Inequalities in Cancer Outcomes NetworkInequalities in Cancer Outcomes Network
Dr Nina Afshar will open her seminar with a discussion about differences in cancer survival by area-level socio-economic disadvantage in Victoria, Australia and whether these inequalities vary by different factors such as year of diagnosis, age at diagnosis, time since diagnosis and sex. She will then present a complex project she has recently undertaken on colon cancer, in which she applied interventional causal mediation analysis to linked population-based health data in order to measure the role of stage at diagnosis, comorbidities, and treatment (surgery and intravenous chemotherapy) on survival from colon cancer.
The fourth in the Inequalities in Cancer Outcomes Network (ICON) series of seminars on Inequalities in Cancer Outcomes, this seminar is offered jointly with the LSHTM Centre for Global Chronic Conditions.
Dr Nina Afshar is the inaugural Graham Giles Research Fellow at Cancer Council Victoria and honorary fellow at Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, the University of Melbourne, Australia. She is a cancer epidemiologist currently focussing on bladder cancer research using the resources of the international National Cancer Institute Cohort Consortium. She completed her master’s degree and PhD in Epidemiology at the University of Melbourne and Cancer Council Victoria. Her doctoral research focused on trends and inequalities in cancer survival in Victoria, Australia using cancer registry data, with an emphasis on identifying factors explaining socio-economic inequalities in colon cancer survival, applying a novel method of causal mediation analysis to linked population-based health data. Before joining Cancer Council in mid-2021, Dr Afshar worked at the University of Melbourne Cancer Health Services Research unit as a Research Fellow, and as an epidemiologist at the Department of Health and Human Services in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.