Publications by authors named "C J Bird"
: The current gold standards for diagnosing acute kidney injury (AKI) are an increase in serum creatinine and a decrease in urine output, which are inadequate for rapid diagnosis. Neutrophil gelatinase-associated lipocalin (NGAL) is a 25-kDa protein produced and secreted by injured kidney tubule epithelial cells, and can serve as an early urinary biomarker for AKI. ProNephro AKI (NGAL) is an immunoassay for the quantitative determination of NGAL in urine (uNGAL) that recently received FDA clearance.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: Primary care access is a key health system metric, but little research has compared models to provide primary care access when one's regular physician is not available. We compared health system use after a visit with a patient's own family physician group (ie, within-group physician who was not the patient's primary physician) vs a visit with a walk-in clinic physician who was not part of the patient's family physician group.
Methods: We conducted a population-based, retrospective cohort study using administrative data from Ontario, Canada, including all individuals formally enrolled with a family physician, from April 1, 2019 to March 31, 2020.
Article Synopsis
- - The systematic review aimed to evaluate how effective point-of-care lung ultrasound is compared to chest X-rays for diagnosing community-acquired pneumonia in children and young adults (0-21 years) in outpatient settings.
- - The review analyzed six studies involving 1,099 pediatric patients, finding a pooled sensitivity of 90.9% and specificity of 80.7% for lung ultrasound, indicating it’s quite sensitive but less specific.
- - The authors concluded that while lung ultrasound shows promise for diagnosing pneumonia, further research is needed to address concerns about clinician training, study design, and the reliability of chest radiography as a standard for comparison.
In this work, we describe compatibility assessments of a recombinant, trivalent non-replicating rotavirus vaccine (t-NRRV) candidate with a mock trivalent Sabin inactivated polio vaccine (t-sIPV). Both t-sIPV and t-NRRV are incompatible with thimerosal (TH), a preservative commonly used in pediatric pentavalent combination vaccines (DTwP-Hib-HepB) distributed in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), preventing the development of a heptavalent combination. The compatibility of t-NRRV with a mock DTwP-Hib-HepB formulation is described in a companion paper.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFArticle Synopsis
- The study aimed to compare family physicians working in walk-in clinics with those providing long-term care in Ontario, focusing on their characteristics and patient demographics.
- The research linked a 2019 physician survey with health care data, revealing differences such as a higher percentage of male physicians and a diverse language background among walk-in clinic practitioners.
- Results showed that walk-in clinic physicians typically served younger, less frequently seeking patients, many of whom were from diverse backgrounds and often attached to other family physicians.