Rosalind Smyth

..Oral calorie supplements are used to increase total daily calorie intake and improve weight gain. However, they are expensive and there are concerns they may reduce the amount of food eaten and not improve overall energy intake...

..The objective of this study was to assess the feasibility of conducting a randomised controlled trial comparing two treatment strategies to eradicate P aeruginosa in CF patients...

..If applied appropriately, they can ensure that management of patients is based on clinically useful diagnostic tests and treatments that have been shown to be effective and not harmful...

..Careful mapping of the inflammatory pathways in the pathogenesis of bronchiolitis should lead to development of new therapies to alleviate symptoms...

..It is increasingly being recognized that the innate immune response may play a key role...

..Asthma may develop as a result of persistent activation of the immune system alone or in combination with physiologic airway remodeling in early childhood. Further studies are needed to confirm this hypothesis...

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..This suggests that clinical manifestations of respiratory syncytial virus bronchiolitis are determined by local immunological responses to infection, rather than by characteristics of the infecting virus...

..If used appropriately, they can aid the clinician in making decisions about individual patients and provide a sound evidence base from which clinical guidelines can be developed...

..We aimed to investigate whether interleukin 9 was produced in the lungs of infants with severe RSV disease and if found, from which cells it originated...

..To investigate sensitivity and specificity of infrared ear thermometry compared to rectal thermometry to detect fever in children...

..The aims of this study were to investigate the chemokine response to invasive pneumococcal disease (IPD) and to examine the influence of HIV infection on the chemokine response, pneumococcal bacterial loads, and outcome...

..To assess risks for parental depression following the diagnosis of cystic fibrosis (CF) in a child...

..These findings provide the first direct evidence in infants that in RSV bronchiolitis there are divergent T-cell responses and suggest that more than one mechanism may be responsible for immune-mediated disease enhancement...

..In this review we will summarize current knowledge about the immunobiology of IL-9 and discuss the role played by IL-9 in inflammation in both asthma and COPD, and its potential as a therapeutic target...

..However, little is known about pulmonary chemokine responses to RSV in humans. Our aim was to characterize the production of chemokines in the lungs of infants with RSV bronchiolitis and how this production changes over time...

..99 [95% confidence interval, 5.0-24.12]; P<.001, by Fisher exact test). Dual infection by hMPV and hRSV is associated with severe bronchiolitis...

..Here we show that RSV+/hMPV+ were clinically symptomatic for longer than RSV+/hMPV- infants, but that no differences in airway total cell concentration, differential cell count or cytokine/chemokine concentrations were detectable...

..Further randomised controlled trials are required to investigate the use of these products in children with chronic disease. Until further data are available, these products should be used with caution...

..Five distinct lineages of the virus genome have been described...

..Our aim was to systematically review studies that address the process of selecting outcomes or outcome domains to measure in clinical trials in children...

..Seventy percent of them were coinfected with metapneumovirus. Such coinfection might be a factor influencing the severity of bronchiolitis...

..Aim: to determine if factors mediating proposed mechanisms for severe bronchiolitis differ with severity of disease...

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..Methods that adjust combined estimates should not be used to provide an alternative answer but to consider the robustness of the combined estimate to publication bias...

..Our finding suggests that infrared ear thermometry does not show sufficient agreement with an established method of temperature measurement to be used in situations where body temperature needs to be measured with precision...

..However, there is compelling evidence to suggest that the host cell immune response also has a prominent role in disease pathogenesis. Non-immunological factors may also be important...

..The trend for an increasing proportion of trials to be multicentre is encouraging. There are however, still deficiencies in the design of clinical trials in CF...

..The Epidemiologic Registry of Cystic Fibrosis (ERCF) was a multicentre, longitudinal follow-up project of cystic fibrosis patients enrolled at some 200 centres in nine European countries between 1994 and 1999...

..CONCLUSIONS: Important errors were identified in a high proportion of reviews. A variety of problems relating to the reporting of results within a review were identified, but these did not lead to substantial changes in any conclusion...

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..Oral protein energy supplements should not be regarded as an essential part of the management of this group of children. TRIAL REGISTRATION: ISRCTN: 95744468...

..Using real-time PCR, we aimed to determine pneumococcal DNA loads in blood and CSF, and their relationship to cytokine concentrations, clinical presentation and outcome...

..Clinicians must be aware that lack of evidence of effect is not the same as evidence of lack of effect. Caution must be exercised before applying the conclusions of systematic reviews based upon adult data to childhood disease...

..The lack of a correlation between RSV-specific T cell numbers and parameters of disease severity make a prominent role in immune pathology unlikely, in contrast the T cells might be involved in the recovery process...