Published58 minutes agoShareclose panelShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingBy Matthew HillHealth correspondent, West of EnglandA baby as young as eight months old has been seen by a new weight management service for severely obese children.A growing number of pre-school children are severely overweight in Somerset. The NHS service, called Splash, is one of only a few in the country offering under fours and their families access to dietary and compassionate psychological support. One doctor involved said while eight months was atypically young, the earlier patients were seen the better.’Milk for comfort’Clinical director of paediatrics Dr Chris Knight said: “[Eight months] is unusual, but at that kind of age we can really make progress about how they are feeding those children at such an early stage. There’s a really good opportunity there to turn thing around.”He continued: “The majority of our cases are between the ages of two and four, but about 15% are under two.”At the very young age of eight months old, that often relates to issues where young babies are taking really large quantities of milk. That can be a difficult cycle to break, they’re relying on milk for comfort, but having a really high intake does mean they gain a lot of weight.”He said in other cases, causes of childhood obesity were often a combination of food and lifestyle.Image source, Family photoPeter Fleming, professor of infant health and developmental physiology at the University of Bristol, said: “It’s not unheard of for babies as young as six months to be severely obese because their parents often start giving them solids too soon.”‘Struggled with my weight’The Royal College of General Practitioners and the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health has been contacted for comment. The Somerset Pre-school Lifestyle Activity Skills for Self-Help (SPLASH) is a weight management service where doctors, dietitians and psychologists monitor food behaviours and seek to build parental confidence.One patient it has been working with is Lainee, who is now a healthy four-year-old. But when she was two, she was living with severe obesity.Her mother Claire said: “I had always worried about her weight mainly because I had struggled with my own. So I went to the doctor.”I just wanted to get a bit of advice, see if I could get a bit of support or just something to guide me along the way, and they mentioned a new programme called Splash and the next thing I knew, I was in it.”Splash first started as a trial in April 2022, but has proved so successful it has now been given permanent funding.It is led by psychologists and dieticians like Isobel Feakins, who carry out home visits.’Blamed or shamed’She said: “Coming to meet a family at home, really getting an understanding once they are in their environment. We can have conversations with Mum around what they are having for tea tonight, what snacks or different foods there are in the cupboard and things like that. We can really talk about those things and give practical tips for the family.” “Also, seeing Lainee with Mum, and those interactions, and how she manages Lainee’s demands around food and requests,” really helped, she added. More than 50 families have been working with the service since it started and two in five of those have also had the support of the team’s psychologist, Dr Megan Rowley.”Quite often our parents have had stigmatising experiences where they’ve felt blamed or shamed about their child’s weight, and this can be incredibly challenging and quite unpleasant,” Dr Rowley said.”Part of my role is to listen and validate some of these experiences of what it’s like to parent a child that lives with severe obesity.””There are different things that can contribute to obesity, ranging from individual factors, parental factors, but also broader social economic and cultural factors. “So we need to take all of that into account. We work really hard to move away from this narrative that the parents are to blame,” Dr Rowley said.’Will she fit?’Any health care professionals can refer children to the Splash service.Lainee’s mother Claire said working with Splash had had a dramatic effect on her daughter’s appearance and enabled to her increase her daily activity levels too.”She would struggle to climb up the slide, but since losing the weight she’s able to freely do things like that,” she said.”I would sit there and think ‘is she going to fit in the swing or is she going to get on the slide?’ because I was always worried about how big she was. Now I don’t have that worry at all.”Follow BBC Somerset on Facebook and, X. Send your story ideas to us on email or via WhatsApp on 0800 313 4630.More on this storyNearly half of NHS workers looking to move jobsPublished1 day agoHospitals using AI to diagnose prostate cancerPublished19 MarchRelated Internet LinksSPLASHNHS AdviceThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.

Published2 hours agoShareclose panelShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingBy Matthew HillBBC West health correspondentAn “anti-bleeding” fabric made from shrimp shells is saving thousands of lives in Ukraine, according to an NHS doctor working in the war-zone.The bandages are coated with an extract known as chitosan that can stem bleeding by forming clots.Made by Nonwovenn in Somerset, the bandages are in first-aid kits being sent out to the Ukrainian military.Dr Iryna Rybinkina said: “It’s been saving a lot of lives, thousands of them, I mean.”The consultant cardiac anaesthetist, who volunteers for the charity Smart Medical Aid, left her job in Brighton to train medics on the front line and has used the bandages many times. She says she uses them alongside other compression bandages on the battlefield.She said: “Our charity supplied about 110,000, and we get a lot of feedback from the people who are using them. “The first thing is your put a tourniquet on, and then you try to stop the bleed by packing the wound.”So if there is a re-bleed, then you repack the one you take out and you put that in.”The Bridgwater supplier said Ukrainian military rang shortly after the invasion asking for as many as they could make.The gauze aims to stop heavy bleeding from wounds with 60 seconds of compression, according to the manufacturer’s website.Chitosan is extracted from shrimp shells and then purified. When it comes into contact with blood it swells into a gel to make a clot. Dr Rybinkina added: “We get a lot of feedback from the people using them. “They say ‘you know what your first aid kit it, did save lives. We used the tourniquet and the Celox and the person actually arrived alive at the evacuation point’.” The coated bandages are also used by the US and UK military and were also deployed in the 2014 conflict between Russia and Ukraine.The bandages are incorporated into first-aid kits sent out by MedTrade in Crewe in Cheshire. Nonwovenn chairman, David Lamb, said: “Our Somerset team is part of a remarkable British success story which is saving the lives of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians caught up in Europe’s worst conflict since World War II.”Since I interviewed Dr Rybinkina, she was involved in a serious road traffic accident on her way back from duties in the Ukraine, and she is now being treated for a broken arm. Follow BBC West on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Send your story ideas to: bristol@bbc.co.uk More on this storyUK donates vital medical supplies to Ukraine24 JanuaryEx-Army medic witnessed ‘inhuman’ acts in Ukraine10 May 2022Shelling of Ukraine aid ambulance angers doctor6 April 2022Relief as Ukrainian sisters reunited in the UK20 March 2022Landlord uses pub vans to get medicine to Ukraine15 March 2022

Published32 minutes agoShareclose panelShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingBy Matthew HillBBC West Health CorrespondentA heart surgeon says he “probably saved the life” of a baby by carrying out a “world-first” operation using stem cells from placentas.Professor Massimo Caputo from the Bristol Heart Institute used pioneering stem cell “scaffolding” to correct baby Finley’s heart defect.He hopes to develop the technology so children born with congenital cardiac disease won’t need as many operations. Finley, now two, is “now a happy growing little boy”.But he was born with the main arteries in his heart the wrong way round and at just four days old had his first open-heart surgery at Bristol Royal Hospital for Children. Unfortunately the surgery didn’t solve the problem and his heart function deteriorated significantly, with the left side of the heart suffering from a severe lack of blood flow. His mother, Melissa, from Corsham, in Wiltshire, said: “We were prepared from the start that the odds of him surviving were not good. “After 12 hours, Finley finally came out of surgery but he needed a heart and lung bypass machine to keep alive, and his heart function had deteriorated significantly.”After weeks in intensive care it looked like there was no conventional way to treat Finley’s condition and he was reliant on drugs to keep his heart going.But a new procedure was tried, involving stem cells from a placenta bank.Prof Caputo injected the cells directly into Finley’s heart in the hope they would help damaged blood vessels grow.The so-called “allogenic” cells were grown by scientists at the Royal Free Hospital in London, and millions of them were injected into Finley’s heart muscle. Allogenic cells have the ability to grow into tissue that is not rejected and in Finley’s case, have regenerated damaged heart muscle.”We weaned him from all the drugs he was on, we weaned him from ventilation,” said Prof Caputo.”He was discharged from ITU and is now a happy growing little boy.” Using a bio-printer, a stem cell scaffold is made to repair abnormalities to valves in blood vessels, and to mend holes between the two main pumping chambers of the heart.Artificial tissue is normally used used on babies for cardiac repairs, but it can fail and it doesn’t grow with the heart, so as the children grow, they require more operations. Prof Caputo hopes a clinical trial on the patches will happen in the next two years, after successful laboratory work.The trial of the stem cell plasters offers hope for patients like Louie from Wales, who has a number of congenital heart defects.The 13-year-old from Cardiff had his first open heart surgery with Prof Caputo at just two weeks’ old and then again aged four to replace the material fixing his heart. But because the materials aren’t completely biological, they are unable to grow with him and he needs repeat operations.Like Louie, every day in the UK, around 13 babies are diagnosed with a congenital heart defect – a heart condition that develops before the baby is born, according to the British Heart Foundation.Because the materials used to fix the heart can be rejected by the patient’s immune system, they can cause scarring in the heart that can lead to other complications, and can gradually break down and fail in just a few months or years. A child might therefore have to go through the same heart operation multiple times throughout its childhood- around 200 repeat operations for congenital heart defects are carried out every year in the UK.Louie hopes the breakthrough means the number of operations he faces will be significantly reduced thanks to the stem cell technology and tissues able to grow with his body.”I don’t like having the procedures,” he said.”It’s not good in the long term, knowing every couple of years I need an operation so that would make me a lot more relaxed.”Prof Caputo and his team say the stem cell technology could save the NHS an estimated £30,000 for every operation no longer needed, saving millions of pounds each year.Dr Stephen Minger, an expert in stem cell biology and director of SLM Blue Skies Innovations Ltd, applauded the research.He said: “Most studies that I am aware of in adults with heart dysfunction or failure show only minimal therapeutic benefit with stem cell infusion. “I’m happy that the clinical team will go on to do a standard clinical trial which should tell us if this was a ‘one-off’ success and also give us some better understanding of mechanisms behind this.”Follow BBC West on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Send your story ideas to: bristol@bbc.co.uk More on this storySynthetic mouse embryo develops beating heart25 August’His scar is something he needs to be proud of’15 May’Pumping heart patch’ ready for human use4 June 2019

Published33 minutes agoSharecloseShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingImage source, Getty ImagesBy Matthew HillBBC West health correspondentStaff mistakes in a private laboratory may have caused 23 extra deaths from Covid-19.The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) makes the claim in a report into errors at the Immensa lab in Wolverhampton.It says as many as 39,000 positive results were wrongly reported as negative in September and October 2021.The mistakes led to “increased numbers of [hospital] admissions and deaths”, the report, published on Tuesday, concluded.Thousands of people, many in the South West, were wrongly told to stop testing after their results were processed by Immensa.The Wolverhampton laboratory was used for additional testing capacity for NHS Test and Trace from early September 2021, but testing was suspended on 12 October following reports of inaccurate results.Immensa lab: What went wrong?Lab ‘not accredited’Experts said high case rates in some areas were down to people unwittingly infecting others when they should have been isolating.UKHSA experts said the mistakes could have led to as many as 55,000 additional infections in areas where the false negatives were reported.”Each incorrect negative test likely led to just over two additional infections,” the report said.”In those same geographical areas, our results also suggest an increased number of admissions and deaths.”Immensa was paid more than £100m to carry out Covid testing for the NHS during the pandemic.The UKHSA said a total of about 400,000 samples had been processed at the Wolverhampton lab.’Staff errors’ to blame”The cause [of the mistakes] was the incorrect setting of the threshold levels for reporting positive and negative results of PCR samples for COVID-19,” said the UKHSA.”Based on background infection rates in different population groups at the time, UKHSA estimated that this error could have led to around 39,000 results being incorrectly reported as negative when they should have been positive.”Richard Gleave, UKHSA director and lead investigator, said: “Through this investigation we have looked carefully at the arrangements in place for overseeing contracts of private labs providing surge testing during this time.”We have concluded that staff errors within Immensa’s Wolverhampton laboratory were the immediate cause of the incorrect reporting of COVID-19 PCR test results in September and October 2021.”It is our view that there was no single action that NHS Test and Trace could have taken differently to prevent this error arising in the private laboratory.”However, our report sets out clear recommendations to both reduce the risk of incidents like this happening again and ensure that concerns are addressed and investigated rapidly.”Jenny Harries, UKHSA chief executive, said: “I fully accept the findings and recommendations made in this report, many of which were implemented as soon as UKHSA discovered the incident.”These ongoing improvements will enhance our ability to spot problems sooner where they do arise.”Dante Labs, the owners of Immensa, have been contacted for comment.Follow BBC West on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Send your story ideas to: bristol@bbc.co.uk More on this storyReport into Covid-lab errors must be published- MP7 AprilMonth delay before incorrect Covid tests halted21 December 2021Legal action considered over Covid test lab errors14 December 2021Testing lab ‘chaotic and dangerous’, scientist claims16 October 2020Related Internet LinksUK Health Security AgencyThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.