� ealife Saturday, February 5, 2011

health news

The first ever Government cancer awareness campaign to highlight the early symptoms of bowel cancer was launched this week by Health Minister Paul Burstow.The ‘Be Clear on Cancer’ campaign will be piloted in two regions - including the East of England - and if successful will be rolled out across the country.Improving cancer outcomes is a Government priority and the earlier cancer is diagnosed, the better the outlook. Featuring real GPs encouraging patients to talk to them about changes in their poo, a series of adverts aims to highlight the early signs of bowel cancer and make it easier for people to discuss this with their GP. More than 90% of people diagnosed with bowel cancer at the early stage survive for at least five years compared with only 6.6% of those diagnosed at the late stage. Ten thousand lives, across all cancers, could be saved each year if England matched the best cancer survival rates in Europe.Sarah Lyness, of Cancer Research UK, said: “Most changes in bowel habits won’t be cancer but if they are it is much better to be treated quickly. A change lasting three weeks or more - looser poo, bleeding or anything else unusual - should be reported to your GP without further delay.”

Awareness of the health benefits of breastfeeding is set to be raised following the appointment of a new ambassador for Suffolk. In this new Department of Health-funded role, Linda Page will be delivering educational and support services to women throughout the county and promoting the health benefits of breastfeeding to both mother and baby.Linda, who has worked as a midwife for more than a decade and has been involved in supporting breastfeeding for the last 20 years, said: “In my role with NHS Suffolk I will be encouraging new mothers to take up breastfeeding as well as working with Ipswich and West Suffolk hospitals as they work towards achieving their Baby Friendly Hospital accreditation, which acknowledges a hospital’s commitment to support breastfeeding.“I look forward to my role and highlighting the importance of breastfeeding to mothers across Suffolk.”

More than 84% of girls aged 13-14 have helped protect themselves against cervical cancer by getting all three doses of the HPV vaccine and more than four million doses of the vaccine have been given in the first two years of the programme, Public Health Minister Anne Milton has announced.The latest figures reveal that the programme is one of the most successful in the world with over 76% of girls aged 12-13 having had the full three doses of the vaccine in the second year of the programme and more expected to do so. Anne Milton said: “The uptake is very encouraging but we can always do more. This vaccination reduces the risk of cervical cancer and will save up to 400 lives a year in the UK. I would ask girls between 12 and 18 who are not protected to speak to their school or GP – all three doses are needed for full protection.”

Bid to improve cancer survival

New role for Linda

Vaccine uptake rising

health

The British Heart Foundation marks its 50th anniversary this year with the launch of its biggest ever fundraising appeal, for a research project which it hopes could help mend broken hearts – literally. Sheena Grant reports

Sheena Grant

How to menda broken heart

IT SOUNDS like the plot from a science fiction novel but it’s not. Within the next decade the UK’s leading heart charity is hoping scientists will have worked out how to get damaged human hearts to repair themselves.

It already happens in nature. Some animals, such as zebrafish, can regrow

portions of their own hearts.With the launch of the biggest fundraising

appeal in its 50-year history, the British Heart Foundation is hoping research may be able to make this possible in people too.

Medicine has come a long way in the last half century.

In 1961, the year the British Heart Foundation was set up, an estimated 100,000 people in the UK had heart failure.

Nowadays the figure is more than 750,000 and rising, largely as a result of our ageing population and the fact that more people than ever before survive heart attacks that would have killed them just a few decades ago.

As a result, heart failure is one of the UK’s leading causes of disability, leaving some patients housebound and fighting for breath, making even getting out of bed or eating a meal incredibly difficult.

That is why the BHF has this week launched its Mending Broken Hearts Appeal.

The charity aims to spend £50 million on research projects aimed at teaching the heart to heal itself. Through the use of stem cell

research and developmental biology it hopes scientists can work out how

to repair or replaced damaged heart muscle in as little as 10 years time.

Professor Peter Weissberg, the charity’s

medical director, said: “Since the BHF’s inception 50 years ago, we’ve made great strides in medical research to better diagnose and treat people with all kinds of heart problems. But the biggest issue that still eludes us is how to help people once their heart has been damaged by a heart attack.

“Scientifically, mending human hearts is an achievable goal and we really could make recovering from a heart attack as simple as getting over a broken leg. But we need to spend £50 million to make this a reality, and currently the resources and investment we need are simply not available.”

Mother-of-three Natalie Cox, who lives near Chelmsford, is supporting the appeal.

Her son, Zachary Cush, was born with a congenital heart problem, which wasn’t detected until he was five months old.

She says: “We were so delighted to have our son but when he was diagnosed with a severe mitral valve regurgitation at five months old we were distraught.

We had no idea anything was wrong when he was born. I had a troubled pregnancy and bad labour, which ended in an emergency Caesarean because Zachary’s heart kept stopping, but nothing was picked up at that time.

support: Zachary Cush, above, underwent surgery for a congenital heart defect. He is pictured, left, with his mother Natalie Cox after coming off a ventilator

Saturday, February 5, 2011 ealife �

healthComplementary health

Learning to deal with life’s many problemsMAKING mountains out of molehills – we all know what this means and yet we all do this from time to time. often, with the benefit of hindsight, we are eventually able to look back and realise that the problem was not as bad as we first thought.But ideally, we need to avoid getting ourselves into a situation which becomes worse if we do not address it. It takes courage – and belief – to do this.Mary came to see me. she was a working mother, married with a two-year-old child. she was beginning to find it increasingly difficult to keep juggling and responding effectively to all the demands that were put on her at home and at work.Her friends started to make comments that she was short tempered and could not enjoy herself. At work, she found it increasingly difficult to concentrate and felt she did not do her job properly. on top of that, her relationship with her husband was also not as it used to be. Neither of them found it easy to talk about how they saw the difficulties they were experiencing, and it was easier to avoid talking about it. But by burying their heads in the sand about the difficulties that were affecting them they were, in fact, storing up problems for their future.It is far better to try and follow these simple rules:■ Avoiding problems makes them worse.■ Avoiding problems will create new ones.■ Avoiding problems means that they interfere with your life and your relationships.that’s all very well, you may think, but how should you go about dealing with things that at first sight may seem insurmountable? First of all, it is important to start clarifying what the issues really are.What stops most people taking action is usually something to do with the following thoughts:■ You may have feelings of not wanting to upset anyone.■ You may be thinking that your thought are too scary and alarming to articulate.■ You may think, what will happen if I do attempt to address the problem? perhaps it is easier if I don’t.■ You may finding yourself thinking (and hoping) that eventually the problem will resolve itself if you don’t do anything.However, in reality, facing difficulties is rarely as alarming as we first imagine, hence the phrase that we all know of ‘making mountains out of molehills’. the truth is that if we address issues at an early stage and if we learn how to address and solve problems effectively, there will not be a mountain in sight.there are various strategies that it is possible to learn from a Neuro-Linguistic programming (NLp) practitioner which will help make life easier and can help to make you happier as well. For more information about this or about how NLp works, why not book a free 15-minute appointment with Nan van der Neut in confidence. to find out more contact the Complementary Medicine Centre on 01379 870707 or visit www.compmed.co.uk.

Damage to the heart muscle sustained during a heart attack is the most common cause of heart failure.

When we have a heart attack, a portion of our heart muscle is damaged or dies. right now, we can’t repair it. Heart damage is permanent.

Early stages of heart failure involve symptoms such as tiredness and breathlessness. However, the condition is progressive and in the latter stages people are often housebound and suffer chronic physical fatigue with even eating a meal or

getting dressed making them breathless.

the BHF’s Mending Broken Hearts appeal was launched on February 1 and will run for five years.

the research programme funded by the appeal aims to repair damaged heart muscle in people who have heart failure after having suffered a heart attack.

And through this research the BHF expects that it will also:■ Learn to help prevent the development of heart disease by improving the

body’s repair mechanisms that maintain blood vessel integrity.■ Create heart valves from human tissue which will greatly benefit people with diseased or abnormal valves.■ Learn how to make new blood vessels.■ treat some simple forms of congenital heart disease, for example a hole in the heart.the BHF is now urging the public to support the Mending Broken Hearts Appeal. Call 0300 333 0333 or visit bhf.org.uk/mbh to order an appeal pack.

Heart Failure

“Over the next few months I kept going back to the doctor with him because I knew something was wrong: he was dripping with sweat all the time and he wasn’t growing. One of the nurses on one of the occasions we were sent to hospital noticed he was quite a grey colour.

“Eventually the hospital did a heart echo test and discovered what was wrong. The blood was not going the right way down a valve and was flooding his lungs. If they hadn’t found it when they did it is likely he wouldn’t have been with us much longer.”

Doctors in Chelmsford immediately transferred Zachary to a hospital in London, where he underwent surgery a week later.

The operation was only a temporary fix, says Natalie.

“His valve should have been opening 13mm but was only opening 3-4mm. They managed to repair it so that it could open 6-7mm but they couldn’t replace it as the new valve they had was 16mm. We think he will need more operations between the ages of two and 10 and at the moment I haven’t been told whether they will be able to fix it for good.”

Zachary, who is now nine months old, was on a ventilator for almost three weeks after the operation and in intensive care for a month. Although he is now home and doing much better his mother knows he is not out of the woods yet.

“He suffers really badly from bronchitis but as he gets stronger and starts to gain weight hopefully that will ease,” she says.

“I am supporting the BHF and their campaign because I want to raise awareness about heart disease and hopefully help people like Zachary. These advances in research and technology can only be a good thing for everyone and I would encourage as many people as possible to do something to help the BHF raise the money they need.”

To fund the programme, the charity is encouraging people to support its Mending Broken Hearts Appeal. The five-year fundraising campaign is the charity’s most ambitious to date, and coincides with the BHF’s 50th anniversary. A high-profile marketing campaign encouraging people to support the appeal kicked off this week, inspired by the experiences of Joanne Ward, who suffered a heart attack just four days after giving birth to her second son, Tyler. The materials feature a woman with heart

failure as she finds hope by watching zebrafish in an aquarium.

Over the next five years, the BHF aims to attract scientists from around the world to work on regenerative medicine in the UK. It also intends to develop up to two Centres of Regenerative Medicine to facilitate its groundbreaking work.

However, the research is not without controversy as it involves the use of stem cells, some of which may come from human embryos donated by couples that have undergone IVF treatment. These couples have chosen to donate embryos that would have otherwise been destroyed, so that stem cells can be extracted from them for use in research. Only embryos at a very early stage of development (up to 14 days) can be used.

The BHF says it funds research that uses stem cells from human or animal embryos, and adult tissues, because it believes both approaches are

important. “Many of the advances

in stem cell research have only been possible through the knowledge and insight gained using embryonic stem cells,” it adds. “We recognise that this is an area some people have concerns about.”

As a result the charity says it only funds research programmes using embryonic stem cells that could not be carried out any other way, that are licensed by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority and have ethical approval from an independent Research Ethics Committee.

Within five years the BHF hopes its work on heart regeneration will have advanced enough to begin early clinical trials and within ten it hope to run full trials. Within a further decade, it says, people living with heart disease should be able to look forward to a brighter future.

The science of heart regeneration“We have real hope that this is possible, and the world’s leading heart scientists agree with us,” says the BHF’s publicity materials.

so why do they think it’s possible to mend broken hearts?

As the zebrafish shows, heart regeneration is possible in nature. researchers think that if they find and harness the key genes and chemical messengers, in the right cells, at the right time, they could find a way to help our hearts fix themselves, just like a broken bone will heal.

of course, we all built our own hearts once upon a time. Each of us developed from a cluster of cells in the womb into a fully formed person with a heart. so our cells knew how to do it once, and researchers think we can make them do it again to create new muscle for heart repair.

research is already providing vital clues about how human hearts could be repaired. But there’s so much more to do.

the BHF hopes to invest £50 million in world-leading stem cell research and developmental biology to see whether we can repair or replace damaged or dead heart tissue with new,

healthy, functioning heart tissue. stem cells are immature

cells which have the ability to transform into different types of specialised cells in the body. researchers think that they are the tools we could use to repair the heart, by getting them to turn into heart cells and replacing damaged tissue. this field of research shows similar promise in other conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes and parkinson’s disease.

However, at the moment it’s not clear which kind of stem cells will work best, or how we can

harness them to turn into fully functional heart muscle.

Adult stem cells exist in some organs in our bodies after birth. Each type of adult stem cell can only develop into a limited range of cell types.

Blood from the umbilical cord is especially rich in several types of adult stem cell. After birth, cord blood can be collected, frozen and stored in cord blood banks. some parents have chosen to store their baby’s cord blood in the hope that the stem cells it contains may one day be useful for medical treatments that

haven’t been developed yet.Embryonic stem cells are

found in the embryo and they are nature’s experts at making other cells. they are capable of becoming any type of cell, and they can multiply again and again to produce more stem cells.

progenitor cells are found in different places around the body but are even more restricted in what kind of cells they can become. they can only divide a limited number of times – so they can’t keep multiplying indefinitely like stem cells can. Nevertheless, they could be important in tissue regeneration, and some existing research is looking into progenitor cells in the heart itself.

CALL For HELp: Images from the mending broken hearts appeal

ALL sMILEs: Zachary Cush back home at last after major surgery for a congenital heart defect