A cohort study of the recovery of health and wellbeing following colorectal cancer (CREW study): protocol paper

Background: the number of people surviving colorectal cancer has doubled in recent years. While much of the literature suggests that most people return to near pre-diagnosis status following surgery for colorectal cancer, this literature has largely focused on physical side effects. Longitudinal studies in colorectal cancer have either been small scale or taken a narrow focus on recovery after surgery. There is a need for a comprehensive, long-term study exploring all aspects of health and wellbeing in colorectal cancer patients. The aim of this study is to establish the natural history of health and wellbeing in people who have been treated for colorectal cancer. People have different dispositions, supports and resources, likely resulting in individual differences in restoration of health and wellbeing. The protocol described in this paper is of a study which will identify who is most at risk of problems, assess how quickly people return to a state of subjective health and wellbeing, and will measure factors which influence the course of recovery. Methods: this is a prospective, longitudinal cohort study following 1000 people with colorectal cancer over a period of two years, recruiting from 30 NHS cancer treatment centres across the UK. Questionnaires will be administered prior to surgery, and 3, 9, 15 and 24 months after surgery, with the potential to return to this cohort to explore on-going issues related to recovery after cancer. Discussion: outcomes will help inform health care providers about what helps or hinders rapid and effective recovery from cancer, and identify areas for intervention development to aid this process. Once established the cohort can be followed up for longer periods and be approached to participate in related projects as appropriate and subject to funding<br/

Environmental Dimensions of the RMS Leinster Sinking

The Irish Sea which separates Great Britain and Ireland has often been written about in terms of divisions, threats, and hazards. Facing each other across that sea, the coast of Wales and Ireland’s eastern seaboard have a more complex story to tell, one characterised by intimate if troubled lines of connection. A place of passage for centuries, the Irish Sea has a distinct identity, its memory longer and more capacious than borders or polities. The region ties together port communities that differ in their stories, cultures, and worldviews. This article explores themes of division and connection across coasts through the story of the Royal Mail Ship (RMS) Leinster, a British mail steamer that was torpedoed just off the coast of Ireland as World War I neared its end and the Irish War of Independence began to stir

Public Humanities EcoGothic at the Coast in Ireland and Wales

The Gothic clings to Irish and Welsh coasts and finds voice through strange stories. Centuries of accumulated death and tragedy forms a dense web of sorrow with particularly prolific roots in the literature, songs, and stories of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These traditions resonate within the longer history of lives and vessels lost in the Irish Sea, becoming part of what Gillian O’Brien has described as the ‘ring of sorrow’ encircling Ireland, and the wider archipelago, ‘binding together communities who have suffered maritime tragedies like beads on a rosary’. This paper explores the Gothic resonances that cross the Irish Sea and some of the conundrums of expressing this material through digital and stakeholder-based public history activities. These manifestations are a form of blue knowledge, sense-making in the face of danger mediated by a sense of ecological anxiety mixed with human feats of bravery. The case studies of this essay originate from the collection of the Ports, Past and Present project, an initiative funded by the European Regional Development Fund through the Ireland Wales Cooperation programme

The formation of sulfate, nitrate and perchlorate salts in the martian atmosphere

Funding: 2011 NAI Director’s Discretionary Fund award titled ‘‘Perchlorate, Water, and Life’’, along with a NASA postdoctoral program award to work at the Virtual Planetary Laboratory.In extremely arid regions on Earth, such as the Atacama Desert, nitrate, sulfate and perchlorate salts form in the atmosphere and accumulate on the surface from dry deposition according to diagnostic evidence in their oxygen isotopes. Salts of similar oxyanions should have formed in the atmosphere of Mars because of comparable photochemical reactions. We use a 1-D photochemical model to calculate the deposition rates of sulfate, nitrogen oxyanions, and perchlorate from Mars' atmosphere, given a plausible range of volcanic fluxes of sulfur- and chlorine-containing gases in the past. To calculate integrated fluxes over time, we assume that throughout the last 3. byr (the Amazonian eon), the typical background atmosphere would have been similar to today's cold and dry environment. If the soil has been mixed by impact perturbations to a characteristic depth of ~2. m during this time, given a time-average volcanic flux 0.1% of the modern terrestrial volcanic flux, the model suggests that the soil would have accumulated 1.0-1.7. wt.% SO42- and 0.2-0.4. wt.% N in the form of pernitrate (peroxynitrate) or nitrate. The calculated sulfate concentration is consistent with in situ observations of soils from rovers and landers and orbital gamma ray spectroscopy. However, nitrates or pernitrates are yet to be detected. The modeled formation of perchlorate via purely gas-phase oxidation of volcanically-derived chlorine is insufficient by orders of magnitude to explain 0.4-0.6. wt.% ClO4- measured by NASA's Phoenix Lander. The far smaller amount of ozone in the martian atmosphere compared to the terrestrial atmosphere and the colder, drier conditions are the cause of lower rates of gas phase oxidation of chlorine volatiles to perchloric acid. Our calculations imply that non-gas-phase processes not included in the photochemical model, such as heterogeneous reactions, are likely important for the formation of perchlorate and are yet to be identified.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe