Publications by authors named "Alvina G Lai"

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in the widespread disruption of cancer health provision services across the entirety of the cancer care pathway in the UK, from screening to treatment. The potential long-term health implications, including increased mortality for individuals who missed diagnoses or appointments, are concerning. However, the precise impact of lockdown policies on national cancer health service provision across diagnostic groups is understudied.

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Background: Cancer is a complex disease, caused and impacted by a combination of genetic, demographic, clinical, environmental and lifestyle factors. Analysis of cancer characteristics, risk factors, treatment options and the heterogeneity across cancer types has been the focus of medical research for years. The aim of this study is to describe and summarise genetic, clinicopathological, behavioural and demographic characteristics and their differences across ten common cancer types and evaluate their impact on overall survival outcomes.

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Comorbidities present considerable challenges to cancer treatment and care. However, little is known about the effect of comorbidity on cancer treatment decisions across a wide range of cancer types and treatment modalities. Harnessing a cohort of 280,543 patients spanning 19 site-specific cancers, we explored pan-cancer frequencies of 109 comorbidities.

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Objective: To describe hospital admissions associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection in children and adolescents.

Design: Cohort study of 3.2 million first ascertained SARS-CoV-2 infections using electronic health care record data.

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A comprehensive evaluation of the total burden of morbidity endured by cancer survivors remains unavailable. This study quantified the burden of 144 health conditions and critical care admissions across 26 adult cancers and treatment modalities in 243,767 adults. By age 60, top conditions ranked by fold difference (cumulative burden in survivors divided by cumulative burden in controls) were haematology, immunology/infection and pulmonary conditions.

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Despite their latent neurogenic potential, most normal parenchymal astrocytes fail to dedifferentiate to neural stem cells in response to injury. In contrast, aberrant lineage plasticity is a hallmark of gliomas, and this suggests that tumor suppressors may constrain astrocyte dedifferentiation. Here, we show that p53, one of the most commonly inactivated tumor suppressors in glioma, is a gatekeeper of astrocyte fate.

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Background: Low-frequency variants play an important role in breast cancer (BC) susceptibility. Gene-based methods can increase power by combining multiple variants in the same gene and help identify target genes.

Methods: We evaluated the potential of gene-based aggregation in the Breast Cancer Association Consortium cohorts including 83,471 cases and 59,199 controls.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study developed a model using national electronic health records (EHR) to predict excess deaths related to COVID-19 by analyzing baseline mortality risk, infection rate, and relative risk.
  • Over one year, there were 127,020 observed excess deaths from March 2020 to March 2021, with the model predicting 100,338 deaths in the validation cohort, showing a reasonable degree of accuracy.
  • The findings suggest that EHR data can enhance pandemic planning, but future models should more effectively consider patients' underlying health conditions for better mortality predictions.
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Background: Randomised controlled trials (RCTs) inform prescription guidelines, but stringent eligibility criteria exclude individuals with vulnerable characteristics, which we define as comorbidities, concomitant medication use, and vulnerabilities due to age. Poor external validity can result in inadequate treatment decision information. Our first aim was to quantify the extent of exclusion of individuals with vulnerable characteristics from RCTs for all prescription drugs.

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Article Synopsis
  • A study in England examined the mental health of 358 young individuals (under 25) with chronic liver diseases compared to 1541 control participants.
  • The research revealed that those with liver disease experienced significantly higher rates of psychiatric issues, including anxiety, depression, substance misuse, and self-harm.
  • The increased risks were notably high, with individuals showing a 2-fold increase in anxiety, 2.5-fold in depression, and 4.4-fold in substance misuse, indicating a pressing need for mental health interventions in this group.
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Background: Population-level estimates of hospitalisation risk in children are currently limited. The study aims to characterise morbidity patterns in all children, focusing on childhood cancer survivors versus children without cancer.

Methods: Employing hospital records of children aged <19 years between 1997 to 2018 in England, we characterised morbidity patterns in childhood cancer survivors compared with children without cancer.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study aimed to define and validate ten COVID-19 phenotypes using linked electronic health records from the NHS in England, to better understand disease trajectories and support pandemic mitigation efforts.
  • The cohort included over 57 million individuals, identifying nearly 14 million COVID-19 events, with key findings showing a 12.7% infection rate, hospital admissions (6.4%), and varying mortality rates across different pandemic waves and treatment modalities.
  • Significant variances were observed in patient outcomes, such as higher mortality rates in wave 1 compared to wave 2 for non-ventilated hospital patients, with mortality being notably high for those receiving ventilatory support outside of ICU settings.
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Cancer is a leading cause of death, accounting for almost 10 million deaths annually worldwide. Personalised therapies harnessing genetic and clinical information may improve survival outcomes and reduce the side effects of treatments. The aim of this study is to appraise published evidence on clinicopathological factors and genetic mutations (single nucleotide polymorphisms [SNPs]) associated with prognosis across 11 cancer types: lung, colorectal, breast, prostate, melanoma, renal, glioma, bladder, leukaemia, endometrial, ovarian.

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Cancer is a life-altering event causing considerable psychological distress. However, information on the total burden of psychiatric disorders across all common adult cancers and therapy exposures has remained scarce. Here, we estimated the risk of self-harm after incident psychiatric disorder diagnosis in patients with cancer and the risk of unnatural deaths after self-harm in 459,542 individuals.

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Background: People with liver disease are at increased risk of developing cardiovascular disease (CVD), however, there has yet been an investigation of incidence burden, risk, and premature mortality across a wide range of liver conditions and cardiovascular outcomes.

Methods: We employed population-wide electronic health records (EHRs; from 1998 to 2020) consisting of almost 4 million adults to assess regional variations in disease burden of five liver conditions, alcoholic liver disease (ALD), autoimmune liver disease, chronic hepatitis B infection (HBV), chronic hepatitis C infection (HCV) and NAFLD, in England. We analysed regional differences in incidence rates for 17 manifestations of CVD in people with or without liver disease.

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Background: Children, teenagers and young adults who survived cancer are prone to developing late effects. The burden of late effects across a large number of conditions, in-patient hospitalisation and critical care admissions have not been described using a population-based dataset. We aim to systematically quantify the cumulative burden of late effects across all cancer subtypes, treatment modalities and chemotherapy drug classes.

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Patients and public have sought mortality risk information throughout the pandemic, but their needs may not be served by current risk prediction tools. Our mixed methods study involved: (1) systematic review of published risk tools for prognosis, (2) provision and patient testing of new mortality risk estimates for people with high-risk conditions and (3) iterative patient and public involvement and engagement with qualitative analysis. Only one of 53 (2%) previously published risk tools involved patients or the public, while 11/53 (21%) had publicly accessible portals, but all for use by clinicians and researchers.

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Background: Patients with liver disease have complex haemostasis and due to such contraindications, landmark randomised controlled trials investigating antithrombotic medicines have often excluded these patients. As a result, there has been limited consensus on the safety, efficacy and monitoring practices of anticoagulant and antiplatelet therapy in patients with liver disease. This study aims to investigate prescribing prevalence, adherence, persistence and impact of adherence on bleeding and stroke risk in people with and without liver disease taking anticoagulants and antiplatelets.

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Background: An Informatics Consult has been proposed in which clinicians request novel evidence from large scale health data resources, tailored to the treatment of a specific patient. However, the availability of such consultations is lacking. We seek to provide an Informatics Consult for a situation where a treatment indication and contraindication coexist in the same patient, i.

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Objective: The objective of this study was to employ ensemble clustering and tree-based risk model approaches to identify interactions between clinicogenomic features for colorectal cancer using the 100,000 Genomes Project.

Results: Among the 2211 patients with colorectal cancer (mean age of diagnosis: 67.7; 59.

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Background: Targeted obesity prevention policies would benefit from the identification of population groups with the highest risk of weight gain. The relative importance of adult age, sex, ethnicity, geographical region, and degree of social deprivation on weight gain is not known. We aimed to identify high-risk groups for changes in weight and BMI using electronic health records (EHR).

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