Background: The impact of Covid-19 and ensuing national lockdown on asthma exacerbations is unclear. Methods: We conducted an interrupted time-series (lockdown on 23rd March as point of interruption) analysis in asthma cohort identified using a validated algorithm from a national-level primary care database, the Optimum Patient Care Database (OPCRD...
Rationale: There is an urgent need for simple, cost-effective prognostic biomarkers for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF); biomarkers that show potential include monocyte count. Objectives: We used pooled data from pirfenidone and interferon gamma-1b trials to explore the association between monocyte count and prognosis in patients with IPF. Meth...
Rationale: Pulmonary endothelial permeability contributes to the high-permeability pulmonary edema that characterizes acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). Circulating bone morphogeneic protein 9 (BMP9) is emerging as an important regulator of pulmonary vascular homeostasis. Objective: To determine whether endogenous BMP9 plays a role in pres...
Introduction UK Guidelines suggest pulse oximetry, rather than blood gas sampling, is adequate for monitoring of patients with COVID-19 if CO2 retention is not suspected. However, pulse oximetry has impaired accuracy in certain patient groups, and data are lacking on its accuracy in patients with COVID-19 stepping down from Intensive Care Units (IC...
BACKGROUND: The COVID-19 pandemic reached Europe in early 2020. Convalescent plasma is used without a consistent evidence of efficacy. Our hypothesis is that passive immunization with plasma collected from patients having contracted COVID-19 and developed specific neutralizing antibodies may alleviate symptoms and reduce mortality in patients treat...
The interplay of type-2 inflammation and anti-viral immunity underpins asthma exacerbation pathogenesis. Virus infection induces type-2 inflammation-promoting chemokines CCL17 and CCL22 in asthma, however mechanisms regulating induction are poorly understood. By using a human rhinovirus (RV) challenge model in human airway epithelial cells in vitro...
Pulmonary rehabilitation has evolved from an "art" to "science" over the past decades thanks to the contributions of Prof Casaburi. His priorities for the future are: 1) access, 2) access, and 3) access! https://bit.ly/3j2aSdr. / status: published
BackgroundThe objective of this study was to characterize practical use trends and outcomes for intraaortic balloon pump (IABP) and percutaneous left ventricular assist device (pVAD) use in cardiogenic shock at a national level.MethodsAn analysis of all adult patients admitted nonelectively for cardiogenic shock from January 2008 through December 2...
PurposePulse oximetry is the current standard for detecting drops in arterial blood oxygen saturation (SpO2) associated with obstructive sleep apnea and hypopnea events in polysomnographic (PSG) testing. However, cellular energy monitoring (CE monitoring), a measure related to cellular hypoxia in the skin, is likely to be more responsive to inadequ...
