A FORMER young carer whose research career was inspired by her grandparents’ health battles is appealing for people across Bradford to help with her work.

Dr Sahdia Parveen has a junior fellowship from the Alzheimer’s Society and is a principal investigator on a study looking at how people’s willingness to care for loved ones changes over time.

Dr Parveen, a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Bradford, remembers growing up with a grandmother who had vascular dementia and a grandfather with cancer.

“Research is my passion, a passion which was triggered back when I was helping to look after my grandparents,” she said. “I want my research to have a real-world impact and directly help people living with dementia and their family members. A good proportion of my teenage years were spent looking after my grandparents.

“Although we knew what cancer was and we discussed it in our South Asian community, we’d never heard of dementia.

“It was a new term to us. But it was noticeable how, while my grandfather had numerous hospital appointments and medicines, my grandmother had nothing so we were mostly left to care ourselves.”

She said the lack of help for her grandmother inspired her to find out more about dementia and she went on to study for her Master’s in Clinical Psychology.

Dr Parveen has already been working on a special study looking at how carers’ attitudes to look after loved ones might change but now she is recruiting people aged 18 and over who are not already carers to help on a second round of her Caregiving HOPE study to see how willing people would be to care for family if they had to.

Dr Parveen is being supported in the study by the NIHR Clinical Research Network, which assists researchers in the delivery of studies in the NHS.

“The Clinical Research Network has really helped me in setting up this study – without them work of this kind would not be possible.”

The University has an award-winning School of Dementia Studies, that in recent years has pioneered ways of looking at the cruel condition. One of those initiatives has been a Dementia Detective programme set up by Dr Parveen who went into secondary schools to work with 14 to 16-year-olds running sessions to bust the myths surrounding dementia and look at clues to find out why certain people may act the way they do and discover how to support people living with dementia.

Those sessions have since been expanded to students at the University.

Anyone interested is getting involved in Dr Parveen’s next study, open to non-carers, can contact her on 01274 236089 or e-mail S.Parveen27@bradford.ac.uk