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Paediatric cancer is the leading cause of disease-related death in Australian children. Limited research focuses on cancer in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children. Although there appears to be a lower incidence of cancer overall in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children compared with non-Indigenous children, a high proportion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children are diagnosed with acute myeloid leukaemia.
Acute lymphoblastic leukaemia is a highly heterogeneous malignancy characterised by various genomic alterations that influence disease progression and therapeutic outcomes. Gene fusions involving the immunoglobulin heavy chain gene represent a complex and diverse category.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women experience a disproportionate burden of hyperglycaemia in pregnancy. A multi-component health systems intervention aiming to improve antenatal and postpartum care was implemented across Australia’s Northern Territory (NT) and Far North Queensland (FNQ) between 2016 and 2019. Components included clinician education, improving recall systems, enhancing policies and guidelines, and embedding Diabetes in Pregnancy (DIP) Clinical Registers in systems of care. This program was evaluated to determine impacts on clinical practice and maternal health.
Ongoing advances in population genomic methodologies have recently enabled the study of millions of loci across hundreds of genomes at a relatively low cost, by leveraging a combination of low-coverage shotgun sequencing and innovative genotype imputation methods. This approach has the potential to provide abundant genotype information at low costs comparable to another widely used cost-effective genotyping approach-that is, SNP panels-while avoiding potential issues related to loci being ascertained in distantly related populations.
When investigating whether a variant identified by diagnostic genetic testing is causal for disease, applied genetics professionals evaluate all available evidence to assign a clinical classification. Functional assays of higher and higher throughput are increasingly being generated and, when appropriate, can provide strong functional evidence for or against pathogenicity in variant classification. Despite functional assay data representing unprecedented value for genomic diagnostics, challenges remain around the application of functional evidence in variant curation.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (hereafter respectfully named Indigenous) Australians are diagnosed with some cancers substantially more frequently than non-Indigenous Australians implying a different risk factor landscape. Additionally, poorer outcomes for certain cancers are exacerbated by lower cancer screening rates and later diagnoses compared to non-Indigenous Australians.
The objective of this scoping review is to understand the nature of the published evidence on housing suitability, affordability, insecurity, and homelessness in relation to physical and mental health, domestic violence, and health service use among Indigenous people in high-income countries.
Rheumatic heart disease (RHD) is underdiagnosed globally resulting in missed treatment opportunities and adverse clinical outcomes. We describe the protocol for a study which aims to co-design, implement and conduct an evaluation of a task-sharing approach to echocardiographic active case finding for early detection and management of RHD in high-risk settings in Australia and Timor-Leste.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (Aboriginal) people in South Australia are overburdened by cardiovascular disease, diabetes and cancer. The South Australian Aboriginal Chronic Disease Consortium (Consortium) was established in June 2017 as a collaborative partnership to lead the implementation of three state-wide chronic disease plans using a strategic approach to identifying key priority areas for action.
Despite the volume of accumulating knowledge from prospective Aboriginal cohort studies, longitudinal data describing developmental trajectories in health and well-being is limited.