Ireland has a successful pharmaceutical industry with over 100 pharmaceutical manufacturing sites across the island. Although this success has many benefits, the irreversible effects emissions from pharmaceutical manufacturing can have on the environment are a major drawback. Although known pollutants are regularly monitored with limits set out by the Environmental Protection Agency, one significant pollutant has been overlooked: pharmaceutical pollution.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCommunity mental health centers (CMHCs) offer invaluable, publicly-funded treatment for serious mental illness (SMI). Unfortunately, evidence-based psychological treatments are often not delivered at CMHCs, in part due to implementation barriers, such as limited time, high caseloads, and complex clinical presentations. Transdiagnostic treatments may help address these barriers, because they allow providers to treat symptoms across multiple disorders concurrently.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFor centuries, aging was considered inevitable and immutable. Geroscience provides the conceptual framework to shift this focus toward a new view that regards aging as an active biological process, and the biological age of an individual as a modifiable entity. Significant steps forward have been made toward the identification of biomarkers for and measures of biological age, yet knowledge gaps in geroscience are still numerous.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAs the dimensionality, throughput and complexity of cytometry data increases, so does the demand for user-friendly, interactive analysis tools that leverage high-performance machine learning frameworks. Here we introduce FlowAtlas: an interactive web application that enables dimensionality reduction of cytometry data without down-sampling and that is compatible with datasets stained with non-identical panels. FlowAtlas bridges the user-friendly environment of FlowJo and computational tools in Julia developed by the scientific machine learning community, eliminating the need for coding and bioinformatics expertise.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFOn average, aging is associated with unfavorable changes in cellular metabolism, which are the processes involved in the storage and expenditure of energy. However, metabolic dysregulation may not occur to the same extent in all older individuals as people age at different rates. Those who are aging rapidly are at increased risk of adverse health outcomes and are said to be "frail.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHeart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF) refers to a clinical condition in which the signs of heart failure, such as pulmonary congestion, peripheral edema, and increased natriuretic peptide levels, are present despite normal ejection fractions and the absence of other causes (eg, pericardial disease). The ejection fraction cutoff for the definition of HFpEF has varied in the past, but recent society guidelines have settled on a consensus of 50%. HFpEF is particularly common in the elderly population.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Goal attainment scaling (GAS), an established individualized, patient-centred outcome measure, is used to capture the patient's voice. Although first introduced ~60 years ago, there are few published guidelines for implementing GAS, and almost none for its use when caregivers GAS is implemented with caregiver input. We conducted a systematic review of studies that implemented GAS with caregiver input; and examined variations in GAS implementation, analysis, and reporting.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCan J Physiol Pharmacol
August 2024
Advanced age is an independent risk factor for cardiovascular diseases in both sexes. This is thought to be due, in part, to age-dependent cellular, structural, and functional changes in the heart, a process known as cardiac aging. An emerging view is that cardiac aging leads to the accumulation of cellular and subcellular deficits that increase susceptibility to cardiovascular diseases.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe inaugural Canadian Conferences on Translational Geroscience were held as 2 complementary sessions in October and November 2023. The conferences explored the profound interplay between the biology of aging, social determinants of health, the potential societal impact of geroscience, and the maintenance of health in aging individuals. Although topics such as cellular senescence, molecular and genetic determinants of aging, and prevention of chronic disease were addressed, the conferences went on to emphasize practical applications for enhancing older people's quality of life.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAge is a major risk factor for the development of cardiovascular diseases in men and in women. However, not all people age at the same rate and those who are aging rapidly are considered frail, compared with their fit counterparts. Frailty is an important clinical challenge because those who are frail are more likely to develop and die from illnesses, including cardiovascular diseases, than fit people of the same age.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Cholangiocarcinoma (CCA) is associated with poor outcomes and limited treatment options, leading to increased use of targeted therapies for its management. Here, we performed one of the largest single-centre reviews evaluating outcomes following personalised targeted agents in CCA patients.
Methods: All consecutive CCA patients receiving systemic therapy between January 2010 and April 2023 at UCLH were included.
Background: Train-the-trainer (TTT) is a promising method for implementing evidence-based psychological treatments (EBPTs) in community mental health centers (CMHCs). In TTT, expert trainers train locally embedded individuals (i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Train-the-trainer (TTT) is a promising method for implementing evidence-based psychological treatments (EBPTs) in community mental health centers (CMHCs). In TTT, expert trainers train locally embedded individuals (i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFClinical studies suggest low testosterone levels are associated with cardiac arrhythmias, especially in later life. We investigated whether chronic exposure to low circulating testosterone promoted maladaptive electrical remodeling in ventricular myocytes from aging male mice and determined the role of late inward sodium current () in this remodeling. C57BL/6 mice had a gonadectomy (GDX) or sham surgery (1 mo) and were aged to 22-28 mo.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTher Adv Med Oncol
March 2023
Tebentafusp is a first-in-class immunotherapy agent that comprises an engineered T-cell receptor targeting a gp100 epitope presented by human leukocyte antigen-A*02:01 cells, fused to an anti-CD3 single-chain variable fragment. Tebentafusp is both the first bispecific T-cell engager to show efficacy in the treatment of advanced solid cancer and the first anti-cancer treatment to demonstrate an overall survival benefit in patients with uveal melanoma (UM). This review article will focus on the clinical development of tebentafusp, the mechanism of action and resultant evolution of the management of advanced UM.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Serious mental illness (SMI) can have devastating consequences. Unfortunately, many patients with SMI do not receive evidence-based psychological treatment (EBPTs) in routine practice settings. One barrier is poor "fit" between EBPTs and contexts in which they are implemented.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe frailty index (FI) quantifies frailty as deficit accumulation. It has been adapted to employ laboratory test data (FI-Lab). Our objective was to systematically review and meta-analyse the FI-Lab's ability to predict mortality.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFChanges in gene expression with age are typically normalised to constitutively expressed reference genes (RGs). However, RG expression may be affected by age or overall health and most studies use only male animals. We investigated whether expression of common RGs (Gapdh, Gusb, Rplp0, B2m, Tubb5, Rpl7l1, Hprt, Rer1) was affected by age, sex and/or overall health (frailty index) in skeletal muscle from young (4-mos) and aged (25-26-mos) mice.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAs an organism ages, its health-state is determined by a balance between the processes of damage and repair. Measuring these processes requires longitudinal data. We extract damage and repair transition rates from repeated observations of binary health attributes in mice and humans to explore robustness and resilience, which respectively represent resisting or recovering from damage.
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