Bladder and bowel problems are very common and can be affected by psychological issues and stressful life events in a child’s life. There is also strong evidence that bladder and bowel problems affect the mental health of children, young people and their parents.
A researcher at the University of Bristol has started to unravel the mysteries of a secretive receptor that modulates how and when nerve cells fire, what this means for brain function and dysfunction, and to garner substantial further funding to continue her work.
Osteoporosis, or bone weakening, is a debilitating disease which becomes more common with age and affects roughly four times more women than men. A team from the University of Bristol led by Dr Emma Clark is developing a new screening tool for clinicians to determine when descriptions of back pain in older women should be referred for X-ray in case of vertebral fractures.
A team at the Bristol Medical School is using stem cell technology to help treat people with one of the most common inherited neurological disorders, Friedreich’s Ataxia (FA).
A team at University of Bristol, led by Professor Linda Wooldridge, is engineering a type of immune cell that might be able to better target cancer cells. This could potentially lead to new therapies which could help the immune system combat cancer with fewer difficult interventions.
Glaucoma is the leading cause of irreversible blindness worldwide; it affects roughly 2% of all people over 40. Researchers at the University of Bristol are pioneering a new way of treating glaucoma using gene therapy.
In Bristol, a small - but significant - number of people who inject drugs (PWID) contribute to increase in hospital admissions in Bristol with community acquired MRSA. Why this might be, and how the number of cases can be reduced, are questions that GP Dr Kate Rush posed to University of Bristol researchers Professor Matt Hickman and Dr Maya Gobin (Public Health England) and collaborators from Bristol Drug Project.
Mathematicians and data scientists from Bristol University are collaborating with clinicians and healthcare professionals in the intensive care unit (ICU) of Bristol Royal Infirmary (BRI) to turn the full force of machine learning onto the problems of patient management.
The treatment of spinal cord injury has seen some striking successes in recent years, although there are still a great many hurdles to be overcome. When the cord is injured, a variety of factors come into play which actively suppress new nerve growth. Zoe Cortes, a veterinary surgeon from the University of Bristol, has been investigating how cells from noses might help.
It is no over-exaggeration to say that high blood pressure is a pandemic. An estimated one billion people currently suffer with elevated blood pressure, and that total is expected to rise to 1.4 billion inside the next ten years. However, for many people the drug treatments have severe side effects, which makes taking them long-term unattractive - indeed, over 40% of patients do not have their high blood pressure adequately controlled despite being prescribed blood pressure tablets. Professor Julian Paton and his team, aim to change that.
A Foley catheter is the most common type of indwelling urinary catheter, which are used when a patient is unable to urinate for themselves. Despite having been developed nearly 90 years ago, 100 million people worldwide are reliant on them. But the Foley catheter, as would perhaps be expected in a design from the 1930s, has a variety of problems resulting in infection, blockage, pain and distress for patients.
Infant mortality is still a pressing problem. Every year, 3 million newborn babies die, mostly in the developing world, and infection of the umbilical cord stump is a major contributor to those deaths. There is a common antiseptic which can help, but it needs to be administered daily; in the developing world it often isn’t. Researchers at the University of Bristol are developing a novel form of antiseptic which has the potential to save a great many newborn lives.
Depression is a mood disorder which, according to the American Psychiatric Association, will affect 1 in every 6 people during the course of their lives. Antidepressant drugs are a common medical treatment, but since their accidental discovery over 50 years ago, few significant advances have been made - not least because of the lack of effective animal models.
Osteoporosis is a bone-weakening disease that creeps up unawares. The first sign is often a broken bone and is therefore often diagnosed in the hospital after presenting with a (serious) fracture. Most of currently available therapies can only prevent bones weakening, but do not strengthen them. Osteoporosis is largely genetically determined, so discovering new bone strengthening genes could lead to novel and better treatments.
One in four UK women experience domestic violence at some time in their lives, and most seek informal support from the people around them, even if they don’t choose to access professional help. But what are the support needs of friends and family members trying to help?
If a cell has an abnormal number of chromosomes (for example, 47 or 45 instead of the usual 46 in a human cell) it has what is called aneuploidy, which is a leading cause of human embryo deaths, miscarriages and infertility. Dr Binyam Mogessie’s work investigates the mechanisms which separate the chromosomes in mammalian eggs and embryos, and how these are disrupted in disease.
