Dear Stirling 1000 Elders, thank you so much to those of you who have signed up so far. We are now at 161 people, so please pass on the website details to your friends who might be interested so they can sign up too.
NEWS! We are trying to get government funding to look at important factors relating to people’s antibody response to the new Covid19 vaccines, particularly among older people as most vaccine studies do not include a high proportion of older adults in their trials. If we are successful, please watch this space and your email for an invitation to take part in a very important research study linking survey details such as age, gender, socio-economic status, timing of vaccination, relationship status, stress experience and social support with antibody levels. The survey will be mainly online but we will also ask for your address on this occasion so that we may post you out a blood spot kit. This is a bit like the finger prick samples for testing blood glucose, which some of you may have had, but even simpler. You would return your dried blood spot in a return envelope provided and our immunology team would measure antibodies against Covid19 in this. We would then see which important socio-demographic and behavioural factors influence antibody response, i.e. numbers of antibodies. Funding is highly competitive at present for these emergency bids, but if we are successful, this would be a very rapid project, hence the advance notice.
If you are interested in factors that influence vaccination response, here are two of my previous papers:
Long, J., Drayson, M.T., Taylor, A.E., Toellner, K.M., Lord, J.M. & Phillips, A.C. (2016). Morning vaccination enhances antibody over afternoon vaccination: a cluster-randomised trial. Vaccine, 34, 2679-2685. and update here