Publications by authors named "McKeown M"

Article Synopsis
  • * Recently, there have been great breakthroughs for MS, with new medications being approved, but people with PD still have not gotten new treatments and only have old ones that don't work as well.
  • * Experts from around the world gathered in Toronto to discuss how to improve treatment for PD by learning from what worked for MS, focusing on things like better clinical trials and understanding the diseases better.
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  • The Canadian Open Parkinson Network (C-OPN) aims to enhance collaboration between study participants, clinicians, and researchers to boost Parkinson's disease research across ten universities and research centers in Canada.
  • The C-OPN database collects a variety of data, including demographic information, treatment approaches, and biological samples, which are accessible for multi-center studies via web-based systems like REDCap.
  • By November 2023, the C-OPN had enrolled 1,505 participants, with a focus on environmental and symptom analysis, serving as a platform for innovative research and collaboration among scientists in Canada.
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Student mental health nurses have greater patient contact than registered nurses, and this is appreciated by patients. This phenomenological study explored the impact of patients and student mental health nurses' time shared on forensic units for men carrying a personality disorder diagnosis. Phenomenology was the underpinning philosophy of this research.

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Purpose Of Review: The brainstem's complex anatomy and relatively small size means that structural and functional assessment of this structure is done less frequently compared to other brain areas. However, recent years have seen substantial progress in brainstem imaging, enabling more detailed investigations into its structure and function, as well as its role in neuropathology.

Recent Findings: Advancements in ultrahigh field MRI technology have allowed for unprecedented spatial resolution in brainstem imaging, facilitating the new creation of detailed brainstem-specific atlases.

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Article Synopsis
  • - The study investigates the prevalence of phase 3 clinical trials for neurologic drugs that started without a positive phase 2 trial, finding that 46% of such trials bypassed or overrode phase 2 outcomes, which could affect the risk/benefit ratio of these trials.
  • - Using data from 2011-2021, the researchers analyzed 1,188 phase 3 trials, concluding that those relying on phase 2 bypass/override had a significantly lower chance of achieving positive primary outcomes, indicating potential issues with efficacy.
  • - The study also found that the practice of bypassing phase 2 trials was not significantly linked to industry funding or testing already approved interventions, suggesting that other factors may drive this trend in neurolog
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Purpose Of Review: Human brain parcellation based on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) plays an essential role in neuroscience research. By segmenting vast and intricate fMRI data into functionally similar units, researchers can better decipher the brain's structure in both healthy and diseased states. This article reviews current methodologies and ideas in this field, while also outlining the obstacles and directions for future research.

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Due to global ageing, the burden of chronic movement and neurological disorders (Parkinson's disease and essential tremor) is rapidly increasing. Current diagnosis and monitoring of these disorders rely largely on face-to-face assessments utilising clinical rating scales, which are semi-subjective and time-consuming. To address these challenges, the utilisation of artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged.

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This study introduces PDMotion, a mobile application comprising 11 digital tests, including those adapted from the MDS-Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale (MDS-UPDRS) Part III and novel assessments, for remote Parkinson's Disease (PD) motor symptoms evaluation. Employing machine learning techniques on data from 50 PD patients and 29 healthy controls, PDMotion achieves accuracies of 0.878 for PD status prediction and 0.

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From 2017 to 2023, British Columbians experienced four record-breaking wildfire seasons, resulting in reduced air quality, mass evacuations and the destruction of homes, properties and livelihoods. Wildfire risk reduction is vital to breaking the sequence of disaster that has befallen such communities as Kelowna, BC in 2003, Ft. McMurray, AB in 2016, and Lytton, BC in 2021.

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In the last two centuries, a high proportion of peatlands have been lost or severely degraded across the world. The value of peatlands is now well-recognised for biodiversity conservation, flood management, and carbon mitigation, with peatland restoration now central to many government policies for climate action. A challenge, however, is to determine 'natural' and 'disturbed' conditions of peatlands to establish realistic baselines for assessing degradation and setting restoration targets.

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Apathy is one of the most prevalent non-motor symptoms of Parkinson's disease and is characterized by decreased goal-directed behaviour due to a lack of motivation and/or impaired emotional reactivity. Despite its high prevalence, the neurophysiological mechanisms underlying apathy in Parkinson's disease, which may guide neuromodulation interventions, are poorly understood. Here, we investigated the neural oscillatory characteristics of apathy in Parkinson's disease using EEG data recorded during an incentivized motor task.

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In August 2022, the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS) were granted unprecedented power to negotiate the price of some pharmaceuticals covered under Medicare Part D of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Price negotiation was previously banned by Medicare Part D legislation but is not a new idea globally. For decades, nations like the United Kingdom (UK) have price set or negotiated the cost of medicine with manufacturers, fine tuning their methodologies, with mixed success.

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The utilization of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for assessing motor performance in Parkinson's Disease (PD) offers substantial potential, particularly if the results can be integrated into clinical decision-making processes. However, the precise quantification of PD symptoms remains a persistent challenge. The current standard Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale (UPDRS) and its variations serve as the primary clinical tools for evaluating motor symptoms in PD, but are time-intensive and prone to inter-rater variability.

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Transcriptional deregulation is a hallmark of many cancers and is exemplified by genomic amplifications of the MYC family of oncogenes, which occur in at least 20% of all solid tumors in adults. Targeting of transcriptional cofactors and the transcriptional cyclin-dependent kinase (CDK9) has emerged as a therapeutic strategy to interdict deregulated transcriptional activity including oncogenic MYC. Here, we report the structural optimization of a small molecule microarray hit, prioritizing maintenance of CDK9 selectivity while improving on-target potency and overall physicochemical and pharmacokinetic (PK) properties.

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Artificial intelligence (AI) has garnered tremendous attention in health care, and many hope that AI can enhance our health system's ability to care for people with chronic and degenerative conditions, including Parkinson's Disease (PD). This paper reports the themes and lessons derived from a qualitative study with people living with PD, family caregivers, and health care providers regarding the ethical dimensions of using AI to monitor, assess, and predict PD symptoms and progression. Thematic analysis identified ethical concerns at four intersecting levels: personal, interpersonal, professional/institutional, and societal levels.

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Background: Establishing and maintaining relationships and ways of connecting and being with others is an important component of health and wellbeing. Harnessing the relational within caring, supportive, educational, or carceral settings as a systems response has been referred to as relational practice. Practitioners, people with lived experience, academics and policy makers, do not yet share a well-defined common understanding of relational practice.

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Objective: To determine if there are sex differences in myelin in Parkinson's disease, and whether these explain some of the previously-described sex differences in clinical presentation.

Methods: Thirty-three subjects (23 males, 10 females) with Parkinson's disease underwent myelin water fraction (MWF) imaging, an MRI scanning technique of myelin content. MWF of 20 white matter regions of interest (ROIs) were assessed.

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This discussion paper offers a critical provocation to my mental health nursing colleagues. Drawing upon David Graeber's account of bullshit work, work that is increasingly meaningless for workers, I pose the question: Is mental health nursing a bullshit job? Ever-increasing time spent on record keeping as opposed to direct care appears to represent a Graeberian bullshitisation of mental health nurses' work. In addition, core aspects of the role are not immune from bullshit.

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Background: Parkinson's disease (PD) is a common chronic neurodegenerative condition. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare provision faced challenges worldwide. We aimed to explore how the COVID-19 pandemic changed healthcare experiences for people living with Parkinson's disease (PwP) in Canada.

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In recent decades concerns about violence and programs for the minimization of physical restraint, amongst other restrictive practices, have proliferated within mental health policy and practice. Whilst nurses are often called upon when violence occurs within mental health care settings, they often find themselves having the conflicting roles of caring and controlling. Within such situations it is service users, who are experts by experience, who perhaps can offer more meaningful insight into being restrained and thus provide a more appropriate approach in dealing with mental distress.

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Motor dysfunction in Parkinson's Disease (PD) patients is typically assessed by clinicians employing the Movement Disorder Society's Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale (MDS-UPDRS). Such comprehensive clinical assessments are time-consuming, expensive, semi-subjective, and may potentially result in conflicting labels across different raters. To address this problem, we propose an automatic, objective, and weakly-supervised method for labeling PD patients' gait videos.

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