Edited by Dr Anna Melidoni, Senior Editor
AM: Tell us a bit about yourself and your current focus of research.
CK: I am a senior statistician at the Nuffield Department of Population Health at the University of Oxford. My work is on the epidemiology of cardiovascular and other major diseases, and on the statistical methods to study these. I completed a degree in Mathematics, an MSc in Applied Statistics, and a DPhil in Statistics. My interests include estimating the associations of various factors with risk of disease, including metabolomics, proteomics, and lifestyle factors, the design of studies to investigate such associations, and the development and use of statistical methods to answer particular questions.
AM: What do you think is the most fascinating recent development in Cardiovascular Epidemiology ?
CK: Using well-designed large-scale prospective population-based studies, high-throughput assays, and appropriate statistical methods we can reliably estimate the risk of diseases associated with various factors and try to understand the pathways involved in disease development. In particular, high-throughput proteomics and metabolomics assays which can quantify hundreds to thousands biomarkers in stored plasma samples from prospective cohort studies allow investigating the relationships of levels of proteins and metabolites measured before disease onset with future risk of cardiovascular events, which occur up to several years later. Such biomarkers may provide insights into the pathways via which metabolic and lifestyle risk factors affect risk of disease, may help predict risk of disease, and in combination with genomics they can help understand whether they have a causal role in disease development and whether they may be promising therapeutic targets.
AM: Where do you see (or where would you like to see) the Cardiovascular Epidemiology in 10 years from now?
CK: Despite the advances in science over the past decades, several types of cardiovascular disease still lead to a high burden and unacceptably high mortality. I would like to see the efforts of the research community to understand, predict, prevent and treat cardiovascular disease to translate to a substantial improvement in patients’ survival. Hopefully Cardiovascular Epidemiology will have provided robust evidence from well-conducted large-scale studies on risk factors and causes of disease which will be utilised to prevent and treat cardiovascular diseases across populations.
AM: Can you think of any collective initiatives that could support/speed up ‘bench to bedside’ research?
CK: Multidisciplinary research and collaboration between scientists with complementary interests and expertise can help make progress which will translate into patient benefit. Large epidemiological studies, consortia, and clinical trials require people with different skills and expertise to contribute to their design, infrastructure, data collection, curation, and analysis, and interpretation of the findings.
AM: What does it mean to you to be an Editorial Board Member for BMC Cardiovascular Disorders?
CK: I am grateful for the opportunity to be an Editorial Board Member, to help the research community and to learn from them.
AM: What is one piece of advice you would give to reviewers as an EBM overseeing peer review ?
CK: I would advise reviewers to think about how the manuscript at hand could be improved. The ultimate goal is to make published research better such that the benefit to the public is maximised. I believe this can be achieved by being unbiased, open-minded, and thorough in assessing submitted work.
AM: What is one piece of advice you would give to prospective authors ?
CK: I would advise authors to provide all relevant information in their manuscript. In particular, the methods section of a paper should provide sufficient detail on what was done such that if the data were available one would be able to reproduce the authors’ results based solely on the information presented in the paper.
AM: What would you change in scientific publishing if you could?
CK: I am not sure how this would best be achieved, but scientific publishing should be such that researchers are incentivised to publish better, rather than more, research. The process should reward quality in the work of authors, reviewers, and editors. Also, as is fortunately increasingly happening, I think that papers should be freely accessible.
