PEOPLE

Assoc Prof Stefan Dieleman

Stefan works as a Staff Specialist in the Department of Anaesthesia at Westmead Hospital. He is a Clinical Associate Professor at The University of Sydney.

Stefan's main research interest is in the inter-patient variability of the perioperative inflammatory response to major surgery. When considering the large variability in the clinical phenotype of this response that is often observed, it is not surprising that the effects of therapies to modify the inflammatory response do largely vary between patients as well. When this phenotype variability is not taken into account while testing perioperative interventions in (large) therapeutic trials, this may lead to decreased effectiveness of these interventions. Stefan's research focusses on improving methods to predict the phenotype of the inflammatory response to major surgery in individual patients. This should eventually enable the use of more targeted prophylactic and/or therapeutic interventions to prevent adverse outcomes.

Stefan works as a Staff Specialist and is the Head of Research in the Department of Anaesthesia at Westmead Hospital. He is a full-time Associate Professor at Western Sydney University and a Clinical Associate Professor at The University of Sydney.

Stefan's main research interests include:

Inter-patient variability of the perioperative inflammatory response

The clinical phenotype of the perioperative inflammatory response is largely variable. When considering this variability, it is not surprising that the effects of therapies to modify the inflammatory response do significantly differ between patients as well. When this variability is not taken into account while testing perioperative interventions in (large) therapeutic trials, this may lead to decreased effectiveness of these interventions. Stefan's research focusses on improving methods to predict the phenotype of the inflammatory response to major surgery in individual patients. This should eventually enable the use of more targeted prophylactic and/or therapeutic interventions to prevent adverse outcomes.

Large-scale, registry-based perioperative outcomes research

Registry-based trials and cohort studies can be low-cost, can facilitate rapid consecutive enrolment of large numbers of patients. By harnessing variations in 'standard' clinical practice in the study design, registry-based trials will have enhanced generalizability of findings. In particular in the context of perioperative medicine, which traditionally has a relatively large variation in practice (and therefore in what is considered 'routine practice'), registry-based clinical trials are be ideally suited.

An overview of Stefan's publications is available online.

21 Mar 2021