(MRC NW-DMS Funded PhD opportunity) Antibiotic use in hidradenitis suppurativa: prescribing patterns, treatment trajectories and antimicrobial treatment failure

id="offer-description" class="ecl-u-type-heading-2 ecl-u-mt-none ecl-u-mb-l">Offer Description About the Project . Hidradenitis suppurativa is one of the most painful diseases in dermatology. It causes recurrent boils, abscesses and scarring in the armpits, groin and under the breasts, and affects around one in 130 people in the UK. Oral antibiotics are a mainstay of treatment and many patients take them for months or years. What that costs them in antibiotic effectiveness later on is unknown. This PhD will answer that question using national electronic health records. You will work with the Clinical Practice Research Datalink Aurum, linked to hospital admission and mortality data, and you will: map how antibiotics are prescribed for hidradenitis suppurativa across the UK and how this has changed; use machine learning to uncover distinct patterns of treatment over time and test whether they predict disease flares; and estimate whether prolonged antibiotic exposure is followed by antibiotic treatment failure when patients are later treated for chest or urine infections. You will be trained in epidemiological study design, causal inference, survival analysis, machine learning and statistical programming, and in the governance of large health datasets. Supervision spans dermatology, pharmacoepidemiology and health informatics. You will join the Dermatology and Pharmaco-epidemiology Research Group in Manchester, within a dermatology centre that is a standalone theme of the NIHR M