April Cashin-Garbutt

Natural Sciences

April graduated with a first-class honours degree in Natural Sciences from Pembroke College, University of Cambridge. During her time as Editor-in-Chief, News-Medical (2012-2017), she kickstarted the content production process and helped to grow the website readership to over 60 million visitors per year.

Through interviewing global thought leaders in medicine and life sciences, including Nobel laureates, April developed a passion for neuroscience and now works at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour, located within UCL.

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Articles from April

Can dancing improve your mental health?

Dance psychology is the study of dance and dancers from a scientific and psychological perspective. What we're trying to understand is what happens when people dance and why, we are looking at it from a healthcare perspective, which might suggest dancing is good for you.

8 Mar 2017

Could smartglass rehumanize the physician patient relationship?

Augmedix is a Google Glass-powered remote scribe service that frees doctors from 3 hours of mandated charting and documentation each day.

7 Mar 2017

Benefits of compact MRI

The kind of research I'm interested in is a technique called diffusion MRI and this technique is sensitive to the microstructure of the tissue. Particular clinical applications that it is used for are cancer and looking at neurodegenerative diseases.

3 Mar 2017

Advances in Optogenetics

Optogenetics is a way of introducing information into the brain using light, it targets specific cells or connections across the brain. It is fast, like brain signaling, and helps you communicate with neural circuitry in a language more similar to what is normally used within the brain.

2 Mar 2017

Using Spherical Nucleic Acids to Track and Treat Disease

Spherical nucleic acids are structures that are made by taking a nanoparticle template and using chemistry to arrange short strands of DNA or RNA on the surface of those particles. The spherical core of the nanoparticle creates a spherical arrangement of DNA or RNA, similar to tiny little balls of nucleic acids.

1 Mar 2017

Diagnosing Infections Through Molecules in Patient Breath

Over the past couple of decades, the analytical technology and the clinical microbiology insight needed to create a breath test for infections has seen a considerable number of advances and there are now numerous research teams focused on evaluating patient breath as a diagnostic fluid for infectious diseases. Significant challenges still need to be overcome.

27 Feb 2017

Decoding the Exposome Through Breath Biomarkers

The human exposome is probably best defined as “everything that is not the genome.” This is a bit tongue in cheek, but basically, the exposome is comprised of all of the chemicals in your body from the environment, food, consumer products, their metabolites, the endogenous “housekeeping” chemicals, the cellular wastes from energy production, as well as all of the messenger compounds and life supporting chemicals.

24 Feb 2017

Listening technique for cochlear implant users in noisy situations

The listening tactic that we investigated is the idea that if you turn your head away from the person that you're talking to, rather than directly facing them, that it would help you to understand what they're saying a little better. At the same time as still looking at them, of course, because you need to be able to lip read.

23 Feb 2017

Rapid patient recruitment and reduced trial costs: is LDS the answer?

LDS stands for Linked Database System, which essentially describes what it does. Our LDS technology uses multiple sources of information from hospitals, GPs and pharmacies. However in the future this information could also come from other health data sources e.g. your smartphone, Fitbit etc.

21 Feb 2017

Targeting RNA repeats

RNA repeats are stretches of code in the body that incrementally repeat. For example, in the most common cause of adult-on-set muscular dystrophy a RNA has a repeat of r(CUG) and this three letter code can repeat thousands of times.

20 Feb 2017