Period
June 11 - July 6, 2018.
Admission requirements
- Successful completion of Clinical Research in Practice is strongly recommended.
Description
Thrombosis is the major cause of death in western cultures. It may occur in arteries (myocardial infarction, stroke) and veins (deep-vein thrombosis, pulmonary embolism). Particularly in venous thrombosis abnormalities affecting blood coagulability play an important role. These may be genetic (e.g., factor V Leiden) or acquired (e.g., oral contraceptives). Recently, research has successfully focused on identifying new genetic risk factors for thrombosis, and their interaction with acquired factors, and on factors that predict high risk of recurrent thrombosis.
Program:
students will perform a clinical scientific study, related to thrombosis, in which they will pass through all phases of a research project: posing a research question, finding a study design, setting up the study (questionnaire, lab), data-cleaning, analysis, and reporting. Of course, since the actual study includes hundreds of patients, they will only do small parts of these, and then work with the final data which are available.
in this study students will work on actual data, which is part of an on-going study on venous thrombosis, which is a two-centre study carried out together with Cambridge.
students will work on individual sub-projects on various risk factors (e.g., type of oral contraceptive, travel, exercise, obesity, factor V Leiden gene mutation, pregnancy/puerperium ).
site visits will be part of the course, in which students will interview people, for instance a patient with thrombosis, and professionals (physicians, biochemists, Ph.D. students, fieldworkers, technicians) who are involved in clinical care and studies such as these.
*Important note to non-Dutch speaking students: the outpatient clinic sessions and the patient demonstrations will be in Dutch, due to presence of Dutch patients.
This course will particularly work on:
Research competences:
Choosing appropriate techniques, recording, organizing and analyzing data, relate results to those of others.
Professional competences:
Collaborating with peers, commitment, motivation and drive, digesting of other people’s opinions, reflecting on personal actions.
Course objectives
To get a good understanding into:
hands-on comprehensive experience in clinical research (translational research). During this course, clinical problems and biochemical possibilities are translated into a scientific study. The course also shows how this scientific study can be translated back to clinical practice.
how to write a Short Report.
The students will be part of all phases of a study on venous thrombosis, and obtain understanding of what needs to be done to obtain a dataset and how to get the best data.
Mode of instruction
Interactive lectures, practicals, work groups, patient demonstrations.
Assessment method
Writing of patient invitation letter, a questionnaire, and a short report; oral presentation of assignment; and student behaviour (motivation, independency, oral reporting, participation in discussion).