Amy Campbell, Hannah Sallis & Robyn Wootton How do you feel about researchers tracking your mood using technology? How about tracking your physical activity or your sleep? How much technology will we let into our lives in the name of research? These were the questions being asked this summer, when a team of researchers (from ..read more

Author: Vicky Carlisle. Twitter: @Vic_Carlisle, Email: vicky.carlisle@bristol.ac.uk On Wednesday 7th July 2021, I brought together key stakeholders with an interest in improving opioid substitution treatment (OST) from across the UK. This included people with lived experience, Public Health England staff, local authority public health practitioners, treatment service leads, pharmacists and academics. We discussed the findings ..read more

by Olivia Maynard In a paper recently published in the journal Addiction, Hannah Charles and colleagues suggest that the prevalence of illicit drug use among 23-25 year olds in a Bristol-based birth cohort (ALSPAC) is over twice that reported in the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW). The team propose that these figures reflect under-reporting in the CSEW, although they note that they may reflect higher levels of illicit drug use in Bristol. Here I present some preliminary data supporting their view that the CSEW underestimates illicit drug use. In March 2020, I recruited 683 UK univer ..read more

Working from home can present huge challenges both to our work productivity and overall wellbeing. These challenges will vary in type and intensity from one person to another, and may also wax and wane at different times of the year. Things we in TARG have been struggling with include: No separate workspace versus home space; blurring of boundaries between home and work Lack of motivation due to general stress or anxiety about the state of the world Material problems e.g. caring responsibilities, things in life disrupted by the pandemic The social aspect of not seeing people Difficulties in ..read more

Written by Angela Attwood and Olivia Maynard, with reflections from Marcus Munafò Beyond the immediate impact on people’s lives and livelihoods, the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has caused a great deal of disruption in how we work. The burden on academics, particularly with respect to teaching, has been considerable. But are there positives that we can take from this situation? Academia can be surprisingly conservative – we have ways of working that we are reluctant to change. While undergraduate courses may have been tweaked in response to student feedback, they remain largely unchanged from the ..read more

Written by Anna Blackwell, Senior Research Associate The manufacturing or importing of packs of cigarettes with fewer than 20 cigarettes per pack was prohibited in the UK when the EU Tobacco Products Directive and standardised packaging legislation were fully implemented in May 2017. This change was aimed at reducing the affordability of cigarettes and thereby discouraging young people from smoking. This directive also required the removal of branding and established a standard shape and dark green colour for packaging, including pictorial health warnings, which prevented the use of packaging ..read more

Written by Angela Attwood and Maddy Dyer COVID-19 impact on research The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has forced millions of us to embrace remote working, and researchers are no exception. Universities are closed and face-to-face research with human participants has been temporarily halted. This has created challenges for our research, and laboratory and field studies are particularly affected. As part of a large research group at the University of Bristol, we had to respond to this new situation and develop contingency plans for our research. Our first step was to review ongoing research a ..read more

Written by Natalie Hunter, Graduate Trainee – Research Landscape at Wellcome Trust   As a graduate at Wellcome, I get the opportunity to be involved in so many exciting initiatives, including working with the people aiming to tackle some of the biggest challenges in science and research.   Attending the first annual meeting of the UK Reproducibility Network (UKRN) last Friday is a great example of this. UKRN is a grassroots, researcher-led organisation with the aim of improving scientific integrity, with a particular focus on the reproducibility of research. There’s been a  ..read more

An essay by Caitlin Lloyd. Emma was an anxious child, always worrying. At thirteen, her anxiety became centered on interactions at school – she was terrified of being judged negatively by classmates. Around this time Emma began dieting, intending to lose just a small amount of weight. It turned out she could do so relatively easily, and enjoyed the sense of achievement resulting from the numbers on the scale going down. Her diet continued, becoming more and more extreme. Emma’s weight plummeted. Eight years later, having had two inpatient hospital admissions, Emma maintains a dangerously low b ..read more

The recent Nature Neuroscience paper by Pasman et al entitled “GWAS of lifetime cannabis use reveals new risk loci, genetic overlap with psychiatric traits, and a causal influence of schizophrenia” (see below) provides important and novel insights into the aetiology of cannabis use and its relationship with mental health. However – in its title and elsewhere – it subtly misrepresents what the Mendelian randomization (MR) [1] analyses it presents actually show. MR analyses are increasingly being reported as demonstrating the effect of a disease (in this case schizophrenia) on the outcome, throu ..read more