Publications by authors named "Cormac Breen"

Background: Post-transplant glomerulonephritis (PTGN) has been associated with inferior long-term allograft survival, and its incidence varies widely in the literature.

Methods: This is a cohort study of 7,623 patients transplanted between 2005 and 2016 at four major transplant UK centres. The diagnosis of glomerulonephritis (GN) in the allograft was extracted from histology reports aided by the use of text-mining software.

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Background: AngioJet® is an increasingly used method of percutaneous mechanical thrombectomy for the treatment of patients with arterial and venous thromboses. AngioJet® has been shown to cause intravascular haemoylsis universally. We report the case of a 29 year old patient who underwent AngioJet® thrombectomy and post-procedure developed a stage 3 Acute kidney injury (AKI.

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Background: Patients admitted to hospital with Covid-19 are at risk of deterioration. The National Early Warning Score (NEWS2) is widely recommended, however it's validity in Covid-19 is not established and indices more specific for respiratory failure may be more appropriate. We aim to describe the physiological antecedents to deterioration, test the predictive validity of NEWS2 and compare this to the ROX index ([SpO/FiO]/respiratory rate).

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Analyses of search engine and social media feeds have been attempted for infectious disease outbreaks, but have been found to be susceptible to artefactual distortions from health scares or keyword spamming in social media or the public internet. We describe an approach using real-time aggregation of keywords and phrases of freetext from real-time clinician-generated documentation in electronic health records to produce a customisable real-time viral pneumonia signal providing up to 4 days warning for secondary care capacity planning. This low-cost approach is open-source, is locally customisable, is not dependent on any specific electronic health record system and can provide an ensemble of signals if deployed at multiple organisational scales.

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Background: The National Early Warning Score (NEWS2) is currently recommended in the UK for the risk stratification of COVID-19 patients, but little is known about its ability to detect severe cases. We aimed to evaluate NEWS2 for the prediction of severe COVID-19 outcome and identify and validate a set of blood and physiological parameters routinely collected at hospital admission to improve upon the use of NEWS2 alone for medium-term risk stratification.

Methods: Training cohorts comprised 1276 patients admitted to King's College Hospital National Health Service (NHS) Foundation Trust with COVID-19 disease from 1 March to 30 April 2020.

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Rationale & Objective: Most patients with kidney failure receive hemodialysis 3 times per week in a facility. More frequent and longer duration dialysis prescriptions improve a number of key outcome measures. These prescriptions are best suited to self-care and home regimens.

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There are over 12,000 people with sickle cell disease (SCD) in the UK, and 4-12% of patients who develop Sickle Cell Nephropathy (SCN) progress to End Stage Renal Disease (ESRD). Renal transplantation offers the best outcomes for these patients with but their access to transplantation is often limited. Regular automated exchange blood transfusions (EBT) reduce the complications of SCD and may improve outcomes.

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Anticoagulation is an important component of haemodialysis treatment in all settings. The therapeutic options available for anticoagulation of home haemodialysis are similar to those for haemodialysis in other settings. However, dialysis sessions with a wide range of treatment durations are undertaken at home, which can require different approaches to anticoagulation.

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Background: Recombinant erythropoietin (Epo) therapy is well established as an effective treatment for the anaemia of end-stage renal disease. However, 5-10% of such patients do not respond adequately and an important contributory factor to this is chronic inflammation.

Methods: The present study compares the circulating T-cell phenotypes of haemodialysis patients who respond poorly to Epo with those who respond well, along with normal controls.

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