The Health News United Kingdom December 5 2017

• The youngest patient on the UK’s transplant waiting list has had a life-saving heart operation. A Europe-wide appeal had been launched for Charlie Douthwaite, an 8-week-old baby born with half a heart. The child had hypoplastic left heart syndrome. Surgeons performed a 9-hour operation at Newcastle’s Freeman hospital after a donor heart was found within weeks, rather than the months or even years it can take.
• Under new Government plans, children will be offered counselling in the classroom in a bid to tackle a mental health crisis among British youth. Around three thousand health professionals will be trained to counsel anxious pupils, in a bid to tackle soaring levels of mental distress and self-harm, with every school also asked to have a designated teacher in charge of mental health. The proposals, in a Government green paper on children and young people’s mental health, backed with £300 million, will also see a four-week waiting time limit piloted.  
• Many might think type 1 diabetes is a “disease of childhood”, but research has found it has similar prevalence in adults. More than 40% of Britons diagnosed with the condition are over 30. Many of these are initially diagnosed with type 2 , and receiving the wrong treatment can be life-threatening. Charity Diabetes UK is calling for doctors not to rule out the possibility a patient over thirty might have type 1.

News on Health Professional Radio. Today is the 4th of December 2017. Read by Tabetha Moreto.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/dec/03/youngest-baby-uk-transplant-waiting-list-new-heart-charlie-douthwaite

The youngest patient on the UK’s transplant waiting list has had a life-saving heart operation.
A Europe-wide appeal had been launched for Charlie Douthwaite, an eight-week-old baby born with half a heart. The child had hypoplastic left heart syndrome, a condition that leaves the left side of the organ underdeveloped. Surgeons performed a nine-hour operation at Newcastle’s Freeman hospital after a donor heart was found within weeks, rather than the months or even years it can take. His mother, Tracie Waite, thanked the donor family for the “priceless, most precious gift that could ever be given.”
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Not everyone born with Douthwaite’s condition undergoes a transplant. Only those with complex defects or weakened hearts due to surgery need one. Charlie’s heart problem was spotted during a routine twenty-week pregnancy check up and doctors performed open heart surgery on him when he was three days old. He went into cardiac arrest on two occasions after the procedure, despite initially having appeared to be recovering well. After a total of eleven operations, doctors deemed that he needed a new heart.
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Just like all other babies who receive a heart transplant, Charlie will have to remain on medication for his whole life to prevent his body potentially rejecting the organ. There are around six thousand five hundred people on the UK transplant waiting list at the moment. Last year nearly five hundred people died while waiting for a transplant.  Because of the lack of available hearts, which need to be of the appropriate size and blood type, it is often impossible to have a heart transplant as soon as it is required.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/12/03/army-therapists-sent-schools-tackle-anxiety-epidemic/

Under new Government plans, children will be offered counselling in the classroom in a bid to tackle a mental health crisis among British youth. Around three thousand health professionals will be trained to counsel anxious pupils, in a bid to tackle soaring levels of mental distress and self-harm, with every school also asked to have a designated teacher in charge of mental health. The proposals, in a Government green paper on children and young people’s mental health, backed with three hundred million pounds, will also see a four-week waiting time limit piloted. The plans aim to tackle the scandal of troubled children – including those who are suicidal – facing long waits for psychiatrists, with some waiting as long as eighteen months for help.

It follows warning of an epidemic of anxiety among Britain’s young, with a seventy per cent rise in self-harm among teenage girls in three years. Experts say the internet is heaping pressures on children, with social media provoking a sense of inadequacy, dissatisfaction with appearance, and leaving some with no respite from bullying.

Jeremy Hunt, the Health Secretary said: “Around half of all mental illness starts before the age of fourteen so it is vital children get support as soon as they need it – in the classroom. If we catch mental ill health early we can treat it and stop it turning into something more serious.”

A maximum time limit of four weeks for those in need of specialist help will be piloted, amid concern that the most troubled children are waiting far too long for help, including those who are suicidal.

http://www.bbc.com/news/health-42179359

Many might think type one diabetes is a “disease of childhood”, but research, published in the Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology, has found it has similar prevalence in adults. More than forty percent of Britons diagnosed with the condition are over thirty. Many of these are initially diagnosed with type two, and receiving the wrong treatment can be life-threatening.
Charity Diabetes UK is calling for doctors not to rule out the possibility a patient over thirty might have type one.

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According to the new report, misdiagnosis may be a surprisingly common occurrence in the UK.
The team analysed the genetic data of thirteen thousand two hundred fifty people of white European descent, who developed diabetes in the first six decades of their life, in the health resource UK Biobank. Type one is where the pancreas does not produce any insulin while type two is where the pancreas does not produce enough insulin or the body’s cells do not react to insulin. Type one diabetes can develop at any age, but usually appears before the age of forty, particularly in childhood. About ten percent of all diabetes is type one, but it is the most common type of childhood diabetes, so it is sometimes called juvenile diabetes or early onset diabetes.
Type two diabetes tends to develop later in life and is linked to lifestyle and being overweight.
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One of the major reasons type one goes misdiagnosed is  that there are far fewer cases of it in adulthood, as ninety six percent of adults aged thirty one to sixty diagnosed with diabetes have type two. Emily Burns, from Diabetes UK, said: “While more research is needed to understand the realities of misdiagnosis, we’d ask healthcare professionals to have this insight in mind: don’t rule out type one diabetes after the age of thirty.”