Publications by authors named "Blamey R"

The COVID-19 disease is caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus and was declared a pandemic by the WHO on March 11, 2020. To date, more than 500 million people have been infected and it has caused over 6 million deaths worldwide. People that belong to the most vulnerable risk groups, such as those at the extremes of life, patients with chronic comorbidities and those with severe immunosuppression, are especially susceptible to developing a severe form of COVID-19 infection and death.

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DRESS syndrome (Drug Reaction with Eosinophilia and Systemic Symptoms) is a severe, rare and potentially lethal idiosyncratic condition associated with the use of some drugs. Given its broad spectrum of presentation, clinical suspicion is essential for management, since it requires the immediate withdrawal of the culprit drug, support measures and the use of corticosteroids as the first line of treatment. We report a 24-year-old woman with a diagnosis of ulcerative colitis with joint involvement despite the use of infliximab, who presented symptoms, signs and laboratory compatible with DRESS syndrome on the third week after indicating sulfasalazine for her baseline disease.

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Much of the Eastern Cape province in South Africa has been experiencing a severe drought since 2015. This drought has had major socio-economic effects particularly on the large impoverished rural population as well as on some urban areas where supplied water services have broken down in several cases. The region is influenced by both midlatitude and tropical systems leading to a complex regional meteorology that hitherto has not been much studied compared to other parts of South Africa.

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A Lagrangian analysis is applied to identify the main moisture source areas associated with atmospheric rivers (ARs) making landfall along the west coast of South Africa during the extended austral winter months from 1980 to 2014. The results show that areas that provide the anomalous uptake of moisture can be categorized into four regions: (1) the South Atlantic Ocean between 10°S and 30°S, (2) a clear local maximum in the eastern South Atlantic, (3) a continental source of anomalous uptake to the north of the Western Cape, and (4) over South America at a distance of more than 7000 km from the target region. It emerges that the South American moisture source can be linked to a particular phase of the South American low-level jet, known as a no Chaco jet event (NCJE), which transports moisture to the western and central South Atlantic basin.

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A previously healthy, 39-year-old obese farmer, arrived hypotensive and tachycardic, with fever, myalgia, headache, abdominal pain, diarrhea, and progressive dyspnea. Ten days before symptoms onset, he was in direct contact with mice and working in a contaminated drain. Patient laboratory showed acute kidney injury and thrombocytopenia.

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Serratia marcescens is a widely distributed gram-negative rod, often associated to nosocomial infections. Some outbreaks linked to contaminated antiseptic solutions have been reported. In this study we report a nosocomial outbreak of surgical site infection and catheter insertion site infection due to S.

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Background: Postnatal depression affects about 10-15% of women in the year after giving birth. Many women and healthcare professionals would like an effective and accessible non-pharmacological treatment for postnatal depression.

Method: Women who fulfilled the International Classification of Diseases (ICD)-10 criteria for major depression in the first 6 months postnatally were randomized to receive usual care plus a facilitated exercise intervention or usual care only.

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The burden of pneumococcal disease is high worldwide, mainly among elderly and immunosuppressed patients. Vaccines are important tools as preventive strategy for this population. There are two types of pneumococcal vaccines approved for adults, these are polysaccharide and conjugate, which are inactivated, have different serotype composition and immunogenicity.

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Background: The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence in the UK has recommended that the effectiveness of ongoing exercise referral schemes to promote physical activity should be examined in research trials. Recent empirical evidence in health care and physical activity promotion contexts provides a foundation for testing the feasibility and impact of a Self Determination Theory-based (SDT) exercise referral consultation.

Methods: An exploratory cluster randomised controlled trial comparing standard provision exercise referral with an exercise referral intervention grounded in Self Determination Theory.

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Background: The incidence of local recurrence (LR) after conservative surgery for early breast cancer without adjuvant therapy is unacceptably high even with favourable tumours. The aim of this study was to examine the effect of adjuvant therapies in tumours with excellent prognostic features.

Methods: Patients with primary invasive breast cancer <2 cm diameter, grade 1 or good prognosis special type, and node negative, treated by wide local excision (WLE) with clear margins were randomised into a 2 × 2 clinical trial of factorial design with or without radiotherapy and with or without tamoxifen.

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Background: Cancer is the third cause of death in patients infected with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and lymphoma is the most common type.

Aim: To describe the clinical characteristics, histology, risk factors and prognosis of these patients, in a Chilean public hospital in Chile.

Material And Methods: Records of 55 patients (45 males) aged between 23 and 67 years with lymphoma and HIV positive serology, diagnosed between 1992-2008, were reviewed.

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Background: Postnatal depression can have a substantial impact on the woman, the child and family as a whole. Thus, there is a need to examine different ways of helping women experiencing postnatal depression; encouraging them to exercise may be one way. A meta analysis found some support for exercise as an adjunctive treatment for postnatal depression but the methodological inadequacy of the few small studies included means that it is uncertain whether exercise reduces symptoms of postnatal depression.

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Background: Long-term analysis of a randomised trial in Nottingham comparing tamoxifen versus surgery as initial treatment demonstrated that in oestrogen receptor (ER)-unselected cases, surgery achieved better local control, with no difference in overall survival. It was suggested that for patients with ER-rich tumours, local control and survival may be comparable. We now present long-term follow-up of a randomised trial designed to address this clinical scenario.

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A recent Cochrane review of trials involving elderly women with operable primary breast cancer showed no significant difference in overall survival between surgery (±adjuvant tamoxifen) and primary endocrine therapy using tamoxifen. We report the final results of a randomised pilot trial comparing primary tamoxifen and wedge mastectomy as initial treatment in this population. One hundred and thirty-one women >70 years with early operable primary breast cancer (<5 cm), unselected for oestrogen receptor (ER), entered the trial in 1982-1987.

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Single clustering methods have often been used to elucidate clusters in high dimensional medical data, even though reliance on a single algorithm is known to be problematic. In this paper, we present a methodology to determine a set of 'core classes' by using a range of techniques to reach consensus across several different clustering algorithms, and to ascertain the key characteristics of these classes. We apply the methodology to immunohistochemical data from breast cancer patients.

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We hypothesized that the functional status of p53 transcriptional pathways, rather than p53 protein expression alone, could accurately discriminate between low- and high-risk breast carcinoma (BC) and inform about individuals' tumour biological behaviour. To test this, we studied a well-characterized series of 990 BCs with long-term follow-up, immunohistochemically profiled for p53, its main regulators and downstream genes. Results were validated in an independent series of patients (n = 245) uniformly treated with adjuvant anthracycline-based chemotherapy.

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PURPOSE Although tubular carcinoma (TC) is known to have a favorable prognosis, it is still unknown whether this subtype represents a distinct type of breast carcinoma or whether it behaves like other low-grade luminal A-type breast carcinomas. METHODS In this study, we performed a retrospective analysis of a large well-characterized series of breast cancers (2,608 carcinomas) to assess the clinicopathologic and molecular features and prognostic value of TC compared with grade 1 ductal carcinomas of the breast. Results When compared with grade 1 ductal carcinoma (n = 212), TC (n = 102) was more likely to be detected on mammographic screening, had smaller median size, and less frequently showed lymphovascular invasion.

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Background: Many people attending rheumatology clinics use analgesics and non-steroidal anti-inflammatories for persistent musculoskeletal pain. Guidelines for pain management recommend regular and pre-emptive use of analgesics to reduce the impact of pain. Clinical experience indicates that analgesics are often not used in this way.

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Unlabelled: ONCOPOOL is a retrospectively compiled database of primary operable invasive breast cancers treated in the 1990s in 10 European breast cancer Units. Sixteen thousand and nine hundred and forty four cases were entered, with tumours less than 5 cm diameter in women aged 70 or less (mean age 55).

Data: Data were date of birth, mode of diagnosis, pathology (size, lymph node status, grade, type, lympho-vascular invasion and hormone receptor) and therapies and outcome measures: first local, regional or distant recurrences, contralateral primary, date and cause of death.

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Gene expression microarrays allow for the high throughput analysis of huge numbers of gene transcripts and this technology has been widely applied to the molecular and biological classification of cancer patients and in predicting clinical outcome. A potential handicap of such data intensive molecular technologies is the translation to clinical application in routine practice. In using an artificial neural network bioinformatic approach, we have reduced a 70 gene signature to just 9 genes capable of accurately predicting distant metastases in the original dataset.

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Purpose: Triple-negative (TN; estrogen receptor, progesterone receptor, and HER-2 negative) cancer and basal-like breast cancer (BLBC) are associated with poor outcome and lack the benefit of targeted therapy. It is widely perceived that BLBC and TN tumors are synonymous and BLBC can be defined using a TN definition without the need for the expression of basal markers.

Experimental Design: We have used two well-defined cohorts of breast cancers with a large panel of biomarkers, BRCA1 mutation status, and follow-up data to compare the clinicopathologic and immunohistochemical features of TN tumors expressing one or more of the specific basal markers (CK5/6, CK17, CK14, and epidermal growth factor receptor; BLBC) with those TN tumors that express none of these markers (TN3BKE-).

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Unlabelled: The new gene expression molecular taxonomy of breast cancer places medullary carcinoma in the basal group. The basal group is considered to have a poor prognosis, but medullary carcinoma is considered to have a better prognosis than other grade 3 carcinomas. The prognostic significance of tumour associated inflammation, an important feature of medullary carcinomas, remains controversial.

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Purpose: The three strongest prognostic determinants in operable breast cancer used in routine clinical practice are lymph node (LN) stage, primary tumor size, and histologic grade. However, grade is not included in the recent revision of the TNM staging system of breast cancer as its value is questioned in certain settings.

Materials And Methods: This study is based on a large and well-characterized consecutive series of operable breast cancer (2,219 cases), treated according to standard protocols in a single institution, with a long-term follow-up (median, 111 months) to assess the prognostic value of routine assessment of histologic grade using Nottingham histologic grading system.

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Unlabelled: Although invasive ductal (IDC) and lobular (ILC) breast carcinomas are well characterised in the literature, the biological and clinical significance of mixed tumours with both ductal and lobular components has not been investigated. In the current study, we have examined a well-characterised series of breast carcinoma with a long term follow-up that comprised 140 mixed tumours, 2170 IDC and 380 pure ILC.

Results: Mixed tumours constituted 3.

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Background: Axillary node sampling (ANS) is widely used in conjunction with breast conserving surgery in the treatment of primary breast cancers in the UK. Some evidence suggests that axillary staging techniques can miss intramammary nodes contained within the axillary tail of the breast. This study aims to assess the incidence of such nodes in completion mastectomy specimens in women who have had previous breast conserving surgery and ANS.

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