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How sleep in patients with serious mental illness is recorded and treated, and its impact on service engagement

Aviva Stafford, Sheri Oduola, Sarah Reeve

Published online 10 September 2024

Highlights

  • Sleep is minimally documented in severe mental illness (SMI) patient records.
  • Recommended sleep interventions (e.g., CBT-I) are rarely delivered in SMI settings.
  • Further work is needed to improve sleep assessment and intervention in SMI settings.
  • Targeting sleep in SMI patients could significantly improve symptoms and wellbeing.

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Temporal trends in population attributable fractions of modifiable risk factors for dementia: a time-series study of the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (2004–2019).

Publication: BMC Medicine

Chen S, Underwood BR, Cardinal RN, Chen X, Chen S, Amin J, Jin H, Mueller C, Yan LL, Brayne C, Kuper H

26 June 2024

Summary

This was an analysis of pre-existing data from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing, examining changes over time in risk factors for dementia that have the potential to be altered (such as hypertension, obesity, hearing loss, and social isolation).

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Associations between rural/urban status, duration of untreated psychosis and mode of onset of psychosis: a mental health electronic clinical records analysis in the East of England, UK.

Publication: Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology

Kaminska J, Hodgekins J, Lewis JR, Cardinal RN, Oduola S

09 September 2024

Summary

This study examined de-identified NHS data about people having a first episode of psychosis, and looked at how the psychosis began (abruptly or slowly), how long it went untreated, and factors including rural or urban residence. Among such people, some factors differed between rural and urban settings, e.g. employment and living with family. A slow onset of psychosis was associated with a longer time untreated, but rural/urban differences in “time untreated” were not found.

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Cohort study of cardiovascular safety of different COVID-19 vaccination doses among 46 million adults in England

Publication: Nature Communications

Samantha Ip, Teri-Louise North, Fatemeh Torabi, Yangfan Li, Hoda Abbasizanjani, Ashley Akbari, Elsie Horne, Rachel Denholm, Spencer Keene, Spiros Denaxas, Amitava Banerjee, Kamlesh Khunti, Cathie Sudlow, William N. Whiteley, Jonathan A. C. Sterne, Angela M. Wood, Venexia Walker, the CVD-COVID-UK/COVID-IMPACT Consortium & the Longitudinal Health and Wellbeing COVID-19 National Core Study

31 July 2024

Summary

A new study has found heart attacks and strokes were lower after COVID-19 vaccination than before or without vaccination.

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Misexpression of inactive genes in whole blood is associated with nearby rare structural variants

Publication: American Journal of Human Genetics

Thomas Vanderstichele, Katie L. Burnham, Niek de Klein, Michael Inouye, Dirk S. Paul, Emma E. Davenport et al

24 July 2024

Gene misexpression is the aberrant transcription of a gene in a context where it is usually inactive. Despite its known pathological consequences in specific rare diseases, we have a limited understanding of its wider prevalence and mechanisms in humans. To address this, we analyzed gene misexpression in 4,568 whole-blood bulk RNA sequencing samples from INTERVAL study blood donors.

We found that while individual misexpression events occur rarely, in aggregate they were found in almost all samples and a third of inactive protein-coding genes. Using 2,821 paired whole-genome and RNA sequencing samples, we identified that misexpression events are enriched in cis for rare structural variants. We established putative mechanisms through which a subset of SVs lead to gene misexpression, including transcriptional readthrough, transcript fusions, and gene inversion. Overall, we develop misexpression as a type of transcriptomic outlier analysis and extend our understanding of the variety of mechanisms by which genetic variants can influence gene expression.

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Robust and interpretable AI-guided marker for early dementia prediction in real-world clinical settings

Publication: eClinicaMedicine

Liz Yuanxi Lee j, Delshad Vaghari j, Michael C. Burkhart, Peter Tino, Marcella Montagnese, Zhuoyu Li,
Katharina Zühlsdorff, Joseph Giorgio, Guy Williams, Eddie Chong, Christopher Chen, Benjamin R. Underwood, Timothy Rittman, Zoe Kourtzi

12 July 2024

Summary

Cambridge researchers have developed an artificially-intelligent tool capable of predicting in four cases out of five whether people with early signs of dementia will remain stable or develop Alzheimer’s disease. Read the full press release.

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Quantitative 23Na magnetic resonance imaging in the abdomen at 3 T

Publication: Magnetic Resonance Materials in Physics, Biology and Medicine

Jonathan Birchall, Ines Horvat-Menih, Joshua Kaggie, Arnold Benjamin, Martin Graves, Ian Wilkinson, Ferdia Gallagher, Mary McLean

1 June 2024

Summary

We estimated the sodium content and relaxation of organs within the abdomen of healthy human volunteers using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Existing techniques for measuring sodium content are non-specific or require an invasive biopsy. Clinical translation of sodium content monitoring may aid in diagnosis of disease such as cancer, chronic kidney disease and hypertension at earlier stages, and more regular monitoring may help to evaluate efficacy of treatment.

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Predicting patients with dementia most at risk of needing psychiatric inpatient or enhanced community care using routinely collected clinical data: retrospective multi-site cohort study.

Publication: BJPsych

London SR, Chen S, Sidhom E, Lewis JR, Wolverson E, Cardinal RN, Roalf D, Mueller C, Underwood BR

13 May 2024

Summary

People diagnosed with dementia are often diagnosed in memory clinics and then discharged back to their GP. Some later need intensive mental health support (e.g. crisis teams, or inpatient admission) but others do not. This study shows that it’s possible to predict who will and who won’t, with useful accuracy, based on information collected routinely at the time of initial diagnosis.

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Risks of second primary cancers among 584,965 female and male breast cancer survivors in England: a 25-year retrospective cohort study

Publication: The Lancet regional health – Europe

Isaac Allen, Hend Hassan, Walburga Yvonne Joko-Fru, Catherine Huntley, Lucy Loong, Tameera Rahman, Bethany Torr, Andrew Bacon, Craig Knott, Sophie Jose, Sally Vernon, Margreet Lüchtenborg, Joanna Pethick, Katrina Lavelle, Fiona McRonald, Diana Eccles, Eva J.A Morris, Steven Hardy, Clare Turnbull,
Marc Tischkowitz, Paul Pharoah, Antonis C. Antoniou,

25 April 2024

Summary

Survivors of breast cancer are at significantly higher risk of developing second cancers, including endometrial and ovarian cancer for women and prostate cancer for men, according to new research studying data from almost 600,000 NHS England patients. Read the full news item.

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The role of psychosis and clozapine load in excessive checking in treatment-resistant schizophrenia: longitudinal observational study.

Publication: BJPsych

Emilio Fernandez-Egea, Shanquan Chen, Estela Sangüesa, Patricia Gassó, Marjan Biria, James Plaistow, Isaac Jarratt-Barnham, Nuria Segarra, Sergi Mas, Maria-Pilar Ribate, Cristina B García, Naomi A Fineberg, Yulia Worbe, Rudolf N Cardinal, Trevor W Robbins

Summary

This study looked at a group of people treated with clozapine for schizophrenia, examining obsessive-compulsive symptoms (OCS). For some, genetic variants were examined. OCS were common in this group (37.9%). Analysis suggested that both psychosis and clozapine may drive aspects of OCS.

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