Health Technol Assess
July 2025
Background: The emergency department represents a potentially valuable opportunity to support smoking cessation. Evidence is lacking around the use of e-cigarettes in opportunistic settings like the emergency department.
Objective: To undertake a randomised controlled trial in people who smoke attending United Kingdom emergency departments, testing a brief intervention which included provision of an e-cigarette versus signposting to smoking cessation services, assessing smoking abstinence.
Blue carbon accreditation for climate mitigation services provided by coastal ecosystems, such as seagrass beds, typically account only for autochthonous organic carbon, potentially underestimating the total carbon sequestration capacity of seagrass ecosystems. Here, a multi-proxy approach is used to determine the provenance of organic carbon in two intertidal temperate seagrass ecosystems in the Northeast Atlantic. The organic carbon to nitrogen ratio (C/N) and carbon isotope composition (δC) of seagrass tissues and sediments from an open coastal sandy site (Ryde, UK) and a muddy tidal inlet site (Farlington Marshes, UK) were measured.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAim: Measure the impact of brief, academic-led, evidence-based social media videos on vaping harm perceptions among young adults.
Design: On-line between-subjects experimental study. Participants were randomized to one of two conditions: experimental (exposed to one of eight brief videos, designed for social media, with academic experts addressing vaping harms) or control.
Int J Drug Policy
September 2025
Background: Smoking prevalence among people experiencing homelessness is high. This study explored the factors which influenced potential smoking abstinence among participants receiving an e-cigarette (EC) intervention within the Smoking Cessation Trial in Centres for Homelessness (SCeTCH) across Great Britian.
Methods: Using the Capability Opportunity Motivation - Behaviour (COM-B) model, hypothesised and emerging mediators were explored quantitatively via measures in baseline and follow-up questionnaires (n=239) and qualitatively via interviews with homelessness centre staff (n=16) and participants (n=31) who received an EC starter pack and 4-week e-liquid supply.
BMC Med
July 2025
Background: Smoking rates are exceptionally high among people experiencing homelessness. We aimed to test the effectiveness of an e-cigarette (EC) intervention designed to help people accessing homeless support services to stop smoking.
Methods: A two-arm cluster randomised controlled trial.
Marine and salt marsh sediments contain large amounts of organic carbon (OC) and are therefore important in the global carbon cycle. Here, we collated previously published and unpublished measurements of sediment OC in marine and salt marsh sediments in European regional seas (EURO-CARBON; available at https://doi.org/10.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFChronic non-healing wounds represent a growing global health challenge that is poorly addressed by current advances in wound care dressings. Hyperosmotic stress linked, for example, to poor glycaemic control, is a known but under-investigated contributor to the chronic wound environment and a known inflammatory stimulus. MXene (TiCT) has been considered for smart dressing applications but has not been investigated for use with bioactive agents to directly moderate hyperosmotic stress for improved wound care.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: To determine characteristics and pregnancy outcomes in women with primary adrenal insufficiency (PAI).
Design: Retrospective multicentre cohort study.
Setting: Twenty-three maternity units in the UK and Ireland.
Introduction: Hospital emergency departments (ED) offer an opportunity to engage with large numbers of people who smoke to prompt cessation, although the acceptability of opportunistic intervention in this context has been questioned. This process evaluation study was embedded into the Cessation of Smoking Trial in the Emergency Department (COSTED) randomized controlled trial and sought to explore the context of intervention delivery within the ED.
Aims And Methods: Qualitative interviews were conducted with participants and staff across six EDs participating in the COSTED randomized controlled trial.
Tob Use Insights
October 2024
Introduction: E-cigarettes have been shown to be effective for tobacco smoking cessation. Predicting those who are most likely to achieve smoking abstinence after receiving an e-cigarette based smoking cessation intervention could help to target interventions more efficiently.
Methods: A secondary analysis of baseline characteristics of 505 people who received an emergency department based smoking cessation intervention incorporating brief advice, provision of an e-cigarette starter kit and referral to stop smoking services.
Aims: To assess the cost-effectiveness of the Cessation of Smoking Trial in Emergency Department (COSTED) intervention compared with signposting to local stop smoking service (SSS) from the National Health Service (NHS) and personal social services (PSS) perspective.
Design, Setting And Participants: This was a two-group, multi-centre, pragmatic, individually randomized controlled trial set in six Emergency Departments (EDs) in urban and rural areas in the United Kingdom. Adult (≥ 18 years) daily smokers (at least one cigarette or equivalent per day) but not daily e-cigarette users, with carbon monoxide reading ≥ 8 parts per million, attending the ED (n = 972) were included.
Introduction: People living in coastal communities have some of the worst health outcomes in the UK, driven in part by high smoking rates. Deprived coastal communities include socially disadvantaged groups that struggle to access traditional stop smoking services. The study aimed to seek the views of people who smoke living in coastal communities, to assess the optimal smoking cessation intervention for this population.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNicotine Tob Res
January 2025
Introduction: Screening for smoking when people interact with healthcare services and referral of those who smoke to stop smoking services (SSSs) is a key component of efforts to tackle tobacco use. However, little is known about what happens after someone is referred or signposted to SSSs.
Methods: As part of the Cessation of Smoking Trial in the Emergency Department (NCT04854616), those randomized to intervention (n = 505) were referred to local SSSs (along with receiving brief advice and an e-cigarette starter kit) and those randomized to control (n = 502) were given contact details for the same services (signposted).
Background And Aims: Youth use of disposable vapes has increased markedly in the United Kingdom in recent years, yet little is known about the motivations, experiences and perceptions of young people themselves. This study aimed to explore young people's experiences and use of disposable vapes.
Methods: This was a qualitative study recruiting young people reporting regularly vaping disposables, collecting data via dyad guided, individual and group interviews.
Background: Supporting people to quit smoking is one of the most powerful interventions to improve health. The Emergency Department (ED) represents a potentially valuable opportunity to deliver a smoking cessation intervention if it is sufficiently resourced. The objective of this trial was to determine whether an opportunistic ED-based smoking cessation intervention can help people to quit smoking.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: The Cessation of Smoking Trial in the Emergency Department (COSTED) trial aims to ascertain whether brief advice, the provision of an e-cigarette starter kit and referral to stop smoking services (SSS), increases smoking cessation in people attending the emergency department. Patient and public involvement (PPI) and scoping work were undertaken to select an appropriate e-cigarette for the trial.
Design And Setting: PPI consultation and feasibility scoping about potential devices with a professional and lay panel, all based in England.
Predictive processing accounts of autism posit that autistic individuals' perception is less biased by expectations than nonautistic individuals', perhaps through stronger precision-weighting of prediction errors. Since precision-weighting is fundamental to all information processing, under this theory, the differences between autistic and nonautistic individuals should be domain-general and observable in both behavior and brain responses. This study used EEG, behavioral responses, and eye-tracking co-registration during gaze-direction adaptation, to investigate whether increased precision-weighting of prediction errors is evident through smaller adaptation after-effects in autistic adolescents compared with nonautistic peers.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIt is unclear whether implicit memory (priming) is affected by aging. Some studies have reported no difference between young and older adults, while others have uncovered reliable reductions. An important factor that may explain these discrepancies is the manner of encoding.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: A proportion of patients with adrenal insufficiency (AI) require increases in their maintenance glucocorticoids following the Covid-19 vaccine as a result of vaccine-related symptoms or development of incipient or frank adrenal crisis. In a large cohort of AI patients, we aim to characterise symptoms, changes in glucocorticoid dosage, occurrence of adrenal crises and whether there are differences between the mRNA and adenovirus vector vaccines.
Patients And Methods: Patients with AI of any aetiology were invited to complete a short, structured questionnaire of their experience of the Covid-19 vaccination.
Dev Cogn Neurosci
December 2023
Rhythmic visual stimulation (RVS), the periodic presentation of visual stimuli to elicit a rhythmic brain response, is increasingly applied to reveal insights into early neurocognitive development. Our systematic review identified 69 studies applying RVS in 0- to 6-year-olds. RVS has long been used to study the development of the visual system and applications have more recently been expanded to uncover higher cognitive functions in the developing brain, including overt and covert attention, face and object perception, numeral cognition, and predictive processing.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Biochemical verification of smoking status prior to recruitment into smoking cessation trials is widely used to confirm smoking status, most commonly using exhaled carbon monoxide (CO). There is variation in the level of CO used as a biochemical inclusion criterion, and thus the possibility for people reporting to be current smokers to be incorrectly excluded from trials.
Methods: As part of the Cessation of Smoking Trial in the Emergency Department, people attending the Emergency Department (ED) who reported being current daily smokers underwent CO testing to confirm eligibility.