Dr Laura Woods
Co-Investigator
A cancer epidemiologist by training, Laura has strong interest in social inequalities in cancer outcomes, particularly in relation to early diagnostic activity including screening. Laura’s research to date has focussed on inequalities in cancer survival in the UK, specifically examining patterns and trends by deprivation for all cancers as well as the role of screening and pre-diagnostic covariables in explaining socio-economic and ethnic differentials. Most recently Laura has examined the specific influence of the socio-economic environment, independently of the a patient’s individual deprivation status, upon survival, as well as the potential of applying AI-approaches to primary care records in order to identify patients at higher risk or developing cancer.
Laura is an Honorary Associate Professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
Newcastle University
Senior Lecturer in Public Health
Investigating and explaining contemporary patterns and trends in inequalities across the head and neck cancer pathway: understanding the roles of deprivation and region (2023-2024)
Developing a screening engagement index (SEI) for England (2023-2024)
Developing a risk score for pancreatic cancer diagnosis (2019-2023): https://icon.lshtm.ac.uk/risk-score-for-pancreatic-cancer/
Individual and contextual deprivation: Association with cancer outcomes and implications for cancer policy (2019-2021): https://icon.lshtm.ac.uk/individual-and-contextual-deprivation/
- Ingleby FC, Woods LM, Atherton IM, Baker M, Elliss-Brookes L, Belot A. An investigation of cancer survival inequalities associated with individual-level socio-economic status, area-level deprivation, and contextual effects, in a cancer patient cohort in England and Wales. BMC Public Health 2022, 22(1), 90.
- Woods LM, Rachet B, Morris M, Bhaskaran K, Coleman MP. Are socio-economic inequalities in breast cancer survival explained by peri-diagnostic factors?. BMC Cancer 2021, 21(1), 485.
- Malhotra A, Rachet B, Bonaventure A, Pereira SP, Woods LM. Can we screen for pancreatic cancer? Identifying a sub-population of patients at high risk of subsequent diagnosis using machine learning techniques applied to primary care data. PLoS ONE 2021, 16(6), e0251876.
- Ingleby FC, Woods LM, Atherton IM, Baker M, Elliss-Brookes L, Belot A. Describing socio-economic variation in life expectancy according to an individual’s education, occupation and wage in England and Wales: An analysis of the ONS Longitudinal Study. SSM – Population Health 2021, 14, 100815.
- Ingleby FC, Belot A, Atherton I, Baker M, Elliss-Brookes L, Woods LM. Assessment of the concordance between individual-level and area-level measures of socio-economic deprivation in a cancer patient cohort in England and Wales. BMJ Open 2020, 10(11), e041714.
- Muller P, Woods L, Walters S. Temporal and geographic changes in stage at diagnosis in England during 2008–2013: A population-based study of colorectal, lung and ovarian cancers. Cancer Epidemiology 2020, 67, 101743.
- Marley C, El Hahi Y, Ferreira G, Woods L, Ramirez Villaescusa A. Evaluation of a risk score to predict future Clostridium difficile disease using UK primary care and hospital data in Clinical Practice Research Datalink. Human Vaccines and Immunotherapeutics 2019, 15(10), 2475-2481.
- Schaffar R, Belot A, Rachet B, Woods L. On the use of flexible excess hazard regression models for describing long-term breast cancer survival: A case-study using population-based cancer registry data. BMC Cancer 2019, 19(1), 107.
- Muller P, Walters S, Coleman MP, Woods L. Which indicators of early cancer diagnosis from population-based data sources are associated with short-term mortality and survival?. Cancer Epidemiology 2018, 56, 161-170.
- Morris M, Woods LM, Bhaskaran K, Rachet B. Do pre-diagnosis primary care consultation patterns explain deprivation-specific differences in net survival among women with breast cancer? An examination of individually-linked data from the UK West Midlands cancer registry, national screening programme and Clinical Practice Research Datalink. BMC Cancer 2017, 17(1), 155.
- Schaffar R, Rachet B, Belot A, Woods LM. Estimation of net survival for cancer patients: Relative survival setting more robust to some assumption violations than cause-specific setting, a sensitivity analysis on empirical data. European Journal of Cancer 2017, 72, 78-83.