Publications by authors named "Maria Bishara"
Background: Upadacitinib is a Janus kinase inhibitor, which has recently been approved for treating Crohn's disease. There are limited real-world studies on the outcomes of upadacitinib in Crohn's disease.
Objective: Our aim was to evaluate the outcomes of upadacitinib in a real-world Crohn's disease cohort.
Article Synopsis
- The study aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of two medications, infliximab and adalimumab, for treating patients with active Crohn's disease over three years and to identify what factors contribute to treatment failure.
- It involved a large cohort of patients across the UK, tracking their responses to anti-TNF therapy and analyzing reasons for loss of effectiveness.
- Findings showed that remission rates declined over time for both medications, with around 40% of patients on infliximab and about 35% on adalimumab remaining in remission by the end of Year 1, suggesting ongoing challenges in maintaining treatment effectiveness.
Article Synopsis
- Vitamin D plays a crucial role in immune function, and past research suggested its low levels might lead to ineffective treatment with anti-TNF therapies in Crohn's disease patients.
- This study measured vitamin D levels in over 1,100 patients undergoing treatment with infliximab and adalimumab to assess if these levels could predict treatment outcomes.
- The findings showed that while vitamin D deficiency is prevalent among these patients, it did not significantly predict non-response or non-remission to anti-TNF therapy within 14 weeks or 54 weeks, contrasting earlier studies' results.
Background: The thiopurine medications are well established in the treatment of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). There is significant variation in levels of toxic and therapeutic metabolites. Current data from small or short-term studies support therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM) in assessing azathioprine (AZA) and 6-mercaptopurine (6MP).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Sepsis is the world's leading cause of death and its detection from a range of data and coding sources, consistent with consensus clinical definition, is desirable.
Objective: To evaluate the performance of three coding definitions (explicit, implicit, and newly proposed synchronous method) for sepsis derived from administrative data compared to a clinical reference standard.
Method: Extraction of administrative coded data from Australian metropolitan teaching hospital with 25,000 annual overnight admissions compared to clinical review of medical records; 313 (27.
Background: Early or first-line treatment with biologics, as opposed to conventional immunomodulators, is not always necessary to achieve remission in Crohn's disease [CD] and may not be cost-effective. This study aimed to develop a simple model to predict the need for early biologic therapy, in order to risk-stratify CD patients and guide initial treatment selection.
Methods: A model-building study using supervised statistical learning methods was conducted using a retrospective cohort across two tertiary centres.
Background: There are safety concerns regarding immunomodulators (thiopurines and methotrexate) for treatment of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).
Aim: To compare the long-term tolerability, and persistence of thiopurine and methotrexate therapy in IBD.
Methods: A retrospective cohort study was performed at two hospitals between 1 January 2004 and 31 December 2016 for patients commenced on thiopurines or methotrexate for IBD.
Serum amyloid A (SAA) is expressed locally in chronic inflammatory conditions such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), where macrophages that do not accord with the classic M1/M2 paradigm also accumulate. In this study, the role of SAA in regulating macrophage differentiation was investigated in vitro using human blood monocytes from healthy subjects and patients with COPD and in vivo using an airway SAA challenge model in BALB/c mice. Differentiation of human monocytes with SAA stimulated the proinflammatory monokines IL-6 and IL-1β concurrently with the M2 markers CD163 and IL-10.
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