news 2021

New analysis of the R&D response to COVID argues that future innovation could be dramatically scaled up to tackle other major diseases or even climate change. Last updated on Tuesday 9 February 2021 Policymakers need to rethink their approach to tackling long-standing healthcare and environmental challenges and can learn lessons from the success of research and development in responding to COVID-19, say the authors of a new study.

Respiratory support used to treat patients with severe COVID-19 are associated with less aerosol emission than breathing, speaking or coughing new research suggests. The study led by researchers from the University of Bristol and North Bristol NHS Trust (NBT) is published on the pre-print server medRxiv.

A new approach to treating one of the leading causes of blindness among patients with diabetes is being tested in clinical trials which begin this month. The trial involves 48 patient volunteers with diabetic macular oedema (DMO), a disease where blood vessels leak fluid into the retina. It is the most common cause of vision loss among people with diabetic retinopathy, affecting approximately 21 million people worldwide.

New research led by the University of Birmingham has revealed for the first time the extent to which frailty increases the risk of mortality in COVID-19 patients. The clinical observational study , involving 5,711 patients with COVID-19 at 55 hospitals across 12 countries, found that very severely frail individuals with COVID-19 are three times more likely to die than those who were not frail, even taking into account their age.

A meta-analysis of global studies has shown that intensive care morality from COVID-19 has continued to fall since the start of the pandemic, but the improvement is slowing and may have plateaued. The study, published today [2 February] in Anaesthesia (a journal of the Association of Anaesthetists), is by Professor Tim Cook, Consultant in Anaesthesia and Intensive Care Medicine at the Royal United Hospitals Bath NHS Foundation Trust and Honorary Professor in Bristol Medical School: Translational Health Sciences (THS) at the University of Bristol, and colleagues.

England has seen a modest rise in psychotic symptoms in recent years, while antipsychotic medication use doubled over the same period, according to a study by UCL and City, University of London researchers. The findings, published in Schizophrenia Research , clarify that a previously-reported rise in psychosis rates is partly, but not entirely, due to changes in prescription rates, as symptoms themselves are increasing as well.

A high proportion of survivors of Ebola experienced a resurgence in antibody levels nearly a year after recovery, a new has found. Published today in Nature, the finding hints that hidden reservoirs of virus could exist long after symptoms ease and has implications for monitoring programmes and vaccine strategies.

The antiviral drug plitidepsin is between 10 and 100 times* more effective against SARS-CoV-2, including the new UK variant, than the NHS approved** drug remdesivir, finds new preclinical research involving UCL scientists.

Open-source model is shared to help medics around the world in case of ventilator shortfalls Last updated on Wednesday 3 February 2021 As Covid-19 continues to put pressure on healthcare providers around the world, engineers at the University of Bath have published a mathematical model that could help clinicians to safely allow two people to share a single ventilator.

Professor Mahdad Noursadeghi (UCL Infection & Immunity) and Dr Rishi Gupta (UCL Institute for Global Health) discuss the importance of their new online 4C deterioration model, which is helping NHS doctors identify Covid-19 patients likely to deteriorate. The pandemic continues to pose huge challenges to health services worldwide.

A team of scientists at UCL have found that blood tests measuring the hallmark Alzheimer's protein, beta-amyloid (amyloid), could radically reduce the cost of clinical trials and potentially open the door to treating the disease earlier. The findings, published in the journal Brain , suggest that blood tests could be used to recruit people to Alzheimer's drug trials before they start showing any symptoms.

Professor Andrew Hayward (UCL Epidemiology & Health) explains why the new, more infectious, strain of Covid-19 is a cause for concern and suggests what must be done to reduce transmission of the disease. On the last day of 2019 the World Health Organization (WHO) received the first reports of an unusual cluster of pneumonia cases in Wuhan, China.

Researchers have developed a DNA test to quickly identify secondary infections in COVID-19 patients, who have double the risk of developing pneumonia while on ventilation than non-COVID-19 patients. Using this test, we found that patients with COVID-19 were twice as likely to develop secondary pneumonia as other patients in the same intensive care unit Andrew Conway Morris For patients with the most severe forms of COVID-19, mechanical ventilation is often the only way to keep them alive, as doctors use anti-inflammatory therapies to treat their inflamed lungs.

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted stark inequalities in healthy life expectancy, according to a report into healthy ageing published today. The report into health ageing has been published by the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee , following an in-depth inquiry for which the University of Birmingham's Professor Janet Lord was special adviser.

Patients admitted to very full hospitals have an increased chance of dying which is equivalent to being up to 11 years older, according to a new study co-led by UCL researchers. The study, published as a pre-print* on MedRxiv , analysed data from 4032 patients with COVID-19 who were admitted to Intensive Care Units (ICU) with presumed or confirmed Covid-19 in the first lockdown.

A new advanced computing technique using routine medical scans to enable doctors to take fewer, more accurate tumour biopsies, has been developed by cancer researchers at the University of Cambridge. This is an important step towards precision tissue sampling for cancer patients to help select the best treatment.

Assessing the ability of unresponsive patients with severe brain injury to understand what is being said to them could yield important insights into how they might recover, according to new research. A team at the University of Birmingham has shown that responses to speech can be measured using electroencephalography, a non-invasive technique used to record electrical signals in the brain.