Inside Health Folgen

What is Papilloedema? The condition has been in the headlines as an optometrist was found guilty of manslaughter after missing abnormalities in the eyes of an eight year old child. Plus, Margaret McCartney debates the accuracy of screening young people for Sudden Cardiac Death in Sport. How to diagnose early miscarriage in women who are bleeding in early pregnancy? And the serendipitous story of how the anti-clotting agent warfarin was first discovered.

Care.data, the scheme to build an enormous database containing the medical records of all English patients has been scrapped. Dr Mark Porter investigates the fall-out following the cancellation of this expensive programme, which foundered on concerns about confidentiality and public and professional trust. Chair of the national EMIS user group and Sheffield GP Dr Geoff Schrecker and GP Dr Margaret McCartney discuss the scale of the failure of the care.data programme and outline what needs to happen in the future if valuable patient data is to be used for the public good.Twelve hundred adults and children die every year in the UK from asthma attacks, and these grim statistics have remained stubbornly consistent for decades. But there is light on the horizon as researchers in the field begin to stratify the disease; identifying patients with different types of asthma and treating them accordingly. Mark visits the Churchill Hospital in Oxford where some pioneering work has taken place to develop new diagnostic tests and new treatments. Ian Pavord, Professor of Respiratory Medicine at the Nuffield Department of Medicine, shows Mark the new FENO breath test for nitric oxide to test inflammation - soon to be available for use in general practice.Acne Rosacea is a debilitating and painful condition. It's characterised by redness, spots and inflammation on the face and affects both sexes but mainly women. Dr Bav Shergill of the British Association of Dermatologists discusses latest treatments.And the first in a new series dedicated to happy accidents that have altered modern medicine. First off, the pacemaker. Dr Margaret McCartney and Carl Heneghan, Professor of Evidence Based Medicine at the University of Oxford, tell the remarkable story of the serendipitous discovery of this life-saving device.

David Haslam, chair of NICE, discusses with Mark Porter how doctors should treat patients with 'multi-morbidity', the millions of people receiving many different drugs for many different conditions. There's plenty of trial data for starting treatments, but a dearth of evidence for stopping them! And one-shot radiotherapy during surgery for breast cancer may help 20,000 women in the UK. Rather than daily hospital visits for radiotherapy over 5 weeks, a dose is given straight to the open wound during the operation. It is quicker, cheaper and much more convenient, so why isn't it more widely available?