IRFMN, IRCCS - Istituto di Ricerche Farmacologiche “Mario Negri”, Silvano Gallus, ScD – PI; Alessandra Lugo, PhD – researcher; Xiaoqiu Liu, PhD – researcher; Roshni Biswas, MD – PhD student.
The Laboratory of Lifestyle Epidemiology is part of the Department of Environmental Health Sciences of Mario Negri Institute. The team, led by Silvano Gallus, is currently composed of two post-doc researchers and a PhD student of the European School for Interdisciplinary Tinnitus Research. The team has conducted successfully or is conducting various projects funded by the European Commission, including two FP7 projects, one Horizon 2020, one Joint Action and one ITN project. The research interest of the laboratory is mainly on tobacco control and cancer epidemiology. Since 2014, epidemiology of tinnitus became one of the most important research lines of the team. Within the project TIGER, the lab will provide expertise in Epidemiology and Biostatistics. The Laboratory of Lifestyle Epidemiology has years of experience in conducting systematic reviews of scientific literature, cross-sectional, case-control and cohort studies and other epidemiological studies on a wide spectrum of different conditions. The results have been reported in more than 230 articles published in high-impact peer-reviewed journals, including the Lancet, Annals of Oncology, American Journal of Epidemiology, Tobacco Control and Neuroepidemiology. Most of the investigations evaluated the main study outcomes also separately in men and women to assess potential gender effects. In 21 years of experience in research, Dr. Gallus has gained wide knowledge and expertise in epidemiology, public health, biostatistics and computation, collaborating in various national and international projects. To fill the knowledge gap in the aetiology of tinnitus, Dr. Gallus has already conducted and published a cross-sectional study on tinnitus and is now coordinating a case-control study investigating the potential risk factors of tinnitus, including lifestyle habits, hearing loss, noise exposure and drug use. The study will enrol 600 incident cases of tinnitus and 600 sex and age matched controls. Dr. Lugo and Dr. Liu, two epidemiologists and biostatisticians with valuable experiences in meta-analysis, case-control studies and other study designs, will collaborate with Dr. Gallus in conducting the case-control study and analyzing the data. Meanwhile, they will also assist Roshni Biswas, an MD from India (currently PhD student on a project on the epidemiology of tinnitus), in the conduction of a meta-analysis on the risk factors of tinnitus. The laboratory will provide expertise in epidemiology.
