Publisher Health

Published1 hour agoShareclose panelShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingImage source, Getty ImagesBy Thomas MorganBBC NewsThe UK Health Security Agency has issued an amber cold-health alert for the whole of England, meaning it expects the NHS to see increased demand as a result of the weather.The weather alert service warns the public when high or low temperatures could damage their health. How does the weather health alert system work? Run by the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) and the Met Office, the weather health alert system for England was introduced in June 2023. It includes both heat-health alerts (HHA) and cold-health alerts (CHA).Cold-health alerts are typically issued between 1 November and 30 March and heat-health alerts between 1 June and 30 September. The system issues warnings to members of the public and sends guidance directly to NHS England, the government and other healthcare professionals during periods of adverse weather.Alerts are categorised according to severity and include:headline weather conditions expected in the coming daysdetails of how weather conditions will affect each regionlinks to additional information, advice and guidance.The system was designed to help reduce illness and deaths by improving communication between the public and relevant bodies during periods of extreme weather.Cold weather and health guidance and adviceHot weather and health guidance and adviceSee current weather-health alertsSign up to receive alertsWhat does each level mean?The level of alert is based on Met Office forecasts and data. There are four levels ranging from green (least severe) to red (most severe):GreenGreen is the normal level, when advice is given on how people should prepare to respond if temperatures rise or fall.YellowYellow alerts are issued during periods of hot or cold weather that are only likely to affect those who are particularly vulnerable, for example, the elderly or those with existing health conditions.AmberAmber alerts are issued in situations that could potentially put the whole population at risk. The NHS may see increased demand on GPs and ambulances, for example. Travel disruption is also likely.RedA red alert is the most severe. It is issued in situations when hot or cold weather would be a significant risk to life, for even the healthy population, and could lead to failures of critical national infrastructure, such as power outages or roads and rail lines being closed. Which areas are covered by the latest cold-health alert?On 14 January, the existing yellow cold-health alerts issued by the UKHSA were upgraded to amber across all regions of England:the North Westthe North EastYorkshire and the Humberthe EastWest MidlandsEast Midlandsthe South Eastthe South WestLondonThe UKHSA said that the cold weather “can rapidly have a serious impact on the health of those over the age of 65 and those with pre-existing health conditions”.”It increases the risk of heart attacks, strokes and chest infections,” warned Dr Agostinho Sousa, head of extreme events and health protection at UKHSA. The amber alert will remain in place until noon on Friday 19 January. Image source, PA MediaSeparately, the Met Office has also issued yellow warnings for snow and ice for Scotland, Northern Ireland, much of northern England and north Wales.National Highways also issued a severe weather alert for the north west of England.What does an unheated room do to your body?What are cold weather payments and who gets them?How to drive in snow and icy weatherThe best way to de-ice a car and other winter tipsFind out the weather forecast for your area, with an hourly breakdown and a 14-day lookahead, by downloading the BBC Weather app: Apple – Android – Amazon The BBC Weather app is only available to download in the UK.

The UK Covid inquiry has upped sticks from London to Edinburgh.Over the next three weeks, the inquiry will hear evidence from government ministers and experts about decisions taken in Scotland during the pandemic.BBC political correspondent Kirsten Campbell outlines what can be expected during the inquiry’s time north of the border.Video by Morgan SpenceRead more: Covid inquiry turns spotlight on Scottish decisions

The UK Covid inquiry has upped sticks from London to Edinburgh.Over the next three weeks, the inquiry will hear evidence from government ministers and experts about decisions taken in Scotland during the pandemic.BBC political correspondent Kirsten Campbell outlines what can be expected during the inquiry’s time north of the border.Video by Morgan SpenceRead more: Covid inquiry turns spotlight on Scottish decisions

Published5 hours agoShareclose panelShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingThis video can not be playedTo play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.By Emma Glasbey, Nicky Hudson & Tom AireyBBC NewsStaff at a West Yorkshire major trauma centre say they are concerned about the number of injuries they are seeing inflicted on children and adults with machete-style weapons.Doctors warn the large blades cause complex wounds and result in significant trauma for both the victims and those who come to their aid.The BBC spent three weekends at Leeds General Infirmary to see the reality facing medical teams.Some readers may find an image showing injury and the subject matter discussed below distressing’Am I dying?’It is a busy Saturday night and a patient who arrived by ambulance is asking for reassurance.The 33-year-old man has come to the major trauma centre in Leeds with serious knife wounds across his face.He is taken into resus – the area reserved for patients with the most severe injuries – and his bloodied trainers are removed.”He is a chap that helpfully has been quite lucky,” says Catherine Holmes, the on-duty consultant.”His injuries are all facial injuries without any significant injury to his chest, his abdomen, his pelvis.”He thought he might have been hit or punched and then he realised there had been a knife involved in the incident.”Several of the medics tell us the number of knife crime victims they are treating is a real concern.Staff nurse Matt Tasker says his job has made him think twice about the future for his family.He asks: “I’ve just become a dad and it worries me about how, if things are bad now, how are they going to be later down the line?”Me and my wife have talked about moving to other areas where I can still work but have less chance of knife crime.”Image source, West Yorkshire PoliceThe major trauma centre has seen the aftermath of recent knife crime tragedies involving young people which have shocked local communities.Alfie Lewis, 15, died at the hospital in late 2023 after being stabbed outside a school in Horsforth.Khayri Mclean, also 15, died shortly after being stabbed on his way home from school in Huddersfield in 2022.’With a machete the wound is much larger’It is another Saturday night and a mother has arrived at the children’s A&E department with her 14-year-old son.He has wounds to his leg doctors believe may have been inflicted with a machete, with nurses told he was attacked by a group he did not know.Simon Rush, lead paediatric advanced practitioner, says this boy’s case follows a rising trend at the hospital.”We are seeing it increasingly now that young people are advising us that they don’t know the assailants,” he explains.”It’s not that we don’t believe them – but sometimes we wonder whether actually they do but they’re scared to tell us who these people actually are.”On The Front Line: The Knife Crime Emergency is available to watch on BBC iPlayer now.The larger machete or sword-type blades are causing more significant injuries too.”With a machete the wound is much larger,” emergency medicine consultant Dr Sundararaj Manou explains. “I think the kids or the young ones don’t really understand – it’s only when they’ve stabbed somebody, they realise the implications of it.”He adds: “I think a little bit more education in schools might help.”There are efforts being made by the hospital to prevent the young people they are treating coming back with even more serious injuries.Patients aged between 11 and 25 who have been victims of violent crime are visited by A&E navigators, a team of youth workers who help them access support including mental health treatment.’It’s a terrifying experience’On a Tuesday morning, A&E navigator Rowan Jameson-Mcauley has been to see a teenager who arrived overnight after being attacked with a sharp weapon.”He seems to be doing OK, as OK as somebody can be after that situation,” he says.He tells us that most of the patients he visits are young men trying to put on a brave face in a scary situation.”They wouldn’t admit that they’re scared, but I think for any human being who has been attacked by multiple assailants with machetes, it’s a terrifying experience,” he says.”It’s similar to what people would go through in a war zone, so it’s traumatising for a 15-year-old to go through that.”The impact of being involved in a knife attack can be long lasting, even for those who do not suffer serious injury.Kamil arrived at the major trauma centre on a Friday night after being stabbed in the shoulder at a house party in Bradford.”I’m always looking behind me, I’m scared to come outside when it’s dark,” he shares.”I need some support to deal with my mental health because it’s not so easy to just get stabbed and to go and live a normal life.”Witnessing the aftermath of a stabbing can also take a toll on the doctors and nurses, who may be faced with knife injuries every week.”When I get home, I find it difficult sometimes,” says staff nurse India Tomlinson.”I live on my own so I don’t really have anyone to talk to so I just end up processing it a lot in my brain and just overthinking.”Knife crime has been falling, according to the Office for National Statistics, with 51,091 reported knife-related offences recorded in England and Wales in 2022/23, compared to 55,193 in 2019/20.But despite some progress nationally, the impact can still be felt by the medical teams at the Leeds major trauma centre on a regular basis.”I just think, is this really how kids are nowadays?” Ms Tomlinson asks.”I feel like a lot of people don’t want to use their fists any more in terms of having a fight, punching – they’d rather get a weapon and use a weapon.” If you have been affected by any of the issues raised in this story you can visit BBC Action Line.Follow BBC Yorkshire on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Send your story ideas to yorkslincs.news@bbc.co.uk.More on this storyFatal stabbings account for half of 2023 homicidesPublished4 JanuaryIdris Elba urges stronger action on knife crimePublished8 JanuaryCourt scuffles as teens sentenced for killing boyPublished18 December 2023Funeral held of 15-year-old boy killed in stabbingPublished1 December 2023Four jailed for murdering teen over mistaken IDPublished18 December 2023Related Internet LinksLeeds Teaching Hospitals NHS TrustThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.

Published5 hours agoShareclose panelShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingImage source, Getty ImagesBy Philippa RoxbyHealth reporterThe sale of all energy drinks to young people and children in the UK should be banned, says a review of the latest evidence on their effects on health.It highlighted links to more risks than previously found, such as anxiety, stress and suicidal thoughts.These drinks often contain high levels of caffeine and sugar, and are sold as providing an energy boost.Most UK supermarkets have introduced a voluntary ban on the sale of energy drinks to under-16s.A complete ban, which would also cover smaller shops, online retailers and vending machines, was proposed in England and Scotland in 2019.Health ministers in England said they would set out their full response in due course. On the back of the review, 40 health-related organisations have written a letter to Health Secretary Victoria Atkins to repeat the call for sales of energy drinks to be further restricted.”Many of these drinks contain high amounts of caffeine, as much as between 160-200mg per can in some cases, which is double the amount found in an average cup of coffee (about 80mg depending on the strength),” the letter says.The packaging on the drinks often says they are not suitable for children, and yet they can be easily bought by under-18s from corner shops, the researchers and experts say.Energy drinks are marketed as giving a physical and mental boost, and providing more energy than standard soft drinks.It is a huge and growing market, and up to a third of UK children drink them every week.Dr Amelia Lake, professor of public health nutrition at Teesside University, who led the review, looked at 57 recent studies of energy drinks and their impact on young people’s health. More than one million children from 21 countries were included.”The evidence is clear that energy drinks are harmful to the mental and physical health of children and young people, as well as their behaviour and education,” she said.”We need to take action now to protect them from these risks.”The research found that boys were more likely than girls to drink energy drinks.And regular drinking was more likely to make young people use drugs, be violent and have unsafe sex.Sleep problems, poor performance at school and an unhealthy diet were also closely related to the use of energy drinks, the review found.Dr Lake said that although their research could not prove that energy drinks directly caused the health harms, because dietary studies are always observational, the findings were important and the best available evidence.It is possible that energy drinks are linked to health harms because those who consume them frequently are more likely to be unhealthy in other ways – such as smoking, or drinking alcohol, for example.Caffeine warningsOfficial guidance says people should consume no more than 3mg of caffeine per kilogram of body weight.”It’s so easy for a young person to have that,” says Dr Lake, with the caffeine equivalent of two espressos in a large can of energy drink.They also have a high sugar content which can damage children’s teeth and, if they already eat unhealthily, contribute to obesity.Some countries, such as Latvia and Lithuania, have already banned the sale of energy drinks to children, but it is too soon to tell what difference the move has made. Other countries like Finland and Poland could follow suit.England and Scotland held a consultation on ending their sale to children four years ago, and Wales consulted on the same issue in 2022.Current rules mean that drinks which contain caffeine from whatever source at a level over 150mg per litre must state on the label: “High caffeine content. Not recommended for children or pregnant or breastfeeding women.”A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Social Care said: “We consulted on a proposal to end the sale of energy drinks to children under 16 in England, and will set out our full response in due course. “In the meantime, many larger retailers and supermarkets have voluntarily introduced a ban on the sale of energy drinks to children under 16.”Children, and other people sensitive to caffeine, are recommended to only consume it in moderation.William Roberts, from the Royal Society for Public Health, said the review “adds to the growing evidence that energy drinks can be harmful to children and young people’s physical and mental health, both in the short and long-term”.”That’s why we need the UK government to step up and deliver on its 2019 commitment to ban sales of energy drinks to under-16s.”More on this storySupermarkets ban energy drinks for under-16sPublished5 March 2018Energy drinks ban for children proposedPublished30 August 2018Not enough evidence for energy drink banPublished4 December 2018Related Internet LinksImpact on public health practice & policy – Fuse – Newcastle UniversityFood additives – Food Standards AgencyPublic Health journalThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.

Published5 hours agoShareclose panelShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingImage source, Getty ImagesMore than 7,000 Covid-related hospital admissions could have been prevented in the UK in the summer of 2022 if the population had received the full number of jabs recommended, according to research in The Lancet.Some 44% of the UK population was under-vaccinated, with younger people among the most likely to skip doses.In a first, health records for everyone over five in the UK were analysed. The same approach could now be used to understand other diseases.The entire population of the UK is 67 million, and all those over the age of five had their anonymised electronic health data analysed for The Lancet study.It found that between June and September 2022, the percentage of people not fully vaccinated against Covid was:49.8% in Northern Ireland 45.7% in England 34% in Scotland32.8% WalesAnd that was based on the number of Covid vaccine doses recommended for different groups:one dose for five to 11-year-oldstwo doses for 12 to 15-year-oldsthree doses for 16 to 74-year-oldsfour doses for over-75smore than four for those vulnerable or shielding or with particular health conditionsWith about 40,000 hospital admissions related to Covid during that summer, the research estimates that more than 7,000 – 17% – would have been avoided if everyone had taken up the offer of the vaccine and booster doses for which they were eligible.Why Covid is still flooring some peopleWHO charts rapid spread of new JN.1 Covid variant The research used data on Covid vaccinations and tests, as well as from GPs and hospitals, to track health data for the whole population. They then looked at the relationship between the under-vaccinated and severe Covid illness.They found that under-vaccinated people over-75 were more than twice as likely to be seriously ill with Covid than those who were fully protected. There was also a link between skipping doses and hospitalisation and death rates in all age groups studied.’Help pinpoint groups’Prof Sir Aziz Sheikh, study co-lead and director of the Usher Institute at the University of Edinburgh, said the research showed Covid vaccines “save lives”. Although vaccine uptake was high at the start of the pandemic, that declined over subsequent waves of the virus, and health officials were no longer clear about the overall picture.”As new variants emerge, this study will help to pinpoint groups of our society and areas of the country where public health campaigns should be focused and tailored for those communities,” Prof Sheikh said.The groups most likely to turn down the invitation to be vaccinated were younger people, men, those living in poorer areas and those from ethnic minority groups.This was similar for all UK nations. The difference in rates of under-vaccinated between nations is thought to be because of overall population size, demographics and political approach.Prof Cathie Sudlow, chief scientist at Health Data Research UK, a consortium of researchers who worked on the study, said collecting NHS data on this scale across the four nations of the UK had huge potential. “We believe that we could and should extend these approaches to many other areas of medicine, such as cancer, heart disease and diabetes, to search for better understanding, prevention and treatment of disease.”She said only Qatar, and possibly Israel, had the capability to crunch health data for all age groups and all backgrounds in the same way.This round of seasonal Covid jabs will be available until 31 January 2024 for those eligible.You can no longer book a Covid jab online or by calling NHS 119 – but you may be able to with a local NHS vaccination service.More on this storyCovid inquiry postpones vaccine investigationPublished5 days agoWHO charts rapid spread of new JN.1 Covid variantPublished20 December 2023Who can get another Covid jab this winter?Published20 December 2023

The use of the antipsychotic drugs quetiapine and haloperidolis associated with an increased risk of ventricular arrhythmias and sudden cardiac death (SCD) caused by drug-induced QT prolongation, reports a new study in Heart Rhythm, the official journal of the Heart Rhythm Society, the Cardiac Electrophysiology Society, and the Pediatric & Congenital Electrophysiology Society, published by Elsevier. Caution is advised to manage cardiac risks in patients prescribed these medications, the authors of the study and an accompanying editorial say.
The risks of cardiac conditions associated with the use of antipsychotics have been a concern for the last 30 years. Drugs have previously been either removed from the market or had their use restricted due to an unacceptably high risk of lethal ventricular arrhythmias. Drug-induced cardiac arrhythmias, however, remain an important clinical issue because there are drugs that increase the risk of SCD, but remain on the market because they serve an important clinical need and there are no safer alternatives.
Professor Jamie Vandenberg, PhD, MBBS, FHRS, of the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute, Darlinghurst, NSW, Australia, co-author of the editorial accompanying the study, explains, “Of the 41 drugs on the market in the United States that are listed as having known risk of heart rhythm disorders, five are antipsychotic drugs, the mainstay of treatment for schizophrenia and psychosis. The use of antipsychotic drugs is associated with an approximately two-fold increased risk of sudden cardiac death. If we cannot eliminate this risk, then at the least, we need to minimize the risk by identifying those patients who are at highest risk and managing them more closely.”
Lead investigator of the study Shang-Hung Chang, MD, PhD, of the Cardiovascular Division, Department of Internal Medicine, Chang Gung Memorial Hospital, Linkou Medical Center, Taoyuan, Taiwan, adds, “The use of the antipsychotics quetiapine and haloperidol to treat mental disorders is widespread. In an effort to enhance patient safety and optimize the management of individuals receiving these medications, we have investigated the incidences, risk factors, and clinical outcomes of severe QT prolongation to provide valuable insights for healthcare professionals, patients, and caregivers.”
The research involved a retrospective analysis of electronic medical records of a large cohort of patients from a healthcare provider in Taiwan who received quetiapine or haloperidol therapy. Investigators evaluated the incidences, risk factors, and clinical correlates of severe QT prolongation (i.e., ventricular arrhythmias and sudden cardiac death) in these patients. The most significant results of the study were that more than 10% of patients developed severe QT prolongation during follow-up and the increased risk of ventricular arrhythmias and sudden cardiac death in quetiapine or haloperidol users who developed severe QT prolongation.
Co-author Chun-Li Wang, MD, of the Cardiovascular Division, Department of Internal Medicine, Chang Gung Memorial Hospital, Linkou Medical Center, Taoyuan, Taiwan, says the findings underscore the importance of closely monitoring patients receiving these medications and implementing appropriate risk mitigation strategies to ensure patient safety. “Clinicians should be aware of the potential risks associated with quetiapine use, particularly the risk of severe QT prolongation and its associated outcomes, including ventricular arrhythmias and sudden cardiac death.”
Professor Vandenberg comments, “It would be prudent to undertake an ECG before and after commencement of an antipsychotic drug. If it is an option, one could stop a drug causing QT prolongation and try a different antipsychotic. But if this is not practical, one should pay particular attention to reducing other risk factors, such as prescription of other drugs that may exacerbate QT prolongation and be vigilant for hypokalemia.”

Researchers have developed a platform that combines automated experiments with AI to predict how chemicals will react with one another, which could accelerate the design process for new drugs.
Predicting how molecules will react is vital for the discovery and manufacture of new pharmaceuticals, but historically this has been a trial-and-error process, and the reactions often fail. To predict how molecules will react, chemists usually simulate electrons and atoms in simplified models, a process which is computationally expensive and often inaccurate.
Now, researchers from the University of Cambridge have developed a data-driven approach, inspired by genomics, where automated experiments are combined with machine learning to understand chemical reactivity, greatly speeding up the process. They’ve called their approach, which was validated on a dataset of more than 39,000 pharmaceutically relevant reactions, the chemical ‘reactome’.
Their results, reported in the journal Nature Chemistry, are the product of a collaboration between Cambridge and Pfizer.
“The reactome could change the way we think about organic chemistry,” said Dr Emma King-Smith from Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, the paper’s first author. “A deeper understanding of the chemistry could enable us to make pharmaceuticals and so many other useful products much faster. But more fundamentally, the understanding we hope to generate will be beneficial to anyone who works with molecules.”
The reactome approach picks out relevant correlations between reactants, reagents, and performance of the reaction from the data, and points out gaps in the data itself. The data is generated from very fast, or high throughput, automated experiments.
“High throughput chemistry has been a game-changer, but we believed there was a way to uncover a deeper understanding of chemical reactions than what can be observed from the initial results of a high throughput experiment,” said King-Smith.

“Our approach uncovers the hidden relationships between reaction components and outcomes,” said Dr Alpha Lee, who led the research. “The dataset we trained the model on is massive — it will help bring the process of chemical discovery from trial-and-error to the age of big data.”
In a related paper, published in Nature Communications, the team developed a machine learning approach that enables chemists to introduce precise transformations to pre-specified regions of a molecule, enabling faster drug design.
The approach allows chemists to tweak complex molecules — like a last-minute design change — without having to make them from scratch. Making a molecule in the lab is typically a multi-step process, like building a house. If chemists want to vary the core of a molecule, the conventional way is to rebuild the molecule, like knocking the house down and rebuilding from scratch. However, core variations are important to medicine design.
A class of reactions, known as late-stage functionalisation reactions, attempts to directly introduce chemical transformations to the core, avoiding the need to start from scratch. However, it is challenging to make late-stage functionalisation selective and controlled — there are typically many regions of the molecules that can react, and it is difficult to predict the outcome.
“Late-stage functionalisations can yield unpredictable results and current methods of modelling, including our own expert intuition, isn’t perfect,” said King-Smith. “A more predictive model would give us the opportunity for better screening.”
The researchers developed a machine learning model that predicts where a molecule would react, and how the site of reaction vary as a function of different reaction conditions. This enables chemists to find ways to precisely tweak the core of a molecule.
“We pretrained the model on a large body of spectroscopic data — effectively teaching the model general chemistry — before fine-tuning it to predict these intricate transformations,” said King-Smith. This approach allowed the team to overcome the limitation of low data: there are relatively few late-stage functionalisation reactions reported in the scientific literature. The team experimentally validated the model on a diverse set of drug-like molecules and was able to accurately predict the sites of reactivity under different conditions.
“The application of machine learning to chemistry is often throttled by the problem that the amount of data is small compared to the vastness of chemical space,” said Lee. “Our approach — designing models that learn from large datasets that are similar but not the same as the problem we are trying to solve — resolve this fundamental low-data challenge and could unlock advances beyond late stage functionalisation.”
The research was supported in part by Pfizer and the Royal Society.

His innovations in the use of drugs to prevent organ rejection helped bring a remarkable increase in the one-year survival rate.Roy Calne, a British surgeon whose work on organ transplantation helped turn what was once considered impossible into a lifesaving procedure for millions of people around the world, died on Jan. 6 at a retirement home in Cambridge, England. He was 93.His son Russell Calne said he died from heart failure.There are groundbreaking surgeons and groundbreaking researchers, but very few people are both. Dr. Calne (pronounced “kahn”) was an exception: He developed and practiced many of the operating techniques involved in transplantation, while at the same time working to identify what drugs would get the body to accept a new organ.The son of an automobile mechanic from the suburbs of London, Dr. Calne had long wondered why damaged organs, like faulty carburetors, couldn’t be swapped out for new ones. But as a student in the early 1950s, he was told repeatedly that it could never be done.He persevered, though, researching in his spare time as an anatomy instructor at the University of Oxford and later as a professor and the first chairman of the surgery department at the University of Cambridge.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? 

An Oxford researcher measured the effect of popular workplace mental health interventions, and discovered little to none.Employee mental health services have become a billion-dollar industry. New hires, once they have found the restrooms and enrolled in 401(k) plans, are presented with a panoply of digital wellness solutions, mindfulness seminars, massage classes, resilience workshops, coaching sessions and sleep apps.These programs are a point of pride for forward-thinking human resource departments, evidence that employers care about their workers. But a British researcher who analyzed survey responses from 46,336 workers at companies that offered such programs found that people who participated in them were no better off than colleagues who did not.The study, published this month in Industrial Relations Journal, considered the outcomes of 90 different interventions and found a single notable exception: Workers who were given the opportunity to do charity or volunteer work did seem to have improved well-being.Across the study’s large population, none of the other offerings — apps, coaching, relaxation classes, courses in time management or financial health — had any positive effect. Trainings on resilience and stress management actually appeared to have a negative effect.“It’s a fairly controversial finding, that these very popular programs were not effective,” said William J. Fleming, the author of the study and a fellow at Oxford University’s Wellbeing Research Center.Dr. Fleming’s analysis suggests that employers concerned about workers’ mental health would do better to focus on “core organizational practices” like schedules, pay and performance reviews.“If employees do want access to mindfulness apps and sleep programs and well-being apps, there is not anything wrong with that,” he said. “But if you’re seriously trying to drive employees well-being, then it has to be about working practices.”Dr. Fleming’s study is based on responses to the Britain’s Healthiest Workplace survey in 2017 and 2018 from workers at 233 organizations, with financial and insurance service workers, younger workers and women slightly overrepresented.The data captured workers at a single point in time, rather than tracking them before and after treatment. Using thousands of matched pairs from the same workplace, it compared well-being measures from workers who participated in wellness programs with those of their colleagues who did not.It is possible that there was selection bias, since workers who enroll in, say, a resilience training program may have lower well-being to begin with, Dr. Fleming said. To address that, he separately analyzed responses from workers with high pre-existing levels of work stress, comparing those who did and did not participate. But among this group, too, the survey answers suggested that the programs had no clear benefit.The findings call into question practices that have become commonplace across job sectors. But researchers said they came as no surprise.“Employers want to be seen as doing something, but they don’t want to look closely and change the way work is organized,” said Tony D. LaMontagne, a professor of work, health and well-being at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia, who was not involved in the study.Workplace mental health interventions may send the message that “if you do these programs and you’re still feeling stressed, it must be you,” Mr. LaMontagne said. “People who don’t have a critical view might internalize that failure: ‘So I really am a loser.’”The corporate wellness services industry has ballooned in recent years, with thousands of vendors competing for billions of dollars in revenue. Companies invest in the interventions in hopes of saving money overall by improving worker health and productivity.Some research supports this expectation. A 2022 study tracking 1,132 workers in the United States who used Spring Health, a platform that connects employees with mental health services like therapy and medication management, found that 69.3 percent of participants showed improvement in their depression. Participants also missed fewer days of work and reported higher productivity.Adam Chekroud, a co-founder of Spring Health and an assistant professor of psychiatry at Yale, said Dr. Fleming’s study examined interventions that were “not highly credible” and measured well-being many months later. A blanket dismissal of workplace interventions, he said, risks “throwing the baby out with the bathwater.”“There is recent and highly credible data that things like mental health programs do improve all those metrics that he mentions,” Dr. Chekroud said. “That’s the baby you shouldn’t be throwing out.”There is also solid evidence that practices like mindfulness can have a positive effect. Controlled studies have consistently demonstrated lower stress and decreased anxiety and depression after mindfulness training.The lackluster benefits that Dr. Fleming found may reflect variations in offerings, said Larissa Bartlett, a researcher at the University of Tasmania who has designed and taught mindfulness programs. “Light-touch” interventions like apps, she added, are generally less effective than one-on-one or group trainings.Dr. Fleming’s study, she said, “misses most of these details, condensing intervention types into broad labels, engagement into yes/no, and dismissing the reports from intervention participants that they felt they benefited from the programs they did.”A key omission, she added, is longitudinal data showing whether participants experience improvement over time. The result is a “bird’s-eye view” of the well-being of participants that “skates over changes that may occur at the individual level,” she said.Dr. Fleming said that he was aware of the body of research supporting the treatments’ effectiveness, but that he had “never been as convinced by the very positive findings,” since the data comes from controlled trials in which the treatment is implemented very well, something that may not be the case in employer-provided programs.Dr. David Crepaz-Keay, the head of research and applied learning at the Mental Health Foundation in the United Kingdom, who has advised the World Health Organization and Public Health England on mental health initiatives, described Dr. Fleming’s data and analysis as “certainly more robust” than “most of the research that has created the consensus that employee assistance works.”