Lawyers for convicted child serial killer Lucy Letby have applied to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) to investigate her case as a potential miscarriage of justice, the organisation said.

Q: Sometimes I feel really anxious the day after I drink. Can alcohol cause a panic attack?The short answer is yes.Panic attacks — sudden waves of overwhelming fear and apprehension, along with physical symptoms like chest pain and tightness, sweating, a racing heartbeat, nausea, difficulty breathing, feeling faint or numbness in the arms and hands — are intense episodes of anxiety.And alcohol and anxiety are considered “two sides of the same coin,” said Dr. Alëna Balasanova, an associate professor of psychiatry and the director of addiction psychiatry education at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.While drinking is often used as a social lubricant or a way to relax and unwind, scientists have found that alcohol can ramp up feelings of anxiety. These feelings can result when alcohol is metabolized by the body, a process that can take a day or longer to complete. Regular, heavy drinkers may experience higher levels of anxiety, particularly after the alcohol wears off.“I don’t want to scare people to think that if you go out and you have a few glasses of wine, that you’re going to have a panic attack,” Dr. Balasanova said. “But certainly the risk is always there.”And that risk is higher if you already have an anxiety disorder.Ideally, “people who are prone to anxiety should avoid heavy drinking, or drinking at all, even if alcohol seems to alleviate anxiety in the short term,” said Jennifer E. Merrill, an associate professor of behavioral and social sciences at Brown University.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

But there have been plenty of other illnesses to go around.This winter’s Covid wave in the United States has been the gentlest to date, in a welcome reprieve.

NHS England has been urged to publish a full report after a major investigation into the care received by Nottingham triple killer Valdo Calocane.

The fallout from the F.D.A.’s rejection of a new treatment for PTSD worries researchers and experts who fear other psychedelic drugs in the pipeline could be jeopardized.After more than three decades of planning and a $250 million investment, Lykos Therapeutics’ application for the first psychedelic drug to reach federal regulators was expected to be a shoo-in.Lykos, the corporate arm of a nonprofit dedicated to winning mainstream acceptance of psychedelics, had submitted data to the Food and Drug Administration showing that its groundbreaking treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder — MDMA plus talk therapy — was significantly more effective than existing treatments.At a pivotal public hearing last summer, two dozen scientists, doctors and trauma survivors told an F.D.A. advisory panel how MDMA-assisted therapy had brought marked relief from a mental health condition associated with high rates of suicide, especially among veterans.Then came skeptics with disturbing accusations: that Lykos was “a therapy cult,” that practitioners in its clinical trials had engaged in widespread abuse of participants and that the company had concealed a litany of adverse events.“The most significant harms in Lykos’s clinical trials were not caused by MDMA, but by the people who were entrusted to supervise its administration,” Neşe Devenot, one of the speakers opposed to Lykos’s treatment and a writing instructor at Johns Hopkins University, told the committee.Dr. Devenot and six others presented themselves as experts in the field of psychedelics, but none had expertise in medicine or therapy. Nor had the speakers disclosed their connection to Psymposia, a leftist advocacy group whose members oppose the commercialization of psychedelics and had been campaigning against Lykos and its nonprofit parent, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, or MAPS.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

20 minutes agoShona Elliott and Ruth CleggBBC News Investigations

Nearly 700,000 women are to be recruited to take part in an NHS artificial intelligence (AI) breast cancer screening trial in England.

Online pharmacies will now have to employ stricter checks to stop people who are already a healthy weight or have a history of eating disorders buying weight-loss jabs.

Sir Keir Starmer has denied lockdown rules were broken when he had voice coaching lessons during the Covid 19 lockdown.

The research offers hope to tens of thousands of patients with kidney failure who are on a long waiting list for an organ transplant.American regulators have given the green light to two biotechnology companies for clinical trials that will transplant organs from genetically modified pigs into people with kidney failure. If successful, these studies could lead to the broader use of cross-species transplantation, a dream of medical scientists for centuries.One of the companies, United Therapeutics Corporation, will begin its trial with six patients, but that number could eventually rise to 50. The other, eGenesis, said it would begin with three patients and grow the study from there.“We are entering a transformative era in organ transplantation,” said Mike Curtis, the president and chief executive of eGenesis.Over the past three years, five patients have been known to receive organs from pigs engineered by these companies — two who received hearts and three who received kidneys. But these surgeries were not part of a formal clinical trial. Most of the patients were critically ill and their transplants were allowed because they had run out of other treatment options.The longest survivor to date is Towana Looney, a 53-year-old woman from Alabama who received a pig’s kidney at NYU Langone Health in New York City in November. The four other organ recipients, who were far sicker when they underwent the transplants, died shortly after the procedures.More than 550,000 Americans have kidney failure and require dialysis, and about 100,000 of them are on a waiting list to receive a kidney. But there is an acute shortage of donated organs, with fewer than 25,000 transplants done in 2023. Many people die while waiting.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.