High-heeled shoes and musculoskeletal injuries : a narrative systematic review

Funding This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

The value of pragmatic and observational studies in health care and public health

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Persons with chronic widespread pain experience excess mortality : longitudinal results from UK Biobank and meta-analysis

This manuscript uses the UK Biobank resource (Application 1144). We acknowledge the authors of a previous meta-analysis on this topic (Diane Smith, Ross Wilkie, Olalekan Uthman, Joanne L. Jordan, John McBeth) whose published search strategy we used as the basis for our meta-analysis, albeit that our meta-analysis had a more restricted focus and the criteria for determining eligibility and the data we extracted from eligible studies was not identical and resulted in selection of a different group of studies. We thank John McBeth (University of Manchester) for providing additional data relating to one of the studies, to allow it be included in the meta-analysis. GJM had the idea for the study and together with GTJ designed the analysis plan for UK Biobank. GTJ undertook the UK Biobank analysis. MSB conducted the updated systematic review and all authors participated in undertaking the meta-analysis. GJM drafted the manuscript but all authors made an important intellectual contribution to the text. None of the authors report conflict of interest.Peer reviewedPostprin

Co-Occurrence and Characteristics of Patients With Axial Spondyloarthritis Who Meet Criteria for Fibromyalgia : Results From a UK National Register

The British Society for Rheumatology (BSR) Biologics Register in Ankylosing Spondylitis is funded by the BSR and they have receive funds for this from Pfizer, AbbVie and UCB. These companies receive advance copies of manuscripts and can provide comments but have no input into determining the topics for analysis, publication and no input into the work involved in this analysis. This analysis is part-funded by Arthritis Research UK (Grant No: 21378)Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Speech and communication in Parkinson’s disease: a cross-sectional exploratory study in the UK

Objective: To assess associations between cognitive status, intelligibility, acoustics and functional communication in PD. Design: Cross-sectional exploratory study of functional communication, including a within-participants experimental design for listener assessment. Setting: A major academic medical centre in the East of England, UK. Participants: Questionnaire data were assessed for 45 people with Parkinson’s disease (PD), who had self-reported speech or communication difficulties and did not have clinical dementia. Acoustic and listener analyses were conducted on read and conversational speech for 20 people with PD and 20 familiar conversation partner controls without speech, language or cognitive difficulties. Main outcome measures: Functional communication assessed by the Communicative Participation Item Bank (CPIB) and Communicative Effectiveness Survey (CES). Results: People with PD had lower intelligibility than controls for both the read (mean difference 13.7%, p=0.009) and conversational (mean difference 16.2%, p=0.04) sentences. Intensity and pause were statistically significant predictors of intelligibility in read sentences. Listeners were less accurate identifying the intended emotion in the speech of people with PD (14.8% point difference across conditions, p=0.02) and this was associated with worse speaker cognitive status (16.7% point difference, p=0.04). Cognitive status was a significant predictor of functional communication using CPIB (F=8.99, p=0.005, η2 = 0.15) but not CES. Intelligibility in conversation sentences was a statistically significant predictor of CPIB (F=4.96, p=0.04, η2 = 0.19) and CES (F=13.65, p=0.002, η2 = 0.43). Read sentence intelligibility was not a significant predictor of either outcome. Conclusions: Cognitive status was an important predictor of functional communication—the role of intelligibility was modest and limited to conversational and not read speech. Our results highlight the importance of focusing on functional communication as well as physical speech impairment in speech and language therapy (SLT) for PD. Our results could inform future trials of SLT techniques for PD

The British Society for Rheumatology Biologics Registers in Ankylosing Spondylitis (BSRBR-AS) study : Protocol for a prospective cohort study of the long-term safety and quality of life outcomes of biologic treatment

Acknowledgements Oversight of the study is provided by the BSR Registers Committee of which GJM and GTJ are members, together with investigators from BSRBR-RA, representatives from the BSR clinical affairs section and BSR independent members, currently, Alex MacGregor (University of East Anglia), Elaine Dennison (University of Southampton), Jon Packham (Keele University) and patient representatives Ailsa Bosworth and Debbie Cook. We acknowledge the contribution of the International Advisory Group members Desireé van der Heijde (Netherlands), Matthew Brown (Australia) and Walter Maksymowych (Canada). We thank Neil Basu (University of Aberdeen) for his role with regards to pharmacovigilance and the Robertson Centre for Biostatistics (University of Glasgow) for data management services. Author KTM is currently at the Tayside Clinical Trials Unit, University of Dundee. Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Potential Benefit of Singing for People with Parkinson’s Disease : A Systematic Review

Acknowledgements This study was not supported by any particular grant or funding source. The senior author MSB, an epidemiologist with research experience in PD, wishes to thank clinician authors JB, RAA and SMB for their invaluable contributions. JB is a retired health professional with long-standing experience in community health. RAA and SMB are qualified and practising speech and language therapists and RAA specialises in adult neurological disorders. Additionally, we thank Dr Katherine Deane of the University of East Anglia for expert input regarding the Threats to Validity quality tool, on which she was the lead developer.Peer reviewedPostprin

Group-based active artistic interventions for adults with primary anxiety and depression: a systematic review

Objectives This systematic review examined the potential benefit of all group-based performing arts interventions for primary anxiety and/or depression.Setting Scholarly literature from any country or countries globally.Data sources Three key bibliographic databases, Google Scholar and relevant citation chasing.Primary and secondary outcome measures Depression and/or anxiety symptom severity, well-being, quality of life, functional communication or social participation.Results Database searches returned a total of 63 678 records, of which 56 059 remained following dededuplication. From these database searches, a total of 153 records proceeded to full-text screening. These were supplemented by 18 additional unique full-text screening records from Google Scholar searches and citation chasing (12% of total). From a total of 171 records at the full-text screening stage, 12 publications (7%) were eligible for inclusion in this systematic review, each reporting on a separate study. Published from 2004 to 2021, these studies involved a total of 669 participants with anxiety and/or depression from nine countries and covered five broad artistic modalities: dance, music therapy, art therapy, martial arts and theatre. Dance was the most studied artistic modality (five studies), while there were three studies on art therapy, two on music therapy and one each on martial arts and theatre. The evidence was clearest for a benefit of arts therapies on depression and/or anxiety symptoms.Conclusions This systematic review addresses all group-based active arts interventions in a focused population of primary anxiety and/or depression. The evidence suggests that the arts may be a useful therapeutic medium in this population. However, a substantial limitation of the evidence base is the lack of studies directly comparing different artistic modalities. Moreover, not all artistic modalities were assessed for all outcome domains. Therefore, it is not currently possible to determine which artistic modalities are most beneficial for which specific outcomes

Making orphan drugs and services available and accessible for people who live with rare diseases : what has been done? A systematic scoping review

Objectives: Rare diseases are recognized as non-prevalent health disorders. Availability, accessibility, and affordability of Orphan Drugs (ODs), alongside genetic testing, are the major contributors to ensuring no patient is excluded by the health system. Therefore, making ODs available and accessible has been a challenge even for high-income nations. This review aims to summarize the evidence on the availability and accessibility of orphan drugs and other required resources for managing rare diseases. Methods: The Joanna Briggs Institute scoping review method was used as the analytical framework. We searched Medline, and Embase through Ovid, and Web of Science. We used Guilford et al. definition and classification of accessibility and its dimensions to synthesize the evidence. Results: The majority of the final included evidence is about the financial, and then availability and physical accessibility to ODs. Furthermore, almost all the evidence comes from high-income countries. Conclusion: The principal hurdles to the availability and accessibility of ODs and other related services are very high prices, lack of a legal framework, and budgetary impact on public funding. A lack of reimbursement mechanisms and lower availability of other resources are among other problems