Katharina Dworzynski

• BSc, MSc, PhD
• Senior Researcher at Royal College of Physicians

Objectives: To determine the cost-effectiveness of natriuretic peptide (NP) testing and specialist outreach in patients with acute heart failure (AHF) residing off the cardiology ward. Methods: We used a Markov model to estimate costs and quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs) for patients presenting to hospital with suspected AHF. We examined diagnos...

Objectives To determine the cost-effectiveness of natriuretic peptide (NP) testing and specialist outreach in patients with acute heart failure (AHF) residing off the cardiology ward. Methods We used a Markov model to estimate costs and quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs) for patients presenting to hospital with suspected AHF. We examined diagnost...

Many stroke survivors, despite improvements in mortality and morbidity, remain dependent on others for everyday activities. People with stroke need access to effective specialist multidisciplinary rehabilitation services that are organised and integrated within the whole system of health and social care. They also commonly come under the care of ge...

To determine and compare the diagnostic accuracy of serum natriuretic peptide levels (B type natriuretic peptide, N terminal probrain natriuretic peptide (NTproBNP), and mid-regional proatrial natriuretic peptide (MRproANP)) in people presenting with acute heart failure to acute care settings using thresholds recommended in the 2012 European Societ...

We agree with Dalzell and Cannon that, with the possible exception of diuretics, no single drug treatment has been shown to improve outcomes in acute heart failure.1 The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) guideline is worded to reflect this lack of evidence.2 Satchithananda and colleagues are correct—we did not formally …

Acute heart failure may present de novo in people without known cardiac dysfunction, or as an acute decompensation of known chronic heart failure. Acute heart failure is a common cause of admission to hospital (more than 67 000 admissions in England and Wales each year) and is the leading cause of hospital admission in people aged 65 years or more...

All drugs have the potential to cause side effects or “adverse drug reactions,” but not all of these are allergic in nature. The diagnosis of drug allergy can be challenging, and there is considerable variation both in how drug allergy is managed and in geographical access to specialist drug allergy services.1 On the basis of a National Institute f...

Each year, about 150 000 people in the UK have a first or recurrent stroke.1 Despite UK health policies that place a great emphasis on reducing stroke (such as the National Stroke Strategy2) and improvements in mortality and morbidity, guidance is needed on access to and provision of effective rehabilitation services to maximise quality of life aft...

This study aimed to explore sex differences in autistic traits in relation to diagnosis, to elucidate factors that might differentially impact whether girls versus boys meet diagnostic criteria for autism or a related autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Data from a large population-based sample of children were examined. Girls and boys (aged 10-12 year...

Stuttering affects approximately 5% of children up to the teenage years. There are many possible forms of intervention, one of which is pharmacotherapy. No review about the treatment of stuttering with pharmacological agents in children and adolescents has been undertaken. The objectives of this review were to determine the extent of previous resea...

It has been questioned whether the process of twinning might be a risk factor for autism spectrum conditions (ASC) and autistic traits. Aim: We sought to determine whether autistic traits and probable disorder, as measured by the Childhood Autism Spectrum Test (CAST), were more pronounced in twins compared to singletons. Data were analyzed from two...

Aim: A deficit in non-word repetition (NWR), a measure of short-term phonological memory proposed as a marker for language impairment, is found not only in language impairment but also in reading impairment. We evaluated the strength of association between language impairment and reading impairment in children with current, past, and no language i...

Background: The increase in male to female ratio in autism spectrum conditions (ASCs) with increasing IQ may be an important clue to the aetiology of these disorders. Recent research (Skuse et al., 2009) suggests verbal IQ (VIQ) at the high extreme is protective against social communication impairments in girls only. Objectives: The aim is to e...

Prenatal and neonatal events were reported by parents of 13,690 eighteen-month-old twins enrolled in the Twins Early Development Study, a representative community sample born in England and Wales. At ages 7-8, parents and teachers completed questionnaires on social and nonsocial autistic-like features and parents completed the Childhood Asperger Sy...

We investigated the relationship between challenging behavior and co-morbid psychopathology in adults with intellectual disability (ID) and autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) (N=124) as compared to adults with ID only (N=562). All participants were first time referrals to specialist mental health services and were living in community settings. Clinic...

The aim of this study was to assess whether any memory impairment co-occurring with language impairment is global, affecting both verbal and visual domains, or domain specific. Visual and verbal memory, learning, and processing speed were assessed in children aged 6 years to 16 years 11 months (mean 9 y 9 m, SD 2 y 6 mo) with current, resolved, and...

Specific language impairment (SLI) is a common developmental disorder characterized by difficulties in language acquisition despite otherwise normal development and in the absence of any obvious explanatory factors. We performed a high-density screen of SLI1, a region of chromosome 16q that shows highly significant and consistent linkage to nonword...

Impairments in language and communication are core features of autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). The basis for this association is poorly understood. How early language is related to each of the triad of impairments characteristic of ASDs is also in need of clarification. This is the first study that aims to determine the extent to which shared gen...

Background: The fact that males show a much higher frequency than females of both Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) and autistic traits is a well established fact. Some researchers hypothesise this gender difference to be x-chromosome linked whereas others highlight the role of intrauterine testosterone level. It is possible that the current diagnos...

Factor structure and relationship between core features of autism (social impairments, communication difficulties, and restricted, repetitive behaviours or interests (RRBIs)) were explored in 189 children from the Twins Early Development Study, diagnosed with autistic spectrum disorders (ASDs) using the Development and Wellbeing Assessment (DAWBA;...

Specific language impairment (SLI) is a common developmental disorder characterized by difficulties in language acquisition despite otherwise normal development and in the absence of any obvious explanatory factors. We performed a high-density screen of SLI1, a region of chromosome 16q that shows highly significant and consistent linkage to nonword...

Background: Phenotypic overlap between autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and specific language impairment (SLI) is currently debated in the literature. One aspect of controversy is related to whether children’s phonological short term memory (PhSTM) performance is a possible clinical marker in both SLI and ASD. Objectives: To assess memory abilities...

Background: Autistic spectrum disorders (ASD) are thought to be caused by a combination of genetic and environmental risk factors, but identifying specific environmental triggers has proved difficult. Problems during the birth process have been shown to be associated with ASD but whether these problems are an independent cause of ASD, or a conseque...

Autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) are diagnosed when individuals show impairments in three behavioural domains: communication, social interactions, and repetitive, restrictive behaviours and interests (RRBIs). Recent data suggest that these three sets of behaviours are genetically heterogeneous. Early language delay is strongly associated with ASD,...

Purpose The contribution of genetic factors in the persistence of and early recovery from stuttering was assessed. Method Data from the Twins Early Development Study were employed. Parental reports regarding stuttering were collected at ages 2, 3, 4, and 7 years, and were used to classify speakers into recovered and persistent groups. Of 12,892 ch...

Imitation, vocabulary, pretend play, and socially insightful behavior were investigated in 5,206 same- and opposite-sex 2-year-old twin pairs in the United Kingdom. Individual differences in imitative ability were due to modest heritability (30%), while environmental factors shared between twins (42%) and unique to each twin (28%) also made signifi...

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is conceptualized as a spectrum of related diagnostic categories, comprising subtypes: autism, atypical autism, Asperger's syndrome and other pervasive developmental disorders (ICD-10). Available evidence suggests that several genes contribute to the underlying genetic risk for the development of ASD. However, etiolog...

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In 4 experiments, the authors addressed the mechanisms by which grammatical gender (in Italian and German) may come to affect meaning. In Experiments 1 (similarity judgments) and 2 (semantic substitution errors), the authors found Italian gender effects for animals but not for artifacts; Experiment 3 revealed no comparable effects in German. These...

Many individuals who suffer from stuttering in childhood recover. This suggests that there is plasticity in the process leading to the disorder. This article summarizes the results of comparisons between fluent speakers and speakers who stutter (recovered and persistent) that were intended to elucidate details of this process. Socio-demographic, fa...

Recent research into stuttering in English has shown that function word disfluency decreases with age whereas content words disfluency increases. Also function words that precede a content word are significantly more likely to be stuttered than those that follow content words (Au-Yeung, Howell and Pilgrim, 1998; Howell, Au-Yeung and Sackin, 1999)....

Unlabelled: This study investigated how phonetic complexity affects stuttering rate in German and how this changes developmentally. Phonetic difficulty was assessed using Jakielski's index [Motor Organization in the Acquisition of Consonant Clusters, Dissertation/Ph.D. Thesis, University of Texas Austin, 1998] of phonetic complexity (IPC) in which...

Cross-linguistic research can establish whether stuttering patterns are consistently associated with linguistic structures irrespective of their surface form; or whether difficult motor outputs lead to stuttering independent of the linguistic unit they occur in. A dissociation can be achieved because the same motorically-difficult structures may ap...

Unlabelled: Brown's factors [J. Speech Disorders 10 (1945) 181] predict the likely loci of disfluency in English-speaking adults who stutter. A word is more likely to be stuttered for these speakers if it is a content word, starts with a consonant, is positioned at the beginning of a sentence, and if it is a long word. These same factors were exam...

Borden's (1979, 1980) hypothesis that speakers with vulnerable speech systems rely more heavily on feedback monitoring than do speakers with less vulnerable systems was investigated. The second language (L2) of a speaker is vulnerable, in comparison with the native language, so alteration to feedback should have a detrimental effect on it, accordin...

Borden’s (1979, 1980) hypothesis that speakers with vulnerable speech systems rely more heavily on feedback monitoring than do speakers with less vulnerable systems was investigated. The second language (L2) of a speaker is vulnerable, in comparison with the native language, so alteration to feedback should have a detrimental effect on it, accordin...