Publications by authors named "Ben Butler-Cole"
Article Synopsis
- * In the OpenSAFELY-TPP database, 78.2% of patients had their ethnicity recorded in primary care as of January 2022, with higher rates in women and those with serious health conditions.
- * The primary care ethnicity data closely matched the 2021 UK census data, with a high consistency found among patients with multiple ethnicity records, particularly indicating issues with classification for those recorded as "Other."
Article Synopsis
- Long COVID is associated with increased healthcare utilization and costs, indicating its potential impact on the NHS.
- The study analyzed healthcare usage data from nearly 53,000 individuals with long COVID, comparing it with over 264,000 individuals without the condition from Nov 2020 to Jan 2023.
- Results show that those with long COVID had 49% more healthcare utilization, averaging 30 visits per year, and incurred healthcare costs around £2500 annually, compared to £1500 for the comparators.
Article Synopsis
- - The study examines how the Covid-19 pandemic influenced the rates of group A streptococcal infections and related antibiotic prescriptions in primary care practices across England from January 2018 to March 2023.
- - Significant findings show that infections and antibiotic prescriptions peaked in December 2022, surpassing levels seen during the 2017-18 season, with notable increases in rates for sore throat, scarlet fever, and invasive infections.
- - The research highlights a concerning trend, reporting that the rate ratios for infections and prescriptions in the 2022-23 season were considerably higher compared to the pre-pandemic period, suggesting lasting impacts from the pandemic on public health.
Background: Long COVID is the patient-coined term for the persistent symptoms of COVID-19 illness for weeks, months or years following the acute infection. There is a large burden of long COVID globally from self-reported data, but the epidemiology, causes and treatments remain poorly understood. Primary care is used to help identify and treat patients with long COVID and therefore Electronic Health Records (EHRs) of past COVID-19 patients could be used to help fill these knowledge gaps.
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- Electronic health records (EHRs) are essential for researching medical products and informing public health, but reproducibility in EHR research is a significant challenge.
- OpenSAFELY is an open-source software platform created during the COVID-19 pandemic to improve the reproducibility of research using EHRs by standardizing workflows and ensuring consistent computational environments.
- The platform promotes transparency by enforcing code-sharing, providing an audit trail for data usage, and integrating tools that support reproducible research practices.
Background: Long COVID is a major problem affecting patient health, the health service, and the workforce. To optimise the design of future interventions against COVID-19, and to better plan and allocate health resources, it is critical to quantify the health and economic burden of this novel condition. We aimed to evaluate and estimate the differences in health impacts of long COVID across sociodemographic categories and quantify this in Quality-Adjusted Life-Years (QALYs), widely used measures across health systems.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAims: The COVID-19 pandemic caused significant disruption to routine activity in primary care. Medication reviews are an important primary care activity ensuring safety and appropriateness of prescribing. A disruption could have significant negative implications for patient care.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The COVID-19 pandemic affected how care was delivered to vulnerable patients, such as those with dementia or learning disability.
Objective: To explore whether this affected antipsychotic prescribing in at-risk populations.
Methods: With the approval of NHS England, we completed a retrospective cohort study, using the OpenSAFELY platform to explore primary care data of 59 million patients.
Objectives: Cancer treatments were variably disrupted during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. UK guidelines recommend pancreatic enzyme replacement therapy (PERT) to all people with unresectable pancreatic cancer. The aim was to investigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on PERT prescribing to people with unresectable pancreatic cancer and to investigate the national and regional rates from January 2015 to January 2023.
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- The study investigated how different demographic and clinical groups experienced varying mortality risks related to COVID-19 across five pandemic waves in England, using data from the OpenSAFELY platform.
- A total of nearly 19 million adults were analyzed across each wave, with significant trends showing a decrease in crude COVID-19-related death rates from the first wave to the fifth.
- The highest standardized death rates were found among older adults and those with certain health conditions, such as advanced kidney disease or dementia, especially in the first wave of the pandemic.
Background: The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the incidence and management of inflammatory arthritis is not understood. Routinely captured data in secure platforms, such as OpenSAFELY, offer unique opportunities to understand how care for patients with inflammatory arthritis was impacted upon by the pandemic. Our objective was to use OpenSAFELY to assess the effects of the pandemic on diagnostic incidence and care delivery for inflammatory arthritis in England and to replicate key metrics from the National Early Inflammatory Arthritis Audit.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: Cancer treatments were variably disrupted during the COVID-19 pandemic. UK guidelines recommend pancreatic enzyme replacement therapy (PERT) to all people with unresectable pancreatic cancer. The aim was to investigate the impact of COVID-19 on PERT prescribing to people with unresectable pancreatic cancer and to investigate the national and regional rates from January 2015 to January 2023.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe tyrosine family site-specific recombinases XerC and XerD convert dimers of the Escherichia coli chromosome and many natural plasmids to monomers. The heterotetrameric recombination complex contains two molecules of XerC and two of XerD, with each recombinase mediating one pair of DNA strand exchanges. The two pairs of strand exchanges are separated in time and space.
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