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King s College London researchers have found evidence that minocycline, a widely used antibiotic with anti-inflammatory properties, gave greater improvement in depressive symptoms in patients with treatment resistant depression with low-grade peripheral inflammation.
Improvement in depressive symptoms
In a four-week randomised clinical MINDEP (MINocycline in DEPression) trial, 39 patients with major depressive disorder were recruited from services linked to South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust (SLaM) and via public advertisement.
The trial took place at the NIHR / Wellcome Trust King s Clinical Research Facility at King s College Hospital. The patients, who were taking their routine antidepressant treatment, were split into two groups, one group took daily a placebo (sugar pill) tablet while the other group took daily minocycline alongside their routine treatment for 4 weeks.
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In the first systematic large-scale evaluation of the UK National Early Warning Risk Score (NEWS) 2 as a scoring system for predicting severe COVID-19 outcomes in patients, researchers at King s College London have found poor-to-moderate accuracy for identifying patients at risk of being transferred to intensive care units (ICUs) or dying after 14 days of hospitalisation. Accuracy of predictions in short term (three days) showed moderate success.
For people who are hospitalised with severe COVID-19, it is vital to quickly identify which patients may deteriorate and require transfer to an intensive care unit (ICU) for organ support or may die. NEWS2 is an early warning score that combines physiological parameters such as respiration rate, oxygen saturation, blood pressure and temperature. NEWS2 is currently used almost universally in UK NHS Trusts to identify which patients are at risk of deteriorating early.