Research exploring the causes of blood cancer
Why are we doing this study?
It is important to understand why different blood cancers develop, and what impact cancer treatment can have on patients. For some patients their blood cancer may be as a consequence of having certain medical conditions or the treatment given, for example patients with rheumatoid arthritis are at increased risk of developing non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Cancer treatments may also cause side-effects, these can be immediate or result in long-term effects on patients. Comparing the health and medical history of patients with blood cancer to the general population allows us to investigate these issues.
What is our aim?
This study has a number of aims which we plan to investigate using routinely collected electronic health records; this information includes details of stays in hospital and appointments visits. We will explore whether certain types of conditions or procedures are more likely to have occurred in people with blood cancer before their diagnosis and then we will look at whether patients with a blood cancer have an increase in health-related events compared to people of the same age and sex in the general population.
What are we doing?
YHHN routinely collects information about patients with blood cancer diagnosed in the 14 hospitals within our area; and NHS Digital supply information about these patients, including hospital attendances, cancer diagnoses and deaths. This information comes from Hospital Episode Statistics, the Office for National Statistics and the National Cancer Registration & Analysis Service.
To investigate how the health of patients who have these cancers differs from that of people who do not, NHS Digital have also matched each member of YHHN’s patient cohort to ten people born in the same year who do not have a blood cancer providing us with the same information as we have for YHHN’s patient cohort. By analysing these two sets of data together, we will be able to produce information on similarities and differences between these two groups.