Medical Thought Leaders

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News Medical's "Thought Leaders" series is a selection of articles written by national and international experts and trusted advisers in health and medicine. All the articles are written by experts who have been invited as recognised leaders in their fields to provide a "state of the art" contribution.

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

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

Brain plasticity after injury: an interview with Dr Swathi Kiran

Brain plasticity is the phenomenon by which the brain can rewire and reorganize itself in response to changing stimulus input. Brain plasticity is at play when one is learning new information (at school) or learning a new language...

3 Nov 2016

Nano-biointeraction and nanopathology

Nanoparticles enter the organism in a number of ways. In most cases through inhalation and ingestion. When inhaled, the majority of them are expelled with the next breath. When ingested, most of them are gotten rid of through feces.

31 Oct 2016

Reducing contamination rates in urine samples: an interview with Prof. Frank Chinegwundoh MBE

Contamination is thought to be a significant problem. Depending on which study you look at, the rates of urine contamination can be 17% or upwards. The standard method of midstream urine collection is for the healthcare professional...

26 Oct 2016

Does music improve child brain development?

We are a research group at the Brain and Creativity Institute at University of Southern California. In 2012, we began a five-year longitudinal study in collaboration with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and their Youth Orchestra program at the Heart of Los Angeles (YOLA at HOLA).

13 Oct 2016

An inclusive approach to COPD research: an interview with Dr David Leather

About eight years ago the WHO put out a call saying that we needed data that better represented real world patients. Our ambition was to create evidence earlier in the life cycle of medicine that better represented the population that would...

11 Oct 2016

Behavioral activation as effective as CBT? An interview with Professor David Richards

BA and CBT are quite fundamentally different. BA is what we call an outside-in treatment, which means it focuses on helping people with depression change the way in which they behave.

10 Oct 2016

Diabetes diagnosis linked to cancer development?

There are many studies that support a link between type 2 diabetes and risk of cancer. The relationship is complex and multifactorial.

6 Oct 2016

Can vitamin D reduce asthma attacks? An interview with Professor Adrian Martineau

In the past vitamin D was just thought to be important in regulating calcium homeostasis and bone health as vitamin D deficiency is best known for causing rickets in children and osteomalacia in adults.

4 Oct 2016

Does exercise eliminate the ill effects of sitting? An interview with Prof. Ulf Ekelund

In short, the detrimental effects of sitting for prolonged hours can be divided into acute, or short-term, and long-term effects.

29 Sep 2016

Solid-state NMR in structural biology: an interview with Professor Tatyana Polenova

My research lab studies several classes of systems. We are mostly interested in looking at large protein assemblies to understand their structure, dynamics and how their properties relate to their malfunction in disease.

From Bruker BioSpin - NMR, EPR and Imaging 21 Sep 2016

Gender matching key for corneal transplants? An interview with Professor Kaye

The cornea is a transparent tissue lining the front of the eye, that is invisible tissue to the naked eye. It is a delicate tissue and disease or injury may lead to a loss of transparency or a change in the shape of the cornea, resulting in severe visual impairment.

19 Sep 2016

Delirium in advanced cancer patients: an interview with Dr Knox Todd

Delirium is a terribly distressing syndrome of acute confusion. We often see it in the emergency department in older patients and in those with multiple medical problems. They may be acting strangely at home and concerned loved ones bring them to the emergency department.

7 Sep 2016

MRSA correlated to eczema? An interview with Dr Bjorn Herpers

There is a lot of evidence that Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus) is involved in eczema. Eczema is now thought to be caused by a barrier dysfunction of the skin that allows external triggers to cause an overshoot of inflammation.

31 Aug 2016

Could a light-listening photonics device detect skin disease? An interview with Prof. Vasilis Ntziachristos

Detection of malignant skin alterations is currently aided by optical microscopes such as dermoscopes or optical microscopes. While the latter offers high resolution, it comes with a major disadvantage, just like any other purely microscopic method: it only provides a partial view of the skin due to the low penetration depth.

29 Aug 2016

Advances in brain research since patient HM: an interview with Dr Jacopo Annese

Jacopo Annese, President and CEO of the Institute for Brain and Society, discusses his work on the Human Brain Library.

From Huron Digital Pathology 25 Aug 2016