April Cashin-Garbutt

Natural Sciences

April graduated with a first-class honours degree in Natural Sciences from Pembroke College, University of Cambridge. During her time as Editor-in-Chief, News-Medical (2012-2017), she kickstarted the content production process and helped to grow the website readership to over 60 million visitors per year.

Through interviewing global thought leaders in medicine and life sciences, including Nobel laureates, April developed a passion for neuroscience and now works at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour, located within UCL.

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Articles from April

Acne: when to seek help?

Acne develops due to an interplay between genetic factors (so people often have a family history) and hormonal factors that can increase the size and activity of the sebaceous or oil gland.

29 Nov 2016

Improving innovation uptake in the NHS

I think innovation is one of those rather slippery terms that means different things to different people. First of all, I would make a distinction between innovations that are essentially about a new, physical product and innovations that are more to do with services or processes.

24 Nov 2016

NTM lung infections

Nontuberculous mycobacteria are part of a group of bacteria called mycobacteria. The non-tuberculous mycobacteria are, as the name suggests, mycobacteria that are not tuberculosis. They're also not leprosy, but they are the other members of the bacteria group termed mycobacteria.

23 Nov 2016

Finding reliable health information online: an interview with Dr Andrew Boyden

The research was presented by pharmacists from the Calvary Public Hospital in Canberra, who looked at conversations that took place in selected parenting groups on Facebook.

22 Nov 2016

Testing for Lynch syndrome: an interview with Kevin Monahan

Lynch syndrome is an inherited condition which causes about 1,100 cases of bowel cancer and 1,000 other cancers annually in the UK. It is caused by a fault in the mismatch repair gene (MMR) which usually works to prevent cancer.

21 Nov 2016

Getting drugs to bugs in NTM lung infections: an interview with Dr Jakko van Ingen

The first thing that is important to stress is that this is an area that we actually know very little about. What we generally think, rather than know, is that NTM has a lot in common with pulmonary tuberculosis.

17 Nov 2016

How toxic is your stress?

The term “stress” originates not in our minds or bodies, but from physics. It is the internal forces generated in an object in response to an external load. In the 1950s, Hans Selye adopted the term to characterize how living organisms change...

16 Nov 2016

Identifying foods that trigger IBS: an interview with Dr Bill Chey

IBS is a common medical condition which is diagnosed in the presence of characteristic gastrointestinal symptoms including recurring bouts of abdominal pain and diarrhea and/or constipation. IBS patients also commonly report bloating and abdominal distension or swelling.

15 Nov 2016

Elucidating IDP behaviour on crowded membranes

IDPs are proteins that contain stretches of amino-acid sequence that are flexible and do not comprise stable structure in isolation. This is in contrast with a more traditional view of proteins as largely occupying a stable native structure that correlates with functions such as enzyme activity or binding.

10 Nov 2016

Using urine samples to diagnose disease in preterm newborns

The majority of patients in neonatal intensive care units are premature babies, who often have infectious (congenital pneumonia) or noninfectious (tachypnea, infant respiratory distress syndrome) respiratory pathologies.

9 Nov 2016