Publications by authors named "Melanie Knowles"
Background: National dementia guidelines provide recommendations about the most effective approaches to diagnosis and interventions. Guidelines can improve care, but some groups such as people with minority characteristics may be disadvantaged if recommended approaches are the same for everyone. It is not known if dementia guidelines address specific needs related to patient characteristics.
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- Neurodegenerative diseases often affect the brain's prefrontal cortex, leading to neuropsychiatric symptoms that disrupt autonomic nervous system regulation, indicated by heart rate variability (HRV).
- A review of 27 studies found a moderate positive relationship (r = 0.25) between higher HRV and improved cognitive and behavioral outcomes, regardless of average age or cognitive status.
- The study suggests that HRV could serve as a marker for self-regulation in neurodegenerative diseases, highlighting the need for further research, especially regarding neuropsychiatric symptoms and neuroimaging.
The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in unique challenges for in-patients across the National Health Service as visitors, both family and friends, are prevented from visiting patients owing to infection prevention and control measures. The Attend Anywhere platform was used as the basis of a quality improvement project to mitigate the detrimental effects of reduced social contact for patients. The use of video conferencing led to increased subjective satisfaction for both patients and healthcare professionals, thereby providing further evidence of the benefit that this emerging technology has on healthcare delivery.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: A number of community based surveys have identified an increase in psychological symptoms and distress but there has been no examination of symptoms at the more severe end of the mental health spectrum.
Aims: We aimed to analyse numbers and types of psychiatric presentations to inform planning for future demand on mental health services in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Method: We analysed electronic data between January and April 2020 for 2534 patients referred to acute psychiatric services, and tested for differences in patient demographics, symptom severity and use of the Mental Health Act 1983 (MHA), before and after lockdown.
Introduction: There is increasing emphasis on the importance of optimizing and standardizing clinical trials of agitation in Alzheimer's disease (AD), but the risks of bias arising from published trials and the number and design of unpublished studies are poorly understood.
Methods: Using the ClinicalTrials.gov database, we systematically reviewed all registered investigational clinical trials for agitation in AD to describe the landscape of agitation drug treatment trials and to assess their quality and generalizability.
Background: As the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) epidemic in the UK emerged and escalated, clinicians working in mental health in-patient facilities faced unique medical, psychiatric and staffing challenges in managing and containing the impact of the virus and, in the context of legislation, enforcing social distancing.
Aims: To describe (a) the steps taken by one mental health hospital to establish a COVID-19 isolation ward for adult psychiatric in-patients and (b) how staff addressed the challenges that emerged over the period March to June 2020.
Method: A descriptive study detailing the processes involved in changing the role of the ward and the measures taken to address the various challenges that arose.