Publications by authors named "L J Mackintosh"
Article Synopsis
- The study investigates the prevalence and factors related to depression and anxiety among individuals with chronic kidney disease (CKD) in the UK, revealing that significant portions experience these mental health issues.
- Participants completed an online survey that assessed mental health history and treatment preferences, finding that over half had a history of diagnosed depression and many preferred in-person support.
- The results indicated that certain demographics, including age and gender, as well as factors like self-efficacy and current treatment, were significantly related to the levels of depression and anxiety symptoms, but differences in symptoms were not influenced by the kidney service centers’ location or size.
Article Synopsis
- Plasma phospho-tau 217 (pTau217) assays, when performed on the common Lumipulse-G® platform, can effectively identify Alzheimer's disease (AD) by analyzing β-amyloid (Aβ) status and tau staging in patients.
- In a study with 388 participants, pTau217 showed strong correlations with PET imaging results, achieving high accuracy rates in distinguishing between Aβ-negative and Aβ-positive individuals, as well as different stages of tau pathology.
- The findings suggest that the plasma pTau217 assay is a reliable tool for predicting who might benefit from anti-β-amyloid treatments, emphasizing its potential for broader clinical use in AD diagnostics.
Patient experience is considered a pillar of high-quality care, integral to patient-centered care, but despite significant policy focus on patient-reported experience measures (PREMs), little is published regarding their development, use, or impact on clinical practice. In nephrology, PREMs are increasingly used in research to capture and quantify patients' perceptions of their experiences with health care services. It has been shown that a negative patient experience impacts patients' physical and psychological health, and a small but significant proportion of patients across a selection of settings report their experiences of health care as poor or suboptimal.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAging is a set of complex processes that occur temporally and continuously. It is generally a unidirectional progression of cellular and molecular changes occurring during the life stages of cells, tissues and ultimately the whole organism. In vertebrate organisms, this begins at conception from the first steps in blastocyst formation, gastrulation, germ layer differentiation, and organogenesis to a continuum of embryonic, fetal, adolescent, adult, and geriatric stages.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Depression is common in people with chronic kidney disease, yet little is known about how depression is identified and managed as part of routine kidney care.
Objectives: The primary objective was to survey all UK adult kidney centres to understand how depression is identified and managed. A secondary objective was to broadly describe the variability in psychosocial care.