NHS Choices: Behind the headlines

Breast screening programme to be reviewed

27th October 2011

Many news sources have reported that a “major review” of the NHS breast screening programme is to take place. BBC News said “the evidence for breast cancer screening in the UK is being reviewed amid controversy about the measure's effectiveness”. The news of the review comes from Professor Sir Mike Richards, national cancer director at the Department of Health, who discusses it in an open letter in the BMJ. It follows criticism of the current screening programme by some doctors who believe that by throwing up some false results, screening may be doing more harm than good. The majority of ...

Call for action on 'legal high' drugs

26th October 2011

NHS Choices: Behind the headlines

Government drug advisers have today called for tighter regulation of ‘legal highs’ - recreational drugs sold legally due to loopholes in the law. In a new report the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) has published details of how drugs such as ‘meow meow’ (mephedrone), which was banned last year, have been openly sold over the internet under the guise of being ‘plant food’ or ‘research chemicals’. The report also highlighted the false perception that just because a drug is technically legal it must be safe, pointing out that there have been at least 42 deaths associated with ...

26th October 2011

NHS Choices: Behind the headlines

“The annual flu jab given to hundreds of thousands of people this winter provides only limited protection against the illness,” reported The Independent. This news story is based on a systematic review of studies looking at the effectiveness of two common flu vaccines in the prevention of seasonal flu infection. The vaccines assessed were: trivalent inactivated vaccine (TIV) – the most widely used vaccine in the UK, and live attenuated influenza vaccine (LAIV), which is less commonly used. Over 5,550 studies were screened resulting in 31 studies being included in the review. Pooling the results of these studies showed that ...

Labour induction methods compared

25th October 2011

NHS Choices: Behind the headlines

According to the Daily Mail, a method of inducing labour that dates back to the 1930s “has been found to work as well as modern treatments but with fewer side effects”. The news is based on a large Dutch trial that examined inducing labour using of a simple mechanical device, called a Foley catheter. Researchers tested the device against the use of hormone gels designed to trigger contractions. The study, which featured 824 women, found that both techniques led to similar rates of spontaneous vaginal deliveries, instrumental deliveries (such as using forceps) and women requiring a caesarean section. The Foley ...

Do fizzy drinks make teens violent?

25th October 2011

NHS Choices: Behind the headlines

“Teens who down more than five cans of soft fizzy drinks a week are more likely to be violent or carry a weapon,” reported the Daily Mirror. It said that researchers believe the “sugar or caffeine content in carbonated, non-diet drinks could be to blame – although they admit there may also be other factors involved”. Many newspapers covered this study of 1,878 high school students in the US. Researchers surveyed the teenagers on how many non-diet soft drinks they drank and their violent behaviour. Those who drank five or more cans of non-diet soft drinks a week were about ...

BPA chemical studied for behaviour changes

24th October 2011

NHS Choices: Behind the headlines

“A chemical used in plastic that is ubiquitous in the food and drink industries has been linked with emotional and behavioural problems in girls when they are exposed to it before birth,” reported The Independent. In this study, researchers examined the effects of Bisphenol A (BPA) in 244 mother-child pairs. BPA is a chemical used to manufacture items that come into contact with food, such as food containers, water bottles, and protective linings for canned-foods and drinks. The study found that exposure to BPA in pregnancy was associated with increased anxiety, hyperactivity and depression, in the offspring as well as ...

Doctors call for change to alcohol advice

24th October 2011

NHS Choices: Behind the headlines

Doctors have warned, “drinkers should have three alcohol-free days a week if they want to avoid the risk of liver disease,” the Daily Mail reported. It continued that the Royal College of Physicians (RCP) said that the current guidance must be rewritten as it implies that drinking every day is fine. The new advice from the RCP is part of a submission to MPs on the House of Commons' Science and Technology Committee about current alcohol guidelines. This submission discusses their review of the evidence from 1995 as well as more recent research evidence and alcohol intake guidelines from other ...

Mobiles 'don't increase brain cancer risk'

21st October 2011

NHS Choices: Behind the headlines

“A large study of mobile phone users has found no evidence that longer-term users are at an increased risk of developing brain tumours,” The Daily Telegraph has today reported. The study in question looked at national records and mobile phone subscription registries for all adults aged 30 and over in Denmark between 1987 and 2007. Researchers used the data to compare the risks of getting brain cancer among those who were mobile phone subscribers and those who were not. It found no increased risk of brain cancer among either male or female mobile phone users, even among those who had ...

Facebook and brain changes

21st October 2011

NHS Choices: Behind the headlines

“Facebook users with more friends have bigger sections of brains,” the Daily Mirror reported. The newspaper went on to say that the study that made the finding did not reveal “if having more virtual friends makes the regions grow, or if such people are naturally ‘hard-wired’ to make more connections with others”. This report is based on research that examined the associations between the size of a person’s online social network, the size of their real-world social groups and with the structure of regions of their brain. An association was found between having more Facebook contacts, a higher number of ...

New way to predict cancer returning?

20th October 2011

NHS Choices: Behind the headlines

Researchers have developed a new breast cancer test “that predicts whether or not their breast cancer will return after surgery”, The Daily Telegraph has today reported. The newspaper says the test may mean that thousands of women with a low risk of recurrence could be spared unnecessary chemotherapy. The story is based on new research that compared an existing method for predicting cancer recurrence, the Oncotype DX recurrence score (RS), and an adapted version that also took other clinical data into account. To test this new method, called the “recurrence score-pathology-clinical assessment” (RSPC), researchers examined long-term study data on 1,444 ...

Pregnant women advised to get flu jab

20th October 2011

NHS Choices: Behind the headlines

“Pregnant women were urged to get their annual flu jab yesterday as research showed they have a five times greater risk of a stillbirth if they are admitted to hospital with swine flu,” reported The Independent. This news report is based on a study that followed 256 pregnant women admitted to hospital with the 2009 strain of the swine flu virus, called H1N1. The study compared their pregnancy outcomes to 1,220 healthy pregnant women. Women with swine flu were found to have a significantly higher rate of adverse events than uninfected pregnant women. This included about a fourfold higher rate ...

Uncertainty over bacteria in bowel tumours

20th October 2011

NHS Choices: Behind the headlines

Bowel cancer may be caused by a bacterial infection, The Independent has reported. The story comes from a laboratory study that found that a bacterium called Fusobacterium nucleatum was present in much higher levels in colorectal cancer tissue than in healthy bowel tissue. The bacteria are normally found in the mouth rather than the bowel and is associated with dental infections. While this study has found that a particular bacterium is present at high levels in bowel cancer tissue, it does not necessarily show that bowel cancer is caused by infection or that antibiotics could protect against it. For example, ...

Smoking linked to early menopause

19th October 2011

NHS Choices: Behind the headlines

“Women who smoke face going through the menopause at least a year earlier than non-smokers,” the Daily Mail has reported. The news was based on new research that combined the findings of previous studies in a bid to estimate whether smoking affects the age at which a woman will naturally experience menopause. By bringing together the results of 11 studies researchers found that smoking was significantly associated with early menopause, which smokers experienced approximately one year earlier on average. Earlier natural menopause is of interest in several fields of medicine as it has been associated with a lower risk of ...

Malaria vaccine trialled

19th October 2011

NHS Choices: Behind the headlines

“Millions of children’s lives could be saved by a new vaccine shown to halve the risk of malaria in the first large-scale trials across seven African countries,” reported The Guardian. It goes on to say that the long-awaited results of the largest-ever malaria vaccine study, involving 15,460 babies and small children, show that it could massively reduce the impact of the malaria. The study reported the results of an initial analysis of a large trial of a malaria vaccine, called RTS,S/AS01. The trial found that after a year, the vaccine' reduced the number of episodes of clinical malaria by about ...

What’s your poison? Alcohol special report

19th October 2011

NHS Choices: Behind the headlines

Is Britain beset by binge boozers? Will wine help you lose weight? Can six cans of lager help you live longer? The media pose questions like these on an almost daily basis, often using and abusing the findings of medical research to back up their headlines. In this special report, Behind the Headlines analyses the media’s relationship with research on alcohol, the science behind it, and what all this means for us when we consider raising a glass. What’s your poison: a sober analysis of alcohol and health in the media (PDF, 3Mb) is a must-read for anyone who wants ...

Fish pedicure risk "very low"

18th October 2011

NHS Choices: Behind the headlines

“Trendy fish pedicures could spread HIV and hepatitis C,” The Sun has today reported. Its front-page story said that officials have raised an “alert” over the treatment, popular in beauty spas, where tiny fish are used to nibble away areas of hard foot skin. While The Sun has been carping on about warnings and alerts, the newspaper seems to have overestimated the scale of the risk, which health experts have described as being “extremely low”. Rather than being an alert, the news is based on a report by the Health Protection Agency that has set out good practice for so-called ...

New IVF screening tool studied

18th October 2011

NHS Choices: Behind the headlines

“Three in one test that ‘virtually guarantees IVF success’ could be available within months,” reported the Daily Mail. It said that the test allowed only the best eggs or embryos to be selected for IVF, and is expected to “slash the odds of miscarriage and greatly boost the chances of a woman having a healthy baby”. The research was presented at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine’s annual conference and only limited information is currently available. What is known is that this new technique simultaneously examines various aspects of embryo or egg DNA associated with a lower chance of a ...

Autism birthweight link not clear

17th October 2011

NHS Choices: Behind the headlines

“Babies born weighing less than 4lb (1.8kg) could be more prone to developing autism than children born at normal weight,” BBC News has reported. This finding comes from a study that found that about 5% of infants whose birth weight was less than 2000g (about 4lbs and 6oz) had autistic spectrum disorders (ASDs) at the age of 21. This was higher than previous estimates that suggested that 0.9% of US eight-year-olds of any birthweight have been diagnosed with some form of ASD. The main limitation to this study is that it did not include a control group of children with ...

Researchers examine 'fertility switch'

17th October 2011

NHS Choices: Behind the headlines

“High levels of a protein called SGK1 can cause infertility, but when there is not enough, women are more likely to lose a baby,” reported the Daily Mirror. The newspaper said that scientists hope “the discovery will lead to treatments to ensure women have the right levels of the enzyme in their womb lining”. This report is based on a study performed on human womb cells and genetically engineered mice. High levels of this protein were found in the lining of the womb in women who were infertile. Meanwhile, reduced levels of the protein were found in the lining of ...

Scare over miscarriage scans unjustified

14th October 2011

NHS Choices: Behind the headlines

Several news sources have today reported that errors during early-pregnancy ultrasounds are leading to unnecessary abortions. The Daily Mail said that hundreds of babies a year may die due to “blunders” in testing and Metro said that unreliable tests caused a baby to die every day. These alarming claims are based on four studies on the use of ultrasound in early pregnancy. The research looked at the fine measurements applied to embryos in the first few weeks of pregnancy to determine whether a pregnancy is viable or potential miscarriage. By examining scans of over 1,000 women the researchers found that ...