Publications by authors named "Colin Robertson"

Background: Long-term effects of early, recurrent human exposure to general anaesthesia remain unknown. The Australasian Cystic Fibrosis Bronchoalveolar Lavage (ACFBAL) trial provided an opportunity to examine this issue in children randomly assigned in infancy to either repeated bronchoalveolar-lavage (BAL)-directed therapy with general anaesthesia or standard care with no planned lavages up to 5 years of age when all children received BAL-directed therapy under general anaesthesia.

Methods: This multicentre, randomised, open-label phase 4 trial (CF-GAIN) used the original ACFBAL trial randomisation at 3·6 months (SD 1·6) to BAL-directed therapy or standard-care groups to assess the impact of general anaesthesia exposures over early childhood.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

We have investigated the magnitude of circadian variation in Isokinetic and Isometric strength of the knee extensors and flexors, as well as back squat and bench press performance using the MuscleLab force velocity transducer. Ten resistance-trained males (mean±SD: age 21.5 ± 1.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • * Researchers used a combination of advanced techniques, including CRISPR and phosphoproteomics, to study how neuroligin-3 localizes to different types of synapses in mouse and human brains.
  • * Findings revealed that neuroligin-3 is region-specific, mainly found in excitatory synapses in the cortex and inhibitory synapses in subcortical areas, with its localization regulated by phosphorylation, affecting its interactions with other synaptic proteins.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Generating animal models for individual patients within clinically-useful timeframes holds great potential toward enabling personalized medicine approaches for genetic epilepsies. The ability to rapidly incorporate patient-specific genomic variants into model animals recapitulating elements of the patient's clinical manifestations would enable applications ranging from validation and characterization of pathogenic variants to personalized models for tailoring pharmacotherapy to individual patients. Here, we demonstrate generation of an animal model of an individual epilepsy patient with an ultra-rare variant of the NMDA receptor subunit GRIN2A, without the need for germline transmission and breeding.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Cas9 targets genomic loci with high specificity. For knockin with double-strand break repair, however, Cas9 often leads to unintended on-target knockout rather than intended edits. This imprecision is a barrier for direct editing where clonal selection is not feasible.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background And Aims: The use of whole-body cryotherapy (WBC) for athletic recovery is becoming increasingly popular despite the lack of evidence supporting the dosage parameters in its implementation. The aim of the current study was to investigate the dose-response effects of WBC following match-play in elite rugby league players.

Methods: We observed endocrine (salivary cortisol and testosterone) and biochemical (creatine kinase) responses following three separate post-match recovery periods in elite rugby league players.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Rugby league has a relatively high injury risk, with the tackle having the greatest injury propensity. The number of tackles players engage in, prior to injurious tackles may influence injury risk, which has yet to be investigated. Therefore, this study investigated if rugby league players are involved in more tackles (as either tackler or ball carrier) (i) in the 10 minutes, or (ii) 1-min periods prior to an injurious tackle-event, (iii) differences for ball carriers .

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Despite the abundance of capillary thin-strand pericytes and their proximity to neurons and glia, little is known of the contributions of these cells to the control of brain hemodynamics. We demonstrate that the pharmacological activation of thin-strand pericyte K channels profoundly hyperpolarizes these cells, dilates upstream penetrating arterioles and arteriole-proximate capillaries, and increases capillary blood flow. Focal stimulation of pericytes with a K channel agonist is sufficient to evoke this response, mediated via K2.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Unlabelled: Machine learning techniques have to date not been widely used in population-environment research, but represent a promising tool for identifying relationships between environmental variables and population outcomes. They may be particularly useful for instances where the nature of the relationship is not obvious or not easily detected using other methods, or where the relationship potentially varies across spatial scales within a given study unit. Machine learning techniques may also help the researcher identify the relative strength of influence of specific variables within a larger set of interacting ones, and so provide a useful methodological approach for exploratory research.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Despite improvements in general health and life expectancy in people with cystic fibrosis (CF), lung function decline continues unabated during adolescence and early adult life.

Methods: We examined factors present at age 5-years that predicted lung function decline from childhood to adolescence in a longitudinal study of Australasian children with CF followed from 1999 to 2017.

Results: Lung function trajectories were calculated for 119 children with CF from childhood (median 5.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • The study analyzed the effects of 90 minutes of competitive football on countermovement jump (CMJ) performance, creatine kinase (CK) levels, and urine osmolality (Uosm) in elite players throughout a season, focusing on their links to external match load.
  • It involved 18 footballers, with data collected 24 hours before and 48 hours after matches, revealing a significant increase in post-match CK levels and a decline in various CMJ performance metrics.
  • Results indicated that CMJ performance is closely related to high-intensity activities during matches, highlighting the importance of these measures for assessing player readiness and shaping recovery strategies.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • - Previous studies have shown that common genetic variants are linked to eczema, but this research focuses on understanding the impact of rare genetic variants on eczema risk by analyzing 21 different study groups.
  • - The study finds that rare genetic variants in specific genes (DUSP1, NOTCH4, and SLC9A4) are associated with eczema, with some variants likely affecting important protein functions.
  • - Additionally, the researchers identify five new common variants related to other genes, revealing that over 20% of the genetic heritability for eczema is due to these rare and low-frequency variants, opening up potential avenues for new treatments.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Aim: To identify interventions that reduce hospitalisations and improve related outcomes in children at risk of asthma hospital admissions.

Methods: Medline, Embase, Pubmed and Cochrane Library search from January 2002 to April 2020.

Inclusion Criteria: randomised controlled trials of any intervention for children with asthma who are at risk of hospitalisations.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

This study investigated the relationships between the coach, parent, and peer motivational climate and participants' life skills development in youth sport. In total, 308 participants ( = 14.67,  = 2.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Teaching disaster response medicine (DRM) to medical students requires considerable resources. We evaluate the effectiveness of e-learning in teaching emergency disaster response (ELITE-DR), a novel initiative, in educating medical students of the cognitive aspect of DRM. A prospective cross-sectional study among pre-clinical year medical students was carried out to determine their knowledge on DRM and perception regarding the ELITE-DR initiative using a validated online questionnaire.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Brain pericytes reside on the abluminal surface of capillaries, and their processes cover ~90% of the length of the capillary bed. These cells were first described almost 150 years ago (Eberth, 1871; Rouget, 1873) and have been the subject of intense experimental scrutiny in recent years, but their physiological roles remain uncertain and little is known of the complement of signaling elements that they employ to carry out their functions. In this review, we synthesize functional data with single-cell RNAseq screens to explore the ion channel and G protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) toolkit of mesh and thin-strand pericytes of the brain, with the aim of providing a framework for deeper explorations of the molecular mechanisms that govern pericyte physiology.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Elite athletes are particularly susceptible to sleep inadequacies, characterised by habitual short sleep (<7 hours/night) and poor sleep quality (eg, sleep fragmentation). Athletic performance is reduced by a night or more without sleep, but the influence on performance of partial sleep restriction over 1-3 nights, a more real-world scenario, remains unclear. Studies investigating sleep in athletes often suffer from inadequate experimental control, a lack of females and questions concerning the validity of the chosen sleep assessment tools.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Little is known about early predictors of later cystic fibrosis (CF) structural lung disease. This study examined early predictors of progressive structural lung abnormalities in children who completed the Australasian CF Bronchoalveolar Lavage (ACFBAL) clinical trial at age 5-years and participated in an observational follow-up study (CF-FAB).Eight Australian and New Zealand CF centres participated in CF-FAB and provided follow-up chest computed-tomography (CT) scans for children who had completed the ACFBAL study with baseline scans at age 5-years.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The lack of standardization of methods and procedures have hindered agreement in the literature related to time-of-day effects on repeated sprint performance and needs clarification. Therefore, the aim of the present study was to investigate and systematically review the evidence relating to time-of-day based on performance measures in repeated-sprints.The entire content of PubMed (MEDLINE), Scopus, SPORTDiscus® (via EBSCOhost) and Web of Science was searched.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF