Today’s blog is from Ahmed Alharthi, who in undertaking a PhD at the University of Glasgow. Ahmed talks about the PhD journey.

I am a licenced clinical pharmacist by background, who works with Dr Terry Quinn, a consultant physician and geriatrician in the NHS and a reader in Geriatric Medicine department at the University of Glasgow. I am a second year PhD student, employed and sponsored by Umm Al Qura University in Saudi Arabia.

I completed my MSc in Clinical Pharmacology at the University of Glasgow, and then started to pursue my PhD in Cardiovascular Medicine. My PhD title is “Repurposing cardiovascular medicines for vascular dementia – a data driven clinical study”. My PhD work so far has focussed on dementia and associations with a group of medications called Anticholinergic drugs. I wish to understand the potential relationship between these commonly used medications and the incidence of dementia in older adults, because if there is a causal relationship this could suggest a potential modifiable risk factor.

In my work so far, I have conducted systemic reviews focused on evidence synthesis and had the opportunity to collaborate with the Cochrane Dementia Group, resulting in published paper. I am currently working on a dataset from a completed cohort the APPLE study. This offers me participant-level data that contain high-quality information on medications prescribed and consumed, with detailed information on changes in medication over time. This level of detail is often missing in studies that contain information on prescribed medications, but to truly understand the relationship between medications and dementia this granularity of medication data is required.

Given my professional background, I was eager for my PhD to include content related to clinical pharmacy practice. Among the ideas I have discussed with my supervisors are a real-world analysis of anticholinergic prescribing in Greater Glasgow and Clyde secondary care and a qualitative piece contrasting prescribers’ opinions on anticholinergic prescribing and the use of scales to identify anticholinergic risk.

I was motivated towards pursuing a PhD with a cognition and medications focus, as I was aware of the crucial role of clinical pharmacy to enhance medications use and possibly to improve cognitive impairment by adopting novel treatment approaches.

I am especially excited around the next step of my research, working with Dr Donald Lyall, my second supervisor. I will move from a relatively large dataset (APPLE Study) to a truly bigdata project, assessing for associations of cardiovascular medications and dementia in the UK Biobank, one of the largest biomedical databases in the world.

I am keen to engage with the Scottish dementia research community and look forward to meeting other researchers.

Read more SDRC Blogs

SDRC Annual Report 2022/23: Informatics & Technology

The following is an excerpt of SDRC Annual Report 2022/23 which provides on overview of the research in the field of brain health Informatics & Technology, written by theme lead and SDRC Executive Committee member Dr Mario Parra Rodriguez. Summary of the theme The...

Project Update: Alzheimer Scotland Student Research Programme 2024 recipients

Alzheimer Scotland Student Research Programme: update from 2024 recipients    In 2024, Sarah-Jayne Hamilton and Katie Robertson began their Masters projects as part of the Alzheimer Scotland Student Research Programme. They began their projects in October 2024...

Early Career Researchers: Sarah Gregory

 We are ending the third week of PhD student and Early Career Researcher blog series with Sarah Gregory, PhD student from the University of Edinburgh.  Follow us on Twitter to keep up to date with the series.  Hi, I’m Sarah and I’m a part time doctoral candidate with...

Researcher Blog: Doing Rapid COVID research

Today's SDRC blog provides insights from three investigators and offers tips on doing rapid COVID research. George Palattiyil, Sarah Swift and Debbie Tolson have shared their experiences of working together remotely and the process of the research, from the...

Tips for researchers during Covid-19- Advice from Dr Terry Quinn for Principal Investigators

We will soon be starting a series on the SDRC Blog from Principal Investigators, sharing their experiences of research over the past few months. Today, we have another blog from Dr Terry Quinn at the University of Glasgow. Terry is sharing tips for researchers during...

SDRC Annual Report 2021/22: Fundamental Science

In the SDRC Annual Report 2021/21 we dedicated a section each to the progress and ongoing work of the SDRC research themes.  The following extract is focusing on the Fundamental Science theme, led by Professor Frank Gunn-Moore and Dr Sophie Bradley. Read more below....

COVID Impact on ECRs: Miriam Scarpa

In the coming days, the SDRC are publishing a series of blogs featuring Early Career Researchers who are sharing how COVID has impacted their research and career prospects. The first blogs in this series also featured in our COVID Research Impact Report which we...

Early Career Researchers: Ilaria Pina

Today's blog in SDRC's series from PhD Students and Early Career Researchers is by Ilaria Pina. You can read the full blog series so far here, and keep up to date with the rest of the series, as well updates of all SDRC activity by following us on Twitter.  Hi! I’m...

Confident Conversations about Research

Confident Conversations: Talking about research with Alzheimer Scotland staff   Recently, the SDRC had the pleasure of joining a Confident Conversations training session, delivered to Alzheimer Scotland staff who work directly with people living with dementia....

Early Career Researchers: Suzanne Gray

As part of this blog series featuring PhD Students/ Early Career Researchers that were in the SDRC Annual Report 2019/20, today we are sharing the research from Suzanne Gray, read more below.   I am currently a mental health nurse lecturer at Abertay University,...