Publications by authors named "Nadia A S Smith"

Objectives: In the UK, guidelines recommend pancreatic enzyme replacement therapy (PERT) to all people with unresectable pancreatic cancer. In 2023, we published a national audit of PERT which showed suboptimal prescribing and wide regional variation in England. The aim of this manuscript was to describe how we used the PERT audit to drive improvements in healthcare.

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Background: Several factors may decrease the accuracy of quantitative PET myocardial perfusion imaging (MPI). It is therefore essential to ensure that myocardial blood flow (MBF) values are reproducible and accurate, and to design systematic protocols to achieve this. Until now, no systematic phantom protocols have been available to assess the technical factors affecting measurement accuracy and reproducibility in MPI.

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The effect of the 2020 pandemic, and of the national measures introduced to control it, is not yet fully understood. The aim of this study was to investigate how different types of primary care data can help quantify the effect of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) crisis on mental health. A retrospective cohort study investigated changes in weekly counts of mental health consultations and prescriptions.

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Unlabelled: In Myocardial Perfusion Imaging (MPI) with Positron Emission Tomography/Computed Tomography (PET/CT) systems, accurate quantification is essential. We assessed flow quantification accuracy over various injected activities using a flow phantom.

Methods: The study was performed on the digital 4-ring Discovery MI (DMI-20) and analog Discovery 690 (D690) PET/CT systems, using 325-1257 MBq of [O]HO.

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Although routine healthcare data are not collected for research, they are increasingly used in epidemiology and are key real-world evidence for improving healthcare. This study presents a method to identify prostate cancer cases from a large English primary care database. 19,619 (1.

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Healthcare is increasingly and routinely generating large volumes of data from different sources, which are difficult to handle and integrate. Confidence in data can be established through the knowledge that the data are validated, well-curated and with minimal bias or errors. As the National Measurement Institute of the UK, the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) is running an interdisciplinary project on digital health data curation.

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