Sarah Darby

Sarah Darby
FRS
Born
Sarah C. Darby
EducationImperial College London (BSc)
University of Birmingham (MSc)
London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (PhD)
Scientific career
FieldsEpidemiology
Statistics
Cancer
InstitutionsUniversity of Oxford
Radcliffe Infirmary
St Thomas's Hospital Medical School
National Radiological Protection Board
Radiation Effects Research Foundation
ThesisA Bayesian Approach to Parallel Line Bioassay (1977)
Doctoral studentsHelen Weiss
Websitewww.ndph.ox.ac.uk/team/sarah-darby

Sarah C. Darby FRS is Professor of Medical Statistics at the University of Oxford.[1] Her research has focused the beneficial effects of smoking cessation, the risk of lung cancer from residential radon,[2] and treatments for early breast cancer.[3] She is also a Principal Scientist with the Cancer Research UK in the Clinical Trial Service Unit (CTSU) and Epidemiological Studies Unit at the Nuffield Department of Clinical Medicine, at the Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford.[4][5]

Education

Darby studied Mathematics at Imperial College London (BSc) and Mathematical Statistics at the University of Birmingham (MSc).[6] She completed her PhD at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in 1977 where her research investigated Bayesian approaches to analysing bioassays.[7]

Career and research

After her PhD, she worked at St Thomas's Hospital Medical School, the National Radiological Protection Board, and the Radiation Effects Research Foundation in Hiroshima, before moving to the University of Oxford in 1984. Her major funder since then has been Cancer Research UK.[6]

Darby and her team have demonstrated that there is a linear relationship between the dose of radiation delivered incidentally to the heart during breast cancer radiotherapy and the subsequent risk of ischaemic heart disease, and that the absolute size of the radiation-related risk is bigger for women already at increased risk of heart disease.[6][8]

She and her team have also estimated the absolute size of the benefit of radiotherapy to breast cancer patients and their work is enabling comparison of the likely absolute benefit of radiotherapy with its likely absolute risk for individual patients.[6] Therefore, it is now becoming possible to assess which patients can receive standard radiotherapy, which should be considered for advanced techniques, and which should avoid radiotherapy altogether.[6][9]

Other topics that Darby has worked on include estimating the risk of lung cancer from residential radon, the risk of invasive breast cancer after a diagnosis of ductal carcinoma in situ, and the risk of cancer after computerised tomography (CT) scans in young people.[6][10]

Awards and honours

Darby was awarded the Guy Medal in Bronze in 1988 by the Royal Statistical Society.[11] She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2019.[6]

References

  1. ^ "UK Health Protection Agency entry". hpa.org.uk. Archived from the original on 2006-11-27.
  2. ^ Darby, S. C.; Whitely, E.; Howe, G. R.; Hutchings, S. J.; Kusiak, R. A.; Lubin, J. H.; Morrison, H. I.; Tirmarche, M.; Tomasek, L.; Radford, E. P.; Roscoe, R. J.; Samet, J. M.; Yao, S. X. (1995). "Radon and Cancers Other Than Lung Cancer in Underground Miners: a Collaborative Analysis of 11 Studies". JNCI Journal of the National Cancer Institute. 87 (5): 378–384. doi:10.1093/jnci/87.5.378. ISSN 0027-8874. PMID 7853419.
  3. ^ Sarah Darby publications from Europe PubMed Central
  4. ^ Darby, Sarah C; Ewart, David W; Giangrande, Paul LF; Spooner, Rosemary JD; Rizza, Charles R; Dusheiko, Geoffrey M; Lee, Christine A; Ludlam, Christopher A; Preston, F Eric (1997). "Mortality from liver cancer and liver disease in haemophilic men and boys in UK given blood products contaminated with hepatitis C". The Lancet. 350 (9089): 1425–1431. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(97)05413-5. ISSN 0140-6736. PMID 9371165. S2CID 20692603.
  5. ^ Darby, Sarah C.; Kan, Sau Wan; Spooner, Rosemary J.; Giangrande, Paul L. F.; Hill, Frank G. H.; Hay, Charles R. M.; Lee, Christine A.; Ludlam, Christopher A.; Williams, Michael (2007). "Mortality rates, life expectancy, and causes of death in people with hemophilia A or B in the United Kingdom who were not infected with HIV". Blood. 110 (3): 815–825. doi:10.1182/blood-2006-10-050435. ISSN 0006-4971. PMID 17446349.
  6. ^ a b c d e f g Anon (2019). "Sarah Darby". royalsociety.org. London: Royal Society. Archived from the original on 2019-04-24. One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where:

    “All text published under the heading 'Biography' on Fellow profile pages is available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.” --Royal Society Terms, conditions and policies at the Wayback Machine (archived 2016-11-11)
  7. ^ Darby, Sarah C. (1977). A Bayesian Approach to Parallel Line Bioassay. jisc.ac.uk (PhD thesis). London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (University of London). OCLC 1124248683. EThOS uk.bl.ethos.452976.
  8. ^ Darby, Sarah C.; Ewertz, Marianne; McGale, Paul; Bennet, Anna M.; Blom-Goldman, Ulla; Brønnum, Dorthe; Correa, Candace; Cutter, David; Gagliardi, Giovanna; Gigante, Bruna; Jensen, Maj-Britt; Nisbet, Andrew; Peto, Richard; Rahimi, Kazem; Taylor, Carolyn; Hall, Per (2013). "Risk of Ischemic Heart Disease in Women after Radiotherapy for Breast Cancer" (PDF). New England Journal of Medicine. 368 (11): 987–998. doi:10.1056/NEJMoa1209825. hdl:10616/41712. ISSN 0028-4793. PMID 23484825. S2CID 31409740.
  9. ^ Darby, Sarah C; McGale, Paul; Taylor, Carolyn W; Peto, Richard (2005). "Long-term mortality from heart disease and lung cancer after radiotherapy for early breast cancer: prospective cohort study of about 300 000 women in US SEER cancer registries". The Lancet Oncology. 6 (8): 557–565. doi:10.1016/S1470-2045(05)70251-5. ISSN 1470-2045. PMID 16054566.
  10. ^ Mathews, J. D.; Forsythe, A. V.; Brady, Z.; Butler, M. W.; Goergen, S. K.; Byrnes, G. B.; Giles, G. G.; Wallace, A. B.; Anderson, P. R.; Guiver, T. A.; McGale, P.; Cain, T. M.; Dowty, J. G.; Bickerstaffe, A. C.; Darby, S. C. (2013). "Cancer risk in 680 000 people exposed to computed tomography scans in childhood or adolescence: data linkage study of 11 million Australians". BMJ. 346 (1): f2360. doi:10.1136/bmj.f2360. ISSN 1756-1833. PMC 3660619. PMID 23694687.
  11. ^ Royal Statistical Society Guy Medal in Bronze, MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive