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 liver damage caused by a low protein diet be repaired?

Proteins are an important component of our diet and help to build muscles; they take part in the structure of hormones and they are vital to the whole body’s metabolism. The most important consequence is that the liver loses its capacity to produce proteins (such as albumin) and to metabolise (inactivate or activate in some cases) medicaments for instance.

8 Jun 2017

Treating anxiety disorders in children with CBT

“Anxiety disorders” refers to a broad range of psychiatric conditions, where people are anxious. It covers things like obsessive-compulsive disorder, general anxiety disorder and phobic disorder. Interestingly, anxiety is also a feature of severe mental illnesses such as psychosis and depression.

7 Jun 2017

Innovation in natural health supplementation

The market has changed quite a lot. When I first investigated the industry, and launched BetterYou the natural heath industry was the domain of the educated few. People did a lot of research before they walked into a health store; they knew the questions they wanted to ask and expected quite a good deal of information in return.

1 Jun 2017

Cluster headaches: searching for effective therapies

Cluster headaches are probably the most painful types of pain a human can suffer and it is for no small reason that this condition is also sometimes referred to as suicide headache.

25 May 2017

Medical methods in the life of Shakespeare’s son-in-law

During this period, there was a revival of the Classical medicine of Ancient Greece and Rome, particularly the ideas of the Greek philosopher Hippocrates and the Roman physician Galen of Pergamon.

24 May 2017

Finding a cure for ALS

ALS is a neurodegenerative disease in which motor neurons in the brain and spinal cord are damaged. As ALS progresses, neurons are unable to send impulses to muscles, making voluntary muscle movement difficult, including standing, walking and sitting, as well as speaking and swallowing.

22 May 2017

Sperm epigenetics and fertility

Epigenetics is a system of information that lies atop DNA to control which genes are accessible, active and inactive. Each cell in your body essentially has identical DNA, but they have different patterns of expression.

18 May 2017

History of sleep: what was normal?

We used to sleep in two phases, with a first sleep and then a second sleep. Arguably from time immemorial to the nineteenth century, the dominant pattern of sleep in Western societies was biphasic, whereby most preindustrial households retired between 9 and 10pm, slept for 3 to 3 ½ hours during their “first sleep,”

17 May 2017

Depression in elite athletes

Our main findings showed that high-performance athletes were just as likely as non-athletes to report mild or more severe depressive symptoms.

16 May 2017

Analyzing single-cell RNA data in pre-malignant tumors

RNA sequencing is basically the isolation of RNA from cells and the use of reverse transcriptase to turn the RNA into DNA. You can then use your standard DNA sequencing technologies to quantify the cDNA that you obtained from the reverse transcription reaction.

12 May 2017