PhD-done!

So many new manuscripts published in the past few months!

Gestational diabetes, screening and diagnosis

This is the bulk of the work that I did for my PhD. A series of 3 linked studies have so far been published and I have a few other projects in the works.

The overarching goal of this project is to explore how gestational diabetes screening in BC has changed over the past 15 years, how screening changes interact with diagnoses, how these changes might effect perinatal outcomes, and examine any interactions with health care provider type (ie. physician v midwifery care). This work uses data from British Columbia, Canada.

  • Validation study – In order to study gestational diabetes screening, I needed to be able to obtain valid data on screening. At the advise of one of my committee members (shout-out to the brilliant Dr. Jennifer Hutcheon), I did a chart abstraction study and then compared the results of a random sample of medical records to the administrative data I planned to use for the larger population-based study. The manuscript for this work is available (published) in the journal Epidemiology – see here: Validation of Insurance Billing Codes for Monitoring Antenatal Screening
  • Descriptive study – Gestational diabetes policies and practice guidelines have shifted in BC and Canada since 2004. This study describes incidence of screening across different population groups and presents this in context with relevant policy and guideline changes. This is published in the Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology of Canada (JOGC) – see here: Trends in Gestational Diabetes Screening Practices in British Columbia from 2005–2019
  • Screening changes and effects on diagnosis – This paper takes the next step of looking at how the screening changes in BC impacted gestational diabetes diagnoses. Specifically, incidence of gestational diabetes in BC in recent years has almost doubled since the early 2000’s and appears to be much higher than the Canadian average. Is this increase because of population demographic changes or other underlying risk factors changing? Or is this because of the screening practice changes that I found. This manuscript was published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ) – see here: The effect of changing screening practices and demographics on the incidence of gestational diabetes in British Columbia, 2005–2019

Covid-19 and pregnancy weight gain

This is an unrelated manuscript using Washington State data from the OB-COAP study population. We used an interrupted time series analysis to examine the time point of the COVID-19 pandemic and whether this impacted pregnancy weight gain and/or infant birth weight after the onset of the pandemic. This was published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition – see here: Weight gain in pregnancy and infant birthweight after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic: an interrupted time series analysis – ScienceDirect