Assistant Professor Stefania Papatheodorou is an obstetrician and gynecologist, with interest in prenatal diagnosis of fetal defects, diagnosis and prevention of preterm labor, pregnancy establishment and pregnancy loss. Her research uses the methods of meta-analysis and systematic review to provide accurate information and high quality evidence that can – (i) improve the health and welfare of infants, mothers and their families; (ii) promote the effective use of resources in the provision of perinatal services, and ultimately; (iii) improve the health of individuals and entire communities. She has been conducting quantitative and qualitative assessments of individual epidemiologic studies, and has been using meta-analysis, subgroup analysis and meta-regression to quantify, understand and exploit the heterogeneity in epidemiologic findings.

While one focus of her work is perinatal medicine, other topics in public health are also of interest. Dr. Papatheodorou has recently initiated a secondary analysis of publicly-available data from the US National Health and Nutrition Examination Study (NHANES). Her goal in this work is to understand the roles and inter-relationships of sex hormones, insulin-like growth factors (IGF) and IGF binding proteins as determinants of the causation and progression of a variety of chronic diseases, including cancer.

Dr. Papatheodorou is also a member of a consortium studying the role of genetic factors in aggressive prostate cancer. In this study, using data from two large epidemiological cohort studies (BPC3 and PRACTICAL), she has identified three new single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that are associated with aggressive prostate cancer. Two of the genetic polymorphisms are novel and are associated with non-malignant traits – such as pulmonary function and glycine metabolism.

Her work using advanced methods (such as the excess significance test and the credibility ceiling) to address concerns about the inflation of bias in estimates derived using meta-analysis has yielded several publications in high impact factor journals – such as the Journal of the National Cancer Institute (impact factor 14.5) and the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology (impact factor 5.3). Dr Papatheodorou's interest the effects of climate change in the health of the population led to the financing of the research proposal LIFE-MEDEA which aims to quantify the effects of dust storms in vulnerable populations.