Last Monday 22, our workmate and member of the Observatory of Pain, Alejandro Salazar Couso, defended his doctoral thesis entitled: “Assessment of the evolution of Health Related Quality of Life in coronary patients. An application of Generalized Estimating Equations to handle missing data and time-dependent variables in longitudinal studies”, an excellent and meticulous work led by Dr. Inmaculada Failde Martínez and Dr. Fernando Fernández Palacín.
The court in charge of assessing Alejandro’s work was composed by Dr. Luís Filipe Ribeiro de Azevedo, professor of the Department of Information Sciences and Decision in Health of the University of Oporto; Dr. José Almenara Barrios, professor of the Universitary School at the Department of Biomedicine, Biotechnology and Public Health of the University of Cádiz and Dr. Juan Polo Palillo, professor of Preventive Medicine and Public Health of the University of Sevilla.
After the defense of the thesis and the common discussion after it, the members of the court decided to give him the doctorate with the highest possible score: “Cum Laude”
The thesis, that was presented by a summary of articles, is the result of some years of research in which doctor Alejandro Salazar trained in the management of database with lost data and several techniques for its approachment and application on the health field, outlining, his 3 months stay at the prestigious London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
During its development, the thesis has been presented in different conferences and has been published in some high impact journals such as Epidemiologia e Prevenzione, Statistics in Medicine and International Journal of Cardiology, and in a chapter of a book about quality of life related to the health of coronary patients.
Although the theme was about coronary heart disease, the most methodological aspect of Alejandro’s thesis makes it applicable to any other area, including chronic pain, since in his work, Alejandro offers a solution to the problem of lost data in longitudinal studies of any subject. We trust that what we have learned during these years can be useful and can become an improvement in the knowledge of chronic pain in the Spanish population, the objective of the Observatory of Pain.
From these lines, we want to congratulate the already doctor Salazar for the success wishing him a great future in the research world. Congratulations!
