Thrilled & giddy to officially be Dr Tash #PhDone⭐ massive thanks to my supervisors and colleagues for making this journey so enjoyable. I'm also excited for future collaborations, feels like we're just getting going🤓
@valeriamondelli.bsky.social @annieskjones.bsky.social @sophieharding.bsky.social

@natashaseaton.bsky.social & I sharing our work at the @divhealthpsych.bsky.social conference in Cardiff! 👩🏻‍🔬

9️⃣ The IRD Scale is a brief tool to capture illness-related distress in chronic medical conditions, ready for clinics, trials, and health-services research. Please repost/share if useful!

End of thread 🧵

8️⃣ Big thanks to star team ⭐ (incl. @annieskjones.bsky.social and others not yet on bsky) and the 3️⃣0️⃣+ UK patient charities & others who boosted recruitment. This enabled genuine cross-diagnosis validation (190+ distinct conditions represented) 🙏

7️⃣ Please get in touch for a toolkit (forthcoming this summer): PDF of the scale, scoring sheet, syntax (R/SPSS/Stata), and implementation guide. DM me or @ronamoss-morris.bsky.social for early access 🤓

6️⃣ Future research ideas?

❔Compare IRD change sensitivity within an intervention.
❔Model mediators (catastrophising, illness perceptions) of IRD reduction.
❔Test invariance across specific conditions, cultures, ages.
❔Translations
Open to collaborations! @ us with ideas 📬📞

5️⃣ The development pipeline:
✔️ Thematic analysis of patient interviews📄
✔️ Lit review & expert panels👩‍🔬👨‍⚕️
✔️ Think-aloud with patients & clinicians💬
✔️ Large online sample (n=1,398) for EFA → CFA/ESEM📊

👏Excellent face/content/convergent validity, internal and test-retest reliability, gender invariance

4️⃣ The structure? 2 correlated subscales, analysed separately
🔹 Intrapersonal👤(7 items,0-21, cutpoint 15): emotions related to challenges (EG. anger, frustration, worry)
🔹 Interpersonal👥(7 items,0-21, cutpoint 12): feelings related to social/self-perception (EG. embarrassment, feeling burdensome)

3️⃣ How can the IRD scale be used clinically? By assessing if distress is LTC-related:
🔸 Screen in primary care/psych-liaison/non-specialist service to decide between depression/anxiety pathway vs LTC-adjustment modules
🔸 Track outcomes📈
🔸 Benchmark burden across multimorbidity/rare condition cohorts⚖️

2️⃣Conventional distress measures do not distinguish illness-related distress 🩺🫀🫁 from primary mental-health disorders, potentially mis-triaging patients & misdirecting therapy ❌🚑

Evidence suggests that LTC patients have poorer outcomes, likely due to insufficiently tailored psych therapies ✂️

1️⃣ NEW *open access* measure alert 🧵 We’ve just published the Illness-Related Distress (IRD) Scale in Psychological Medicine doi.org/10.1017/S003... It's a 14-item, trans-diagnostic PRO for distress related to living with any long-term physical condition (LTC). But WHY does this matter 🤔 ⬇️

Our new open access paper in BMC Gastro as part of BOOST project in #IBD: link.springer.com/article/10.1...
@ronamoss-morris.bsky.social @valeriamondelli.bsky.social Prof Chris Norton, Dr Joanna Hudson & Dr Vari Wileman

What drives self-reported disease activity and healthcare usage in IBD? 💩🔥

❗️Spoiler alert❗️It's a more complicated picture than gut inflammation alone. Depression predicted:
🏥self-reported symptoms, primary & secondary care, A&E visits and impact of #IBD on #productivity
🔥but not inflammation

& link to paper!
www.thelancet.com/journals/ebi...

Link to full video:
youtube.com/shorts/YpGX8...
Great team 🙌
@ronamoss-morris.bsky.social
@valeriamondelli.bsky.social
@samjnorton.bsky.social
Annie Jones, Sophie Harding & Joanna Hudson

1 year on and engagement continues to be amazing & humbling.

📰31 print media outlets
🎙️1 radio interview
🏆1% of altmetrics scores EVER
📈HIGHEST engagement of EBioMedicine papers of a similar age
🌍And, most excitingly, 3 wikipedia mentions
Learning to see #scicomms as an essential part of research

Just received an email from none other than Joseph Stalin ! In this world of cancel culture, it is ✨so heartwarming✨ to see dictators having later in life career changes. Hoping Joe has set an example so others with totalitarian tendencies can follow in his footsteps 👀

Would love to be added! A PhD student in psychoneuroimmunology and psychological interventions to improve physical health

Me please! Thank you for pulling together.

My passion for good #scicomms is not unrelated to my move from X -> bluesky. It feels pretty urgent that we need to build trust, inspire the next generation, and help with informed decision making. I hope that clear comms can combat misinformation, motivate behaviour and foster curiosity.

Honoured & delighted to be shortlisted for the Medical Research Council's Max Perutz Prize for outstanding science communication. An amazing day - spectacular videos from an array of scientists with diverse talents..!

www.youtube.com/shorts/RyPD0... (1/2)