Last week members of the College of Medicine and Public Health presented their research at the 2024 World Congress of Epidemiology in Cape Town, South Africa. The Flinders University contingent was the largest from an Australian University and consisted of Associate Professors Billingsley Kambwaa and Jacqueline Stephens, Drs Molla Wassie and Yohannes Melaku, and PhD candidates Amandi Hiyare and Zegeye Abitew.

Held every three years by the International Epidemiological Association, the WCE is the pre-eminent conference for epidemiological methods and research. Last week 1,564 epidemiologists from 99 countries gathered in Cape Town for four days of workshops, plenaries, symposia, and meetings which ran from 7am to 8:30pm each day. The program also included 317 oral and 773 poster presentations, which included research presented by the team.

Research presented by the Flinders contingent covered a range of topics including colorectal cancer, sleep health, kidney disease, pregnancy outcomes, and hearing health. Together they presented a total of eleven presentations at the conference.

Oral Presentations

• Amandi Hiyare: Changing the narrative in Indigenous kidney health: undertaking strengths-based analysis using linked data.
• Billingsley Kaambwa: Sleepless nights, better measures? A head-to-head comparison of Bayesian and frequentist approaches to validate quality-of-life instruments in sleep disorder epidemiology.
• Jacqueline Stephens: Incidence of preeclampsia and hypertensive disorders in pregnancy amongst Australian Aboriginal women: The ARDAC study.
• Yohannes Melaku: Causal analysis in multidimensional dietary data to assess effect on all-cause mortality.

Poster Presentations

• Jacqueline Stephens: Factors Associated with Preeclampsia Amongst First Nations Women from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States.
• Jacqueline Stephens: Hearing health pathways for Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander children living in remote South Australia.
• Jacqueline Stephens: Epidemiology of Childhood Ear Surgery in South Australia 2007-2022: Insights into Socioeconomic Disparities and Indigenous Health.
• Molla Wassie: Risk Factors of Colorectal Cancer after a Colonoscopy: A Retrospective Cohort Study of Australian Patients Aged 75 and Older.
• Molla Wassie: SCOOP – Southern Co-operative Program for the Prevention of Colorectal Cancer.
• Yohannes Melaku: Causal inference in nutritional epidemiology: Methodological challenges, opportunities and future direction.
• Zegeye Abitew: Association of dietary patterns derived by reduced rank regression with colorectal cancer risk and mortality.