PhD Studentship: Evaluating Interventions for End-stage Ankle Osteoarthritis

Do you want to work with healthcare data and develop your data science skills? Do you want to make a difference in healthcare by understanding the reasons why an implant fails or succeeds?

Around 1% of the adult population has osteoarthritis of the foot and ankle. Total ankle replacement (TAR) has been available for more than 50 years and should provide a solution that restores function and quality of life to patients. However, despite the widespread clinical success of other joint replacements in the lower limb, TAR has not generally performed so well. Ankle fusion, where the bones of the tibiotalar joint are permanently joined together, is the more popular treatment at present. There is a growing need to improve the solutions provided for patients with ankle osteoarthritis, to help them resume physical activity and achieve high function without pain. The National Joint Registry (NJR) has a decade of TAR data that has already been used to identify risk of failure associated with age, BMI and underlying condition.

This PhD project aims to link the NJR with the British Orthopaedic Foot and Ankle Society fusion registry to investigate the key factors influencing success of either surgery, with specific exploration of devices. During this project, you will work with the data from the joint and fusion registries to examine outcomes with the two approaches, as well as undertaking implant-specific analysis. You will compare the patient characteristics and approaches for the two surgeries to identify any difference between them and complete sub-analysis to evaluate failure risks. During the project, you will work with surgeons to investigate how they decide whether a patient has a replacement or fusion, and we will work with a group of people who have had either replacement or fusion to gain their perspectives on the surgery and this research.

The supervision team (Claire Brockett, Ines Rombach, Ashley Blom and Lyndon Mason) includes academic and clinical researchers with expertise in foot/ankle, joint replacement, statistics and working with joint registry data. You will be based in the Integrative Musculoskeletal Biomechanics (IMSB) research group and join a thriving PhD research community in the School of Mechanical, Aerospace and Civil Engineering at the University of Sheffield.

The project is funded via a National Joint Registry non-clinical studentship, for a period of 3.5 years and is open to UK applicants only. Funding covers fees and an enhanced stipend of approximately £25000 per annum.

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