Visiting academic at the University of Auckland in New Zealand

Our main collaborator in New Zealand is the very enthusiastic Professor Rod Jackson, who leads a project called PREDICT. In the PREDICT project they have gathered information about cardiovascular risk factors and risk assessments through a computer software (developed through the PREDICT project) widely used by general practices throughout the North Island in New Zealand. These primary care data have been linked to information about drug descriptions, causes of death, laboratory results and hospital admissions. The project started in 2002 and is still ongoing.

The goal of my stay in New Zealand was to start working with the PREDICT data and to hopefully get some answers and information related to the dataset.

Already on my second day I had the data on my computer, and so I got to do a lot of analyses before returning to Norway. Since we have a problem with few endpoints in our Norwegian dataset, we are very grateful for the opportunity of including New Zealand data in our project. The PREDICT dataset have information about more than 200 000 New Zealanders!

The focus of my PhD project is ethnic differences in cardiovascular disease (CVD) and we have a special focus on immigrants from South Asian countries (such as Pakistan, Sri Lanka, India and Bangladesh) since they repeatedly have been found to have increased risk of CVD compared to other ethnic groups. In this Norwegian-New Zealand collaborative project, we aim to study the relation between cardiovascular risk factors and later CVD in people with South Asian background compared to the majority populations in Norway and New Zealand.

New Zealand is a very beautiful country, and luckily I had time to see more than just the university during my stay there. I had my husband and my 2-year old son with me, and together we went to some very beautiful beaches, the zoo and some nice playgrounds (travelling with children make you prioritize a bit differently!) and we also got to visit Hobbiton; the village movie set from the Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

I had a very nice research stay in New Zealand, and I would like to thank EPINOR for help making this possible.