Agnes Ayton 💙

Integrated CBTE improves outcomes for anorexia nervosa - YouTube Thinking about this presentation we did with ⁦@sensinglorna⁩. It’s hard for people to share their experiences publicly, but it’s important to give hope to others who may feel hopeless youtube.com/watch?v=fHsmGN…

Me in full flight. Talking about Acute and Emergency Medicine in the UK. And why it is a total mess. At the recent GoodEM Conference on flow in Sydney. vimeo.com/1182168439

L0NG C0VID IS QUIETLY WRECKING HEARTS. Maybe time for a recap based on 2026 science. Here’s the comparison for MACE, Stroke, Deadly Clots & overall CV risks: ➡️MACE (heart attack, stroke, heart failure) • Non-COVID: HR 1.0 • COVID-19: 1.8–3.9x • Long COVID: ~4.5x ➡️Stroke (ischemic): • Non-COVID: HR 1.0 • COVID-19: ~2–3x • Long COVID: ~3.5x ➡️Deadly clots (PE / VTE): • Non-COVID: HR 1.0 • COVID-19: ~2–4x • Long COVID: 3.2–4.4x ➡️Overall CV risks: • Non-COVID: baseline • COVID-19: ↑1.5–2.5x (arrhythmias, CAD, HF) • Long COVID: 2–4.5x higher Long COVID adds extra danger beyond regular post-COVID. Risks hit even non-hospitalized patients and last for years. Vax may reduce risks but certainly doesn’t erase it. Absolute risks lower in young/healthy, but serious if older/comorbid. ‼️Today’s evidence shows that while any COVID-19 infection elevates cardiovascular risks, long COVID dramatically amplifies them, making proactive heart monitoring essential for affected patients. Bottom line: Get your heart checked post-Covid19/ LongC0vid and #AvoidSars2 #AvoidReinfections! 🚨C0VID-19/L0NG C0VID are serious CV RISK FACTORS!

If you're worried about ticks, put up an owl box. The animal driving most Lyme disease in the eastern US is the white-footed mouse. Ticks that feed on them are far more likely to come away infected than ticks that feed on other animals. The bigger the local mouse population, the worse the next year's tick year. A single barred owl pair raising chicks can take hundreds of rodents in a breeding season. Owls also don't carry Lyme. The bacterium can't survive their digestive tract, so an owl that eats an infected mouse is a dead end for the disease. Researchers at the Cary Institute, the leading lab on Lyme ecology, have been explicit about this: "Landscapes that support predators have reduced Lyme disease risk." One owl box on its own isn't going to fix a tick year. But a yard with owls, foxes, bobcats, and weasels in it has fewer mice, and a yard with fewer mice has fewer infected ticks. If you have woods or fields nearby, a properly sized barn owl or screech owl box (different species, different boxes) is one of the most useful single things you can do for tick exposure at the landscape scale. Match the box to the owl that lives near you. The mouse is the problem, owls are the solution.

"We are urgently scaling up operations, but at the moment the epidemic is outpacing us" Not good. Not good at all. theguardian.com/world/2026/may…

"Poverty is the leading cause of all ill health.. so austerity had a major role to play in spiralling mental illness since 2010" Natasha Devon on the hypocrisy of the Tory leader blaming social media for a surging mental health crisis.

Amazing how many people suddenly “know loads of people” faking mental illness for benefits. Research suggests these stories are socially contagious. Also if someone was fraudulently claiming benefits, they probably wouldn’t be telling everyone down the pub. PIP fraud is 0.2%.

Not just some quality - optimal and high quality as in the rest of healthcare

Wow. Sri Lanka 🇱🇰 isn’t far off Scary 😧

Racist abuse of NHS nurses has jumped by 86% in the last few years, which their union’s boss has blamed on the normalisation of extreme views in politics and the media. Big rise on reported incidents which may only be ‘tip of the iceberg’. theguardian.com/society/2026/m…

That water clarity is an engineering decision, and the math behind it is wilder than the video. Roman aqueducts ran on gravity alone. No pumps, no pressure systems. Engineers carved channels with a gradient so shallow it borders on absurd. The Pont du Gard in southern France drops 2.5 centimeters over 275 meters. That's roughly the thickness of a coin over the length of three football fields. They surveyed that accuracy with plumb lines and wooden leveling instruments. The clarity you're seeing is a direct product of flow velocity. Too steep and the water erodes the channel walls, picks up sediment, turns brown. Too flat and it stagnates. Roman engineers targeted a slope of about 20 centimeters per kilometer, which kept the water moving fast enough to stay fresh but slow enough to stay clear. Before the water reached the city, it passed through multi-chamber settling tanks where velocity dropped near zero. Suspended particles sank. Clean water flowed out the top into the next chamber. Repeat three or four times. Pliny specified the minimum slope in writing. Vitruvius published the exact mortar ratio for hydraulic cement: one part lime to two parts volcanic ash for underwater work. The pozzolana from Pozzuoli reacted with water to form a calcium-aluminum-silicate compound that actually gets stronger the longer it sits submerged. Modern concrete degrades in water. Roman concrete bonds with it. Scale the whole system and it gets harder to process. Eleven aqueducts fed Rome at its peak. Combined output: roughly 1 million cubic meters of water per day. That works out to about 250 gallons per person for a city of one million. Modern New York delivers about 125 gallons per person per day. Ancient Rome had access to double the per capita water supply of the largest city in the United States, running entirely on slope and stone. The Trevi Fountain in Rome is still fed by one of them. Two thousand years, same source, same gravity, same water.

P.gingivalis (the main bacterium of gum disease) is your new worst enemy! This shows how P.g deploys its toxic chemicals and enzymes external to its own cell via its outer membrane vesicles (OMVs). It damages us at no risk to itself. 👇 Wu et al 2025 pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12…

25 years ago our group proposed and tested the prenatal sex steroid theory of autism. Today there is now a strong body of evidence in support of the idea. Simply put, elevated sex steroid hormones (like androgens [e.g. testosterone] and estrogens) interact with genetic predisposition to change fetal brain development and increase the likelihood of the child having more autistic traits, and/or an autism diagnosis. Delighted our new 'Perspective' paper on this has just been published, with wonderful collaborators worldwide. Alongside deeper understanding of the biology of autism we need way way better support services for autistic people and their families, so they can enjoy equal human rights nature.com/articles/s4156…

The Hantavirus outbreak is coming to it's natural end No one who wasn't on the boat got infected It was a bad and unusual event and 3 people sadly died but never had potential for global impact The Ebola outbreak is a far more worrying crisis

Today has been the hottest day in May on record with Kew Gardens provisionally reaching 34.8°C - exceeding the previous highest May temperature in the UK by a full 2 degrees Celsius🌡️ This heat would be exceptional in the UK even in mid summer, let alone in May📈

The vast majority of people who have Schizophrenia aren’t violent and they are more likely to be the victims of violence But that’s where the conversation always stops Unless we see the violence as rare but important, we won’t improve on the poor care that’s available

Remission and recovery from first-episode psychosis in adults: systematic review and meta-analysis of long-term outcome studies cambridge.org/core/journals/…

Can schizophrenia go into remission? Yes! Although it doesn't happen for everyone with the diagnosis, we've long known that it's possible. WHO: "At least one third of people with schizophrenia experiences complete remission of symptoms."

I’ve written for @guardian on how the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and a forecast strong El Niño risk a major global food crisis - and why a new approach is needed to how Britain runs its own, exposed, food system (link below)

@LucyGoBag I’ve seen someone with dementia from a vegan diet and Vitamin 12 deficiency. Terrible.

As a surgeon who makes their living by prescribing GLP-1 and doing bariatric surgery… what we ultimately need is to reexamine and research our food and living environments and pass laws and incentives to help prevent obesity. This will best control obesity for future generations.