Publications by authors named "P G Spinola"
Introduction: Intervention strategies that seek to improve early childhood development outcomes are often targeted at the primary caregivers of children, usually mothers. The interventions require mothers to assimilate new information and then act upon it by allocating sufficient physical resources and time to adopt and perform development promoting behaviours. However, women face many competing demands on their resources and time, returning to familiar habits and behaviours.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: COVID-19 spread rapidly in Brazil despite the country's well established health and social protection systems. Understanding the relationships between health-system preparedness, responses to COVID-19, and the pattern of spread of the epidemic is particularly important in a country marked by wide inequalities in socioeconomic characteristics (eg, housing and employment status) and other health risks (age structure and burden of chronic disease).
Methods: From several publicly available sources in Brazil, we obtained data on health risk factors for severe COVID-19 (proportion of the population with chronic disease and proportion aged ≥60 years), socioeconomic vulnerability (proportions of the population with housing vulnerability or without formal work), health-system capacity (numbers of intensive care unit beds and physicians), coverage of health and social assistance, deaths from COVID-19, and state-level responses of government in terms of physical distancing policies.
In this paper we adopt a growth accounting projection model to estimate and characterize health-financing needs in Brazil as well as to assess the extent to which financing needs may diverge from spending capacity in the future. We estimate an annual increase of 0.71% in the share of projected financing needs relative to GDP, with excess growth rates being 0.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPrevalence of germline variants in consensus moderate-to-high-risk predisposition genes to hereditary breast and ovarian cancer in BRCA1/2-negative Brazilian patients.
Breast Cancer Res Treat
February 2021
Article Synopsis
- The study focused on identifying genetic variants in key predisposition genes linked to Hereditary Breast and Ovarian Cancer Syndrome (HBOC) in BRCA1/2-negative patients from Brazil.
- A total of 126 patients were analyzed, resulting in the discovery of 488 unique variants, with 5 patients found to have pathogenic variants in genes like ATM and TP53.
- The findings enhance our understanding of non-BRCA gene mutations in Brazil and highlight the importance of these variants for clinical management and family risk assessment.
Objective: To use mathematical models to predict the epidemiological impact of lifting the lockdown in London, UK, and alternative strategies to help inform policy in the UK.
Methods: A mathematical model for the transmission of SARS-CoV2 in London. The model was parametrised using data on notified cases, deaths, contacts, and mobility to analyse the epidemic in the UK capital.