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Dramatic changes were seen in the delivery of radiotherapy treatments for cancer during the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic in England.
Much shorter radiotherapy courses were delivered, treatments were delayed where it was safe to do so and some increases were seen in order to compensate for reduced surgical capacity.
Experts believe the changes reflect an impressive adaption of services by the NHS, and that the overall impact on cancer outcomes is likely to be modest.
The new research, led by the University of Leeds, with Public Health England and the Royal College of Radiologists, reveals that there was a decrease in radiotherapy treatment courses of 19.9% in April, 6.2% in May, and 11.6% in June 2020, compared with the same months the previous year.
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In the first systematic large-scale evaluation of the UK National Early Warning Risk Score (NEWS) 2 as a scoring system for predicting severe COVID-19 outcomes in patients, researchers at King s College London have found poor-to-moderate accuracy for identifying patients at risk of being transferred to intensive care units (ICUs) or dying after 14 days of hospitalisation. Accuracy of predictions in short term (three days) showed moderate success.
For people who are hospitalised with severe COVID-19, it is vital to quickly identify which patients may deteriorate and require transfer to an intensive care unit (ICU) for organ support or may die. NEWS2 is an early warning score that combines physiological parameters such as respiration rate, oxygen saturation, blood pressure and temperature. NEWS2 is currently used almost universally in UK NHS Trusts to identify which patients are at risk of deteriorating early.
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IMAGE: Top left and the bottom right are Google Earth satellite images of the Brumadinho tailings dam taken before and after the collapse on 25 January 2019. Top right and bottom. view more
Credit: Google Earth
One of Brazil s worst environmental disasters - a dam collapse that also killed more than 200 people - could have been foreseen with the right monitoring technology, according to a new study by the University of Nottingham and Durham University.
The high-profile catastrophe took place on 25 January 2019 at a tailings dam near the Córrego do Feijão iron ore mine, close to the town of Brumadinho, in Minas Gerais state, south-east Brazil.
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Scientists have created a highly detailed map of skin, which reveals that cellular processes from development are re-activated in cells from patients with inflammatory skin disease. The researchers from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, Newcastle University and Kings College London, discovered that skin from eczema and psoriasis patients share many of the same molecular pathways as developing skin cells. This offers potential new drug targets for treating these painful skin diseases.
Published on 22nd January in
Science, the study also provides a completely new understanding of inflammatory disease, opening up new avenues for research on other inflammatory diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis and inflammatory bowel disease.