How are parenting practices associated with bullying in adolescents? - CAMHS around the Campfire recording

For this session we welcomed Dr. Ana Pascual-Sanchez, Faculty of Medicine, Department of Brain Sciences, Imperial College London, to discuss her CAMH paper 'How are parenting practices associated with bullying in adolescents? A cross-sectional study'.

Filosofia da química e dos materiais: entrevista com Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent

Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, professora emérita da Universidade de Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, é historiadora e filósofa das ciências. Além de mais de uma centena de artigos publicados em periódicos científicos e como capítulos de livros coletivos, suas principais obras são: Histoire de la chimie[1], em colaboração com Isabelle Stengers (La Découverte, 1993), La science populaire dans la presse et l’édition, em colaboração com Anne Rasmussen (CNRS Editions, 1997), Lavoisier. Mémoires d’une révolution (Flammarion, 1998), Eloge du mixte. Matériaux nouveaux et philosophie ancienne (Hachette, 1998), Faut-il avoir peur de la chimie? (Les Empêcheurs de penser en ronde, 2005), Matière à penser. Essais d’histoire et de philosophie de la chimie (Presses Universitaires de Paris Ouest, 2008), Chemistry, the impure Science em colaboração com Jonathan Simon (Imperial College Press, 2008), Les vertiges de la technoscience. Façonner le monde atome par atome[2] (La Découverte, 2009), Fabriquer la vie. Où va la biologie de synthèse? em colaboração com Dorothée Benoit-Browaeys (Seuil, 2011), Carbone. Ses vies, ses oeuvres em colaboração com Sacha Loeve (Seuil, 2018), e Philosophie de la chimie, obra coletiva organizada com Richard-Emmanuel Eastes (deBoeck, 2020).[1] História da química. Tradução de Raquel Gouveia. Lisboa: Instituto Piaget, 1996.[2] As vertigens da tecnociência. Tradução de José Luiz Cazarotto. São Paulo: Ideias & Letras, 2013.

HoloMentor: A Novel Mixed Reality Surgical Anatomy Curriculum for Robot-assisted Radical Prostatectomy

ABSTRACT Objectives: The disruption to surgical training and medical education caused by the global COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the need for realistic, reliable, and engaging educational opportunities available outside of the operating theatre and accessible for trainees of all levels. This paper presents the design and development of a virtual reality curriculum which simulates the surgical mentorship experience outside of the operating theatre, with a focus on surgical anatomy and surgical decision making. Method: This was a multi-institutional study between London’s King’s College and Imperial College. The index procedure selected for the module was robotic radical prostatectomy. For each stage of the surgical procedure, subject-matter experts (N=3) at King’s College London, identified: (1) the critical surgical-decision making points, (2) critical anatomical landmarks and (3) tips and techniques for overcoming intraoperative challenges. Content validity was determined by an independent panel of subject-matter experts (N=8) at Imperial College, London using Fleiss’ Kappa statistic. The experts’ teaching points were combined with operative footage and illustrative animations and projected onto a virtual reality headset. The module was piloted to Surgical Science students (N=15). Quantitative analysis compared participants' confidence regarding their anatomical knowledge before and after taking the module. Qualitative data was gathered from students regarding their views on using the virtual reality model. Results: Multi-rater agreement between experts was above the 70.0% threshold for all steps of the procedure. 73% of pilot study participants ‘agreed’ or ‘strongly agreed’ that they achieved a better understanding of surgical anatomy and the rationale behind each procedural step. This was reflected in an increase in the median knowledge score after trialing the curriculum (p<0.001). 100% of subject-matter experts and 93.3% of participants ‘agreed’ or ‘strongly agreed’ that virtual mentorship would be useful for future surgical training. Conclusions: This study demonstrated that virtual surgical mentorship could be a feasible and cost-effective alternative to traditional training methods with the potential to improve technical skills, such as operative proficiency and non-technical skills such as decision-making and situational judgement.

Incidental uptake of fluorodeoxyglucose in the Waldeyer’s ring and risk of oropharyngeal malignancy

Purpose Fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) positron emission tomography (PET) is increasingly used to diagnose and stage malignancy. The aim of this article is to investigate the significance of incidental FDG uptake in the Waldeyer’s ring and to assess its value in predicting clinically occult oropharyngeal malignancy. Methods All FDG-PET/CT scans performed in Imperial College NHS Foundation Trust, UK between January 2012 and November 2018 were included. Patients with known or suspected oropharyngeal malignancy or lymphoma were excluded. Minimum follow-up was 12 months. Results A total of 724 scans revealed oropharyngeal uptake of FDG. Of these, 102 were included in the study. Most patients (62.1%) were scanned as part of staging for other malignancies. Oropharyngeal FDG uptake was asymmetrical in 57.3% of the cases. Uptake was more common in the tonsils (56.3%), followed by the tongue base (31.1%) and both sites (12.6%). In 41.7% of reports, appearance was described as likely physiological; however, 52.4% of reports advised direct visualisation, clinical correlation or ENT opinion. Only 24.3% (25/102) of patients were referred and seen by ENT, 14.6% (15/102) of which had an interval PET scan and 8.7% (9/102) proceeded to tissue diagnosis. There was one oropharyngeal cancer identified and one unexpected metastasis from esophageal cancer. Conclusion Incidental uptake on PET/CT in the oropharynx is common. However, malignancy is rare (1.9%) and, when present, is associated with high SUVmax and asymmetrical uptake. Imaging results must be correlated clinically. These patients should be seen by an ENT specialist yet most may not require further investigations.

Causality in digital medicine

Ben Glocker (an expert in machine learning for medical imaging, Imperial College London), Mirco Musolesi (a data science and digital health expert, University College London), Jonathan Richens (an expert in diagnostic machine learning models, Babylon Health) and Caroline Uhler (a computational biology expert, MIT) talked to Nature Communications about their research interests in causality inference and how this can provide a robust framework for digital medicine studies and their implementation, across different fields of application.

Is MDD the right target for early-stage psychedelic-assisted therapy trials?

The recently published Imperial College study of a Phase II, double-blind, randomized, controlled trial comparing psilocybin-assisted therapy to a six-week titration of escitalopram for Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) should raise concerns for this illness category as a target of early psychedelic research given a goal of FDA approval. There are three reasons why MDD is the wrong target at this stage of research development. Firstly, the psychiatric category of MDD is heterogeneous, vaguely-defined, and overdiagnosed in a way that will problematize finding a reliable signal with psychedelic interventions (or any intervention), particularly within non-severe cases. Secondly, current rating scales for MDD (QIDS used in the Imperial College trial, but also HAM-D) are limited in approximating the kinds of things we ultimately care most about with depressive states, namely functional status, quality of life, and well-being: measures that seem more salient for psychedelic interventions and which are not adequately captured by these rating scales used in a majority of clinical trials. And thirdly, there are inherent conflicts between psychiatric conceptualizations of MDD (and its symptom amelioration) and the kinds of perspectives on one’s suffering often occasioned by psychedelic experiences themselves: while these kinds of psychedelic-catalyzed openings may lead to a form of acceptance or equanimity with regards to one’s life circumstances this could be in many ways orthogonal to reductions in HAM-D scores. We argue that for these reasons MDD is a non-ideal target at this stage of the science and propose alternative directions.

Os caminhos do decrescimento: entrevista com Giorgos Kallis

Giorgos Kallis é um economista ecológico e ecologista político que trabalha com justiça ambiental e limites para o crescimento. Bacharel em química e mestre em Engenharia Ambiental pelo Imperial College, Doutorado em Política Ambiental - University of the Eegean e um segundo mestrado em Economia pela Barcelona Graduate School of Economics. Atualmente é Professor do ICREA (Institución Catalana de Investigación y Estudios Avanzados) e Professor da Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) em Ciências Sociais e Comportamentais.