK.

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Article Synopsis
  • The text indicates that a correction has been made to a previously published article.
  • The article in question is associated with the DOI: 10.3389/fpsyt.2024.1352077.
  • This correction aims to address errors or clarify information presented in the original publication.
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Introduction: Careful development and evaluation of data linkage methods is limited by researcher access to personal identifiers. One solution is to generate synthetic identifiers, which do not pose equivalent privacy concerns, but can form a 'gold-standard' linkage algorithm training dataset. Such data could help inform choices about appropriate linkage strategies in different settings.

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Background: The genetic and environmental aetiology of autistic and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) traits is known to vary spatially, but does this translate into variation in the association of specific common genetic variants?

Methods: We mapped associations between polygenic scores for autism and ADHD and their respective traits in the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (N = 4,255-6,165) across the area surrounding Bristol, UK, and compared them to maps of environments associated with the prevalence of autism and ADHD.

Results: Our results suggest genetic associations vary spatially, with consistent patterns for autistic traits across polygenic scores constructed at different p-value thresholds. Patterns for ADHD traits were more variable across thresholds.

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Background: Observational studies have described associations of maternal smoking during pregnancy with intellectual disability (ID) in the exposed offspring. Whether these results reflect a causal effect or unmeasured confounding is still unclear.

Methods: Using a UK-based prospectively collected birth cohort (the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children) of 13,479 children born between 1991 and 1992, we assessed the relationship between maternal smoking at 18 weeks' gestation and offspring risk of ID, ascertained through multiple sources of linked information including primary care diagnoses and education records.

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The purpose of this study was to quantify the total energy expenditure (TEE) of international female rugby union players. Fifteen players were assessed over 14 days throughout an international multi-game tournament, which represented two consecutive one-match microcycles. Resting metabolic rate (RMR) and TEE were assessed by indirect calorimetry and doubly labelled water, respectively.

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Importance: Growing evidence associates air pollution exposure with various psychiatric disorders. However, the importance of early-life (eg, prenatal) air pollution exposure to mental health during youth is poorly understood, and few longitudinal studies have investigated the association of noise pollution with youth mental health.

Objectives: To examine the longitudinal associations of air and noise pollution exposure in pregnancy, childhood, and adolescence with psychotic experiences, depression, and anxiety in youths from ages 13 to 24 years.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study investigates how health behaviors like smoking, physical inactivity, and alcohol use may mediate the relationship between depression, anxiety, and different types of cancer, including lung and breast cancer.
  • Utilizing data from 18 cohorts with a total of 319,613 participants, the researchers performed two-stage meta-analyses to analyze these associations and calculate the mediating effects.
  • Results showed that smoking and physical inactivity significantly mediated links between depression, anxiety, and lung cancer, highlighting the importance of smoking cessation programs for individuals dealing with mental health issues.
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Introduction: Trusted Research Environments (TREs) are secure computing environments that provide access to data for approved researchers to use in studies that can save and improve lives. TREs rely on Data Access Agreements (DAAs) to bind researchers and their organisations to the terms and conditions of accessing the infrastructure and data use. However, DAAs can be overly lengthy, complex, and can contain outdated terms from historical data sharing agreements for physical exchange of data.

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This study sought to assess the validity of contact involvement (CI) detection using microsensor technology (MST, Catapult Vector) within the context of a Tier One national rugby union (RU) squad, consisting of 44 players. Sensitivity of MST units to detect CI and scrums was assessed in eight test matches, by comparison with match data obtained by video analysis. This paper is the first to assess the sensitivity of MST to the full range of skilled CI which occur in RU, including evaluating "non-performance" collisions, such as incidental collisions or foul play.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study investigates the role of psychosocial factors, like depression and anxiety, in how health behaviors (such as smoking and alcohol use) influence cancer incidence.
  • Utilizing data from 437,827 participants and 22 cohorts, researchers performed meta-analyses to assess potential interactions between psychosocial factors and health behaviors across various types of cancer.
  • Results showed no significant interactions or clear patterns; the risk of cancer linked to health behaviors appeared consistent regardless of the presence of psychosocial stress.
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Accurately diagnosing asthma can be challenging. We aimed to derive and validate a prediction model to support primary care clinicians assess the probability of an asthma diagnosis in children and young people. The derivation dataset was created from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) linked to electronic health records.

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The Twins Early Development Study (TEDS) is a longitudinal study following a cohort of twins born 1994-1996 in England and Wales. Of the 13,759 families who originally consented to take part, over 10,000 families remain enrolled in the study. The current focus of TEDS is on mental health in the mid-twenties.

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Longitudinal population studies (LPS) have a long history of providing insights into how individual consumption patterns and other lifestyle choices affect health and socio-economic outcomes. LPS typically operate as research databanks, integrating rich and deep phenotypic data - covering diverse aspects of individual, family and household status - with genomic data and linked records on health and socio-economic outcomes. However, individual consumption and behavioural choices are traditionally studied solely using self-report methods which are prone to known biases.

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Introduction: Following the acute phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, record numbers of people became economically inactive (i.e., neither working nor looking for work), or non-employed (including unemployed job seekers and economically inactive people).

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This data note describes a new resource for crime-related research: the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) linked to regional police records. The police data were provided by Avon & Somerset Police (A&SP), whose area of responsibility contains the ALSPAC recruitment area. In total, ALSPAC had permission to link to crime records for 12,662 of the 'study children' (now adults, who were born in the early 1990s).

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Article Synopsis
  • Depression and anxiety have been studied as potential risk factors for various types of cancer, but previous research has produced inconclusive results.
  • The PSY-CA consortium analyzed data from 18 cohorts, including over 319,000 participants, to investigate the relationship between these mental health conditions and cancer incidence using detailed statistical methods.
  • The findings revealed no significant links between depression or anxiety and most cancer types, although there was a slight association with lung and smoking-related cancers, which diminished after accounting for other risk factors like smoking and alcohol consumption.
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Objectives: To examine whether there is an association between people who experienced disrupted access to healthcare during the covid-19 pandemic and risk of an avoidable hospital admission.

Design: Observational analysis using evidence from seven linked longitudinal cohort studies for England.

Setting: Studies linked to electronic health records from NHS Digital from 1 March 2020 to 25 August 2022.

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Intellectual disability (ID) describes a neurodevelopmental condition involving impaired cognitive and functional ability. Here, we describe a multisource variable of ID using data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC).  The multisource indicator variable for ID was derived from i) IQ scores less than 70 measured at age 8 and at age 15, ii) free text fields from parent reported questionnaires, iii) school reported provision of educational services for individuals with a statement of special educational needs for cognitive impairments, iv) from relevant READ codes contained in GP records, iv) international classification of disease diagnoses contained in electronic hospital records and hospital episode statistics and v) recorded interactions with mental health services for ID contained within the mental health services data set.

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Motivation: Social media represent an unrivalled opportunity for epidemiological cohorts to collect large amounts of high-resolution time course data on mental health. Equally, the high-quality data held by epidemiological cohorts could greatly benefit social media research as a source of ground truth for validating digital phenotyping algorithms. However, there is currently a lack of software for doing this in a secure and acceptable manner.

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Objectives: To describe the process and outcomes of a data linkage between electronic secondary mental healthcare records from the South London and Maudsley (SLaM) NHS Foundation Trust with benefits records from the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). We also describe the mental health and benefit profile of patients who were successfully linked.

Design: A deterministic linkage of routine records from health and welfare government service providers within a secure environment.

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: Linking longitudinal cohort resources with police-recorded records of criminal activity has the potential to inform public health style approaches to policing, and may reduce potential sources of bias from self-reported criminal data collected by cohort studies. A pilot linkage of police records to the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) allows us to consider the acceptability of this linkage, its utility as a data resource, differences in self-reported crime according to consent status for data linkage, and the appropriate governance mechanism to support such a linkage. : We carried out a pilot study linking data from the ALSPAC birth cohort to Ministry of Justice (MoJ) records on criminal cautions and convictions.

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Introduction: Digital footprint records - the tracks and traces amassed by individuals as a result of their interactions with the internet, digital devices and services - can provide ecologically valid data on individual behaviours. These could enhance longitudinal population study databanks; but few UK longitudinal studies are attempting this. When using novel sources of data, study managers must engage with participants in order to develop ethical data processing frameworks that facilitate data sharing whilst safeguarding participant interests.

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