Publications by authors named "Martin Connor"

Background: Amidst the difficulty and contentiousness of improving hospitals, a relatively new approach is the Relational Model of Organizational Change (RMOC). However, this approach has its own challenges, including reports that its focus on communication and relationships is undervalued despite evidence supporting its use to facilitate practice improvements in hospitals. Research suggests power dynamics in hospitals influences how the RMOC is used, but the precise mechanisms through which this occurs have not been fully examined.

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  • Radical prostatectomy (RP) is a key surgical treatment for prostate cancer, but assessing surgical margins during the procedure is difficult and costly, making fluorescence confocal microscopy (FCM) a potential solution.
  • The IP8-FLUORESCE study is a multicentre, prospective study that investigates the accuracy of digital FCM in identifying prostate cancer at surgical margins, comparing it to traditional histopathology methods.
  • The study will involve 153 patients undergoing robot-assisted RP, using FCM on prostate specimens immediately after surgery, with results evaluated by blinded uro-pathologists for accuracy in detecting cancer presence at the margins.
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Background And Objective: Cytoreductive treatments for patients diagnosed with de novo synchronous metastatic hormone-sensitive prostate cancer (mHSPC) confer incremental survival benefits over systemic therapy, but these may lead to added toxicity and morbidity. Our objective was to determine patients' preferences for, and trade-offs between, additional cytoreductive prostate and metastasis-directed interventions.

Methods: A prospective multicentre discrete choice experiment trial was conducted at 30 hospitals in the UK between December 3, 2020 and January 25, 2023 (NCT04590976).

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  • Addiction vulnerability involves how much we react to cues that signal rewards, influenced by genetics and environment.
  • A study on 1,645 diverse rats examined their behaviors towards food cues, identifying two types: "sign-tracking," which focuses on cues, and "goal-tracking," which focuses on food sources.
  • The research discovered genetic links on chromosome 1 related to reward behaviors, suggesting a connection between how we perceive rewards and substance use disorders, paving the way for further genetic exploration in addiction.
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Organisms must regulate their behavior flexibly in the face of environmental challenges. Failure can lead to a host of maladaptive behavioral traits associated with a range of neuropsychiatric disorders, including attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism, and substance use disorders. This maladaptive dysregulation of behavior is influenced by genetic and environmental factors.

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For men with prostate cancer who develop biochemical failure after radiotherapy, European guidelines recommend reimaging with Ga-PSMA-11 PET/CT and multiparametric MRI (mpMRI). However, the accuracy of Ga-PSMA-11 PET/CT for detecting intraprostatic recurrences is unclear, both with and without mpMRI. A single-center retrospective study of a series of patients investigated for radiorecurrence between 2016 and 2022 is described.

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Hydrofluoroolefins are being adopted as sustainable alternatives to long-lived fluorine- and chlorine-containing gases and are finding current or potential mass-market applications as refrigerants, among a myriad of other uses. Their olefinic bond affords relatively rapid reaction with hydroxyl radicals present in the atmosphere, leading to short lifetimes and proportionally small global warming potentials. However, this type of functionality also allows reaction with ozone, and whilst these reactions are slow, we show that the products of these reactions can be extremely long-lived.

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Rhodium(II) catalyzes carbene transfer from trimethylsilyldiazomethane to arylmethyl thioethers, generating sulfonium ylides that undergo [2,3]-sigmatropic rearrangement, punching quaternary centers into aromatic rings. The reaction works well with naphthalene, indole, and benzofuran ring systems, but the reaction is unsuccessful with the monocyclic benzene homologue. For aryl thioethers, Rh(OAc) gives good results.

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Objective: To compare biopsy recommendation rates and accuracy of the Prostate Imaging-Reporting and Data System, version 2 (PI-RADSv2) with the Likert scale for detection of clinically significant and insignificant prostate cancer in men screened within the Imperial Prostate 1 Prostate Cancer Screening Trial Using Imaging (IP1-PROSTAGRAM).

Patients And Methods: Men aged 50-69 years were screened with Prostagram MRI. Scans were prospectively reported using both PI-RADSv2 (excluding dynamic contrast-enhanced sequence score) and 5-point Likert scores by expert uro-radiologists.

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  • The study highlights the challenge in genome-wide association studies (GWASs) where different species often do not show agreement in orthologous genes, using body mass index (BMI) as a case study.
  • By analyzing molecular networks, researchers found that while specific BMI-associated genes differ between humans and rats, the networks connecting these genes revealed significant overlaps, pointing to shared biological mechanisms like synaptic signaling and hormonal regulation.
  • The findings suggest that, despite some species-specific mechanisms, there are conserved genetic networks across mammals that influence phenotypes, offering new insights into how model species may reflect human biology.
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Organisms must regulate their behavior flexibly in the face of environmental challenges. Failure can lead to a host of maladaptive behavioral traits associated with a range of neuropsychiatric disorders, including attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism, and substance use disorders. This maladaptive dysregulation of behavior is influenced by genetic and environmental factors.

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Choice behavior requires animals to evaluate both short- and long-term advantages and disadvantages of all potential alternatives. Impulsive choice is traditionally measured in laboratory tasks by utilizing delay discounting (DD), a paradigm that offers a choice between a smaller immediate reward, or a larger more delayed reward. This study tested a large sample of Heterogeneous Stock (HS) male (n = 896) and female (n = 898) rats, part of a larger genetic study, to investigate whether measures of reward maximization overlapped with traditional models of delay discounting via the patch depletion model using a Sequential Patch Depletion procedure.

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Background: The use of prostate-specific antigen (PSA) testing to screen for prostate cancer has been fraught with under- and overdiagnosis. Short, noncontrast magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) might detect more grade group ≥2 cancers with similar rates of biopsy.

Objective: To evaluate strategies that combined PSA and MRI to select men based in the community for a prostate biopsy.

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Background: Quantitative Trait Locus (QTL) analysis and Genome-Wide Association Studies (GWAS) have the power to identify variants that capture significant levels of phenotypic variance in complex traits. However, effort and time are required to select the best methods and optimize parameters and pre-processing steps. Although machine learning approaches have been shown to greatly assist in optimization and data processing, applying them to QTL analysis and GWAS is challenging due to the complexity of large, heterogenous datasets.

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Background: The IP1-PROSTAGRAM study showed that a short, non-contrast MRI detected more significant cancers with similar rates of biopsy compared to PSA. Herein, we compare the expected and perceived burden of PSA, MRI and ultrasound as screening tests.

Methods: IP1-PROSTAGRAM was a prospective, population-based, paired screening study of 408 men conducted at seven UK primary care practices and two imaging centres.

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Power analyses are often used to determine the number of animals required for a genome-wide association study (GWAS). These analyses are typically intended to estimate the sample size needed for at least 1 locus to exceed a genome-wide significance threshold. A related question that is less commonly considered is the number of significant loci that will be discovered with a given sample size.

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Background Since coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) emerged, increasing cases have been identified worldwide. COVID-19 continues to lead to significant morbidity and mortality, despite developing a vaccination for the disease. While much has been studied regarding the initial presentation and treatment of patients with COVID-19, to our knowledge, no study has uncovered that COVID-19-positive patients with abdominal pain are at a higher risk of requiring intubation.

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Choice behavior requires animals to evaluate both short- and long-term advantages and disadvantages of all potential alternatives. Impulsive choice is traditionally measured in laboratory tasks by utilizing delay discounting (DD), a paradigm that offers a choice between a smaller immediate reward, or a larger more delayed reward. This study tested a large sample of Heterogeneous Stock (HS) male (n = 896) and female (n = 898) rats, part of a larger genetic study, to investigate whether measures of reward maximization overlapped with traditional models of delay discounting via the patch depletion model using a Sequential Patch Depletion procedure.

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Background: Prostate cancer (PCa) has a high lifetime prevalence (one out of six men), but currently there is no widely accepted screening programme. Widely used prostate specific antigen (PSA) test at cut-off of 3.0 ng/mL does not have sufficient accuracy for detection of any prostate cancer, resulting in numerous unnecessary prostate biopsies in men with benign disease and false reassurance in some men with PCa.

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Background: Quantitative Trait Locus (QTL) analysis and Genome-Wide Association Studies (GWAS) have the power to identify variants that capture significant levels of phenotypic variance in complex traits. However, effort and time are required to select the best methods and optimize parameters and pre-processing steps. Although machine learning approaches have been shown to greatly assist in optimization and data processing, applying them to QTL analysis and GWAS is challenging due to the complexity of large, heterogenous datasets.

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  • Diagnostic prostate biopsy methods have evolved significantly, shifting from finger-guided techniques to advanced MRI-directed strategies and transperineal approaches.
  • The adoption of transperineal biopsy has decreased the risk of infections and enhanced antibiotic usage.
  • Future advancements may include image fusion for 3D-ultrasonography, molecular targeting with PET imaging, and the use of robotic assistance in biopsies.
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Introduction: On 18 May 2020, New York State enacted legislation banning the sale of vaping products with distinguishable flavours (other than tobacco). According to this new statute, vaping products are deemed flavoured if they include a statement, whether expressed or implied, that have distinguishable tastes or aromas other than tobacco. This study aimed to determine how manufacturers responded.

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We report a diastereoselective, photocatalyst-free decarboxylative alkylation of (hetero)aryl sulfinimines using redox-active esters under blue light. High yields and diastereoselectivities can be achieved under mild conditions, and we demonstrate its utility as a synthetic method, especially for medicinal chemists.

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  • The RAPID diagnostic pathway aims to improve efficiency in prostate imaging and diagnosis while reducing patient burden through better standardization of procedures.
  • A study involving 2130 patients revealed that 43% could avoid biopsy, with significant variations in biopsy avoidance rates across different sites.
  • The pathway also reduced the time to diagnosis from 32.1 days in the pre-RAPID cohort to 15.9 days, with similar cancer detection rates regardless of anesthesia used during transperineal targeted biopsy.
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