Professor of Medical Statistics

Professor Joan Morris is the Director of the National Down Syndrome Cytogenetic Register. She has published work on the epidemiology of Down syndrome including quantifying the risk of a Down syndrome pregnancy to a woman who has had a previous affected pregnancy. She collaborates with congenital anomaly registers in Britain (BINOCAR) and Europe (EUROCAT) to investigate the epidemiology of other chromosomal and non-chromosomal anomalies. She collaborates with Professor Sir Nicholas Wald in evaluating the effectiveness of prenatal screening strategies for several different disorders, for example cystic fibrosis, fragile X syndrome, neural tube defects and Down syndrome. This work included mathematically modeling the population effect of cascade testing for a range of autosomal recessive disorders .She has been responsible for the statistical analysis involved in the work of Professor Wald and Professor Malcolm Law in a trio of papers in the British Medical Journal on the prevention of cardio-vascular disease by the use of the “Polypill”. This builds on the results from earlier meta-analyses of 354 trials on the effect of the value of low dose combination treatment with blood pressure lowering drugs, and meta-analyses on folate and serum homocysteine and cardiovascular disease.

Selected publications

1. Morris, J K. Alberman, E. Scott, C. Jacobs, P. Is the prevalence of Klinefelter syndrome increasing? European Journal of  Human Genetics (Available online 14/11/07 prior to full publication).
2. Morris, J K. Wald, N J. The effect of correlations between screening markers on screening performance. Journal of  Medical Screening. 2007;14:151-7.
3. Morris, J K. Wald, N J. Prevalence of neural tube defect pregnancies in England and Wales from 1964 to 2004. Journal of Medical Screening. 2007;14:55-9.
4. Morris JK, Mutton DE, Alberman E. Recurrences of free trisomy 21: Analysis of data from the National Down Syndrome Cytogenetic Register. Prenatal Diagnosis 2005;25:1120-8.
5. Law M, Morris JK, Jordan R, Wald N. Headaches and the treatment of blood pressure: results from a meta-analysis of 94 randomized placebo-controlled trials with 24,000 participants. Circulation. 2005;112:2301-6.
6. Morris JK, Wald NJ. Graphical presentation of distributions of risk in screening. J Med Screen. 2005;12:155-60.
7. Morris JK, De Vignan C, Mutton DE, Alberman E. Risk of a Down syndrome live birth in women of 45 years of age and older. Prenatal Diagnosis 2005;25:275-8.
8. Morris JK, Law MR, Wald NJ. Is cascade testing a sensible method of screening a population for autosomal recessive disorders? American Journal of Medical Genetics 2004;128:271-5. 
9. Law MR, Wald NJ, Morris JK, Jordan RE. Value of low dose combination treatment with blood pressure lowering drugs: analysis of 354 randomised trials. British Medical Journal 2003;326:1427-1431
10. Wald NJ, Morris JK. Teleoanalysis: combining data from different types of study. British Medical Journal 2003;327:616-618.