There is limited evidence of the health impact of Low Emission Zones (also known as Clean Air Zones, CAZ). This study examines the impact of the Bradford Clean Air Plan (CAP), including a CAZ, on health and nitrogen dioxide (NO) in the first two years of implementation using an interrupted time series design. Primary care and emergency department visits for respiratory and cardiovascular illness in Bradford were recorded between January 2018 to September 2023 with diabetic footcare and head injury visits as controls.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: Aberrant movement-related cortical activity has been linked to impaired motor function in Parkinson's disease (PD). Dopaminergic drug treatment can restore these, but dosages and long-term treatment are limited by adverse side-effects. Effective non-pharmacological treatments could help reduce reliance on drugs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFColocalisation microscopy analysis provides an intuitive and straightforward way of determining if two biomolecules occupy the same diffraction-limited volume. A popular colocalisation coefficient, the Pearson's correlation coefficient (PCC), can be calculated using different pixel selection criteria: PCC includes all image pixels, PCC only pixels exceeding the intensity thresholds for either one of the detection channels, and PCC only pixels exceeding the intensity thresholds for both detection channels. Our results show that PCC depends on the foreground to background ratio, producing values influenced by factors unrelated to biomolecular association.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEngineering the plant immune system offers genetic solutions to mitigate crop diseases caused by diverse agriculturally significant pathogens and pests. Modification of intracellular plant immune receptors of the nucleotide-binding leucine-rich repeat (NLR) receptor superfamily for expanded recognition of pathogen virulence proteins (effectors) is a promising approach for engineering disease resistance. However, engineering can cause NLR autoactivation, resulting in constitutive defense responses that are deleterious to the plant.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Air quality is a major public health threat linked to poor birth outcomes, respiratory and cardiovascular disease, and premature mortality. Deprived groups and children are disproportionately affected. Bradford will implement a Clean Air Zone (CAZ) as part of the Bradford Clean Air Plan (B-CAP) in 2022 to reduce pollution, providing a natural experiment.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTargeting host processes that allow pathogens to thrive can be invaluable in resistance breeding. Here, we generated a deep-sequencing transcriptome time course for Puccinia striiformis f. sp.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWith applications from functional genomics to the production of therapeutic biologics, libraries of mammalian expression vectors have become a cornerstone of modern biological investigation and engineering. Multiple modular vector platforms facilitate the rapid design and assembly of vectors. However, such systems approach a technical bottleneck when a library of bespoke vectors is required.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFComputational design tools are the cornerstone of synthetic biology and have underpinned its rapid development over the past two decades. As the field has matured, the scale of biological investigation has expanded dramatically, and researchers often must rely on computational tools to operate in the high-throughput investigational space. This is especially apparent in the modular design of DNA expression circuits, where complexity is accumulated rapidly.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: Adverse event (AE) reporting is crucial for determining safety of trials. Adverse events are captured manually by clinical research associates (CRAs) and research nurses (RNs), and prior studies show underreporting. It is necessary to understand AE reporting training, processes, and institution-level differences to improve AE capture.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe synthetic chromosome rearrangement and modification by LoxP-mediated evolution (SCRaMbLE) system is a key component of the synthetic yeast genome (Sc2.0) project, an international effort to construct an entire synthetic genome in yeast. SCRaMbLE involves the introduction of thousands of symmetrical LoxP (LoxPsym) recombination sites downstream of every nonessential gene in all 16 chromosomes, enabling numerous genome rearrangements in the form of deletions, inversions, duplications, and translocations by the Cre-LoxPsym recombination system.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: A new prognostic model has been developed and externally validated, the aim of which is to assist in the management of the blunt chest wall trauma patient in the emergency department (ED). The aim of this trial is to assess the feasibility and acceptability of a definitive impact trial investigating the clinical and cost-effectiveness of a new prognostic model for the management of patients with blunt chest wall trauma in the ED.
Design: Stepped wedge feasibility trial.
The field of synthetic biology is already beginning to realize its potential, with a wealth of examples showcasing the successful genetic engineering of microorganisms for the production of valuable compounds. The chassis Saccharomyces cerevisiae has been engineered to function as a microfactory for producing many of these economically and medically relevant compounds. However, strain construction and optimization to produce industrially relevant titers necessitate a wealth of underpinning biological knowledge alongside large investments of capital and time.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMethods Enzymol
November 2019
Construction of expression vectors is imperative for many areas of biological research and the biotechnology industry. Modular cloning systems for expression vector construction offer a labor- and cost-effective alternative to overcome drawbacks associated with traditional cloning methods. We developed an Extensible Mammalian Modular Assembly toolkit (EMMA) as an efficient and versatile tool to facilitate the construction of functionally diverse mammalian expression vectors from a standardized library of DNA parts.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Pediatr Oncol Nurs
September 2019
A chemotherapy roadmap is a summary of the chemotherapy plan for a pediatric oncology patient. Chemotherapy roadmaps exist as paper documents for most, if not all, pediatric oncology programs. Paper chemotherapy roadmaps are associated with risks that can negatively affect the safety of the chemotherapy process.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: A new prognostic model has been developed and externally validated, the aim of which is to assist in the management of the blunt chest wall trauma patient in the emergency department (ED). A definitive randomised controlled trial (impact trial) is required to assess the clinical and cost effectiveness of the new model before it can be accepted in clinical practice. The purpose of this trial is to assess the feasibility and acceptability of such a definitive trial and inform its design.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: The objective of this study was to assess the implementation of a novel ED model of care, which combines clinical streaming, team-based assessment and early senior consultation to reduce length of stay.
Methods: A pre-post-intervention study was used to compare ED performance following an extensive clinical redesign programme. Clinical teams and work sequences were reconfigured to promote the role of the staff specialist, with a focus on earlier decisions regarding disposition.
As ACGME (Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education) requirements have expanded and become increasingly more complex, so has the role of the program coordinator. Over the last decade, the knowledge and skills required to capably administer residency and fellowship training programs have increased in both volume and complexity. Today's coordinators are responsible for more than clerical tasks.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: This paper explores the use of pharmacoeconomic methods of valuation to health impacts resulting from exposure to poor air quality. In using such methods, interventions that reduce exposure to poor air quality can be directly compared, in terms of value for money (or cost-effectiveness), with competing demands for finite resources, including other public health interventions.
Design: Using results estimated as part of a health impact assessment regarding a West Yorkshire Low Emission Zone strategy, this paper quantifies cost-saving and health-improving implications of transport policy through its impact on air quality.
Medical day hospitals (MDH) provide multidisciplinary care to older people living with frailty in an outpatient or day-case setting. Given the pressures on UK emergency departments (ED) combined with the rising numbers of frail older adults presenting as emergencies, we hypothesised that it would be possible for our MDH to be used to provide multidisciplinary ambulatory care for a subset of older patients presenting to ED. With adequate resources, this could potentially provide comprehensive geriatric assessment in an older-friendly environment with the additional benefit of improved flow within the ED.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe administration of chemotherapy to children with cancer is a high-risk process that must be performed in a safe and consistent manner with high reliability. Clinical trials play a major role in the treatment of children with cancer; conformance to chemotherapy protocol requirements and accurate documentation in the medical record are critical. Inconsistencies in the administration and documentation of chemotherapy were identified as opportunities for errors to occur.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Blunt chest wall trauma accounts for over 15% of all trauma admissions to Emergency Departments worldwide. Reported mortality rates vary between 4 and 60%. Management of this patient group is challenging as a result of the delayed on-set of complications.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe decision to admit a frail older patient is rarely made by a geriatrician and often falls to staff in the emergency department (ED), who may not have the training to balance the risks, benefits and alternatives. We based a consultant geriatrician in the ED with the primary aim of facilitating admission prevention for older patients and this was achieved for 64% (543/848) of patients. A secondary aim was to facilitate direct admission to elderly care wards when admission was necessary, and this was achieved for 57% of admitted patients (174/305).
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