North Bristol NHS Trust

About: North Bristol NHS Trust is a healthcare organization based out in Bristol, United Kingdom. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Medicine. The organization has 2204 authors who have published 2811 publications receiving 61110 citations.

Effect of Helicobacter pylori infection on blood pressure: a community based cross sectional study.

Abstract: Many studies have reported an association between Helicobacter pylori infection and an increased risk of cardiovascular disease. The strength of the association has been hard to judge because of the varied methods of the studies and substantial heterogeneity of the findings. Mechanisms that may contribute to this association include abnormalities in the levels of certain blood proteins (for example fibrinogen or C reactive protein) secondary to the chronic infection 1 2 and raised blood pressure in people infected with H pylori .3–5 There are several methodological difficulties in carrying out studies to determine whether H pylori infection results in raised blood pressure. We have attempted to minimise such problems in a large prospective community based study of the association between H pylori infection and blood pressure. The Bristol helicobacter project is a community based study centred on the northeastern suburbs of Bristol. The primary aims of the study are to assess the …

A new method describing border irregularity of pigmented lesions.

Abstract: Background/purpose: Automatic quantitative characterization of border irregularity generating useful descriptors is a highly important task for computer-aided diagnosis of melanoma. This paper proposes a novel approach to describe the border irregularity of melanomas aiming at achieving higher recognition rates. Methods: By introducing a boundary characteristic description, which we call a centroid distance diagram (CDD), a compact-supported mapping, called the centroid distance curve, can be extracted from this diagram. The centroid distance curve establishes the projection from angular orientations to the sum of the lengths of those line segments connecting the lesion centroid and border points. Border irregularity descriptors generated from CDDs include the non-centroid-convexity index, the maximum–minimum distance indicator, the standard deviation of centroid distance curves and the maximum magnitude of non-zero frequency elements of centroid distance curves after discrete Fourier transforms. Upper limits of the error boundaries involved in these descriptors are estimated. Results: Experimental studies are based on 60 melanoma and 107 benign lesion images collected from local pigmented lesion clinics. By applying the proposed descriptors, receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves are constructed by projecting the features into a linear space learned from samples. The optimal sensitivity and specificity for the proposed method are 74.2% and 72.6%. The total area enclosed by the corresponding ROC curve is 0.788. In addition, as the training and testing study for melanoma recognition in the literature is largely missing, a comprehensive comparative study is conducted by randomly dividing the data into two groups: one for training and one for testing. For the testing group, the best mean sensitivity obtained with the descriptors proposed in this paper reaches 71.8% and the standard deviation is 10.1%. The specificity for the testing group corresponding to the optimal sensitivity is 69.8%, with a standard deviation of 7.2%. Conclusion: This study suggests that in terms of sensitivity, descriptors extracted from CDDs are the most powerful ones in characterizing the border irregularity of melanomas.

Emergency treatment of anaphylaxis in adults: concise guidance

Abstract: Anaphylaxis is a severe, life-threatening, generalised or systemic hypersensitivity reaction characterised by rapidly developing life-threatening airway, breathing and/or circulation problems usually associated with skin and mucosal changes. Updated guidance on the recognition, acute management and follow up of adults with anaphylaxis has recently been published. This is a concise version of the full guidelines published by the Resuscitation Council (UK) in 2008. The use of an airway, breathing, circulation, disability and exposure approach to recognise and treat anaphylaxis is emphasised.

Inverse association between serum albumin and future risk of venous thromboembolism: interrelationship with high sensitivity C-reactive protein

Abstract: Purpose: We aimed to assess the prospective association of serum albumin with venous thromboembolism (VTE) risk and evaluate if the association is independent of or modified by inflammation, as mea...