Health officials from the Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) in Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent are encouraging women to attend their cervical screening in order to catch cervical cancer early and prevent its further spread.
Dr Mary McCarthy, a GP in Staffordshire with a special interest in cervical cancer, said: “Cervical cancer affects around 3,000 women in the UK every year, making it the most common form of cancer for women under the age of 35. According to Jo’s Cervical Cancer Trust, 75 per cent of these cases can be prevented through testing.
Information and advice on saving money and keeping warm in the home will be available to residents in The Square, Shrewsbury on Saturday 19 January 2019, 10am until 3pm, as part of national Big Energy-Saving Week.
The event will be hosted by Keep Shropshire Warm – a partnership between Shropshire Council and Marches Energy Agency, a registered charity specialising in energy advice. Advisers will be on hand to deal with a range of queries from the public, and to give out money-saving freebies such as energy monitors.
This study provides little evidence that can help people trying to lose weight safely.
It shows only that certain types of laboratory rat put on weight and have raised blood pressure if fed a high-fat diet, and that this may be linked to inflammatory cells in the body.
Aside from being a study in rats, the study is also short term and based on a diet that's not fed to people.
Non-sugar substitutes might be preferable to lots of sugar, but a better option might be to cut out sweetened food or drinks, or reduce how often we have them. As an independent expert quoted in The Guardian puts it: "replacement of sugary drinks with artificial sweeteners … is not superior to the preferred alternative – water".
This study alone doesn't explain the potential role of irisin.
The research did find that restoring irisin in Alzheimer's mice, including by daily swimming, can boost memory and nerve connections.
But we don't know that the same effects would be seen if people with Alzheimer's were given an exercise programme, for example.
We also don't know if any attempt to increase irisin levels through drug-based treatments (as some in the UK media suggested) would be either effective or safe, as no studies have been carried out in people at this stage.
The research was not just limited in terms of geographical scale. The number of samples collected was small and the method of collection not explained, so we do not know whether the results are really representative of the level of use of BPA and BPS in receipts.
The study does suggest BPA in thermal paper may have hormonal activity, but we do not know how much BPA transfers from receipts into the human body with normal use.
Most importantly, we do not really know the effects of BPA on the human body.
For people who wish to avoid taking the risk, the researchers told newspapers that they should fold receipts inward, not crumple them up or handle them unnecessarily, not store them in pockets or wallets, and throw them in the rubbish when no longer required.
BPS If you’re planning to take off weight in the new year and it suddenly seems like food is everywhere – and is especially enticing – that’s probably your mind playing a particularly unhelpful trick on you. Thinking about food, even in terms of trying to avoid it, can actually make it more likely that you’ll notice food in your environment, especially if you’re already overweight or obese.
That’s according to a recent study in the International Journal of Obesity that compared how overweight and healthy weight people pay attention to food. Food cues – sights, smells, advertisements and social contexts like parties – are everywhere these days, so understanding why some people find it harder to ignore them could be key to designing weight loss programmes.
BPS Blog post. You might imagine – as prior research suggests many people do – that putting your feelings into words will only intensify them. In fact, many laboratory studies have found the opposite to be true. Stating out loud, or writing down, what you are feeling – a process that psychologists call “affect labelling” – seems to down-regulate emotions, diminishing their intensity.
Now an intriguing study has explored this phenomenon outside of the lab, analysing over a billion tweets to find examples of when people used a tweet to put their emotional state into words. From analysing the emotional language used in preceding and subsequent tweets, Rui Fan and his colleagues were able to see how the act of affect labelling influenced the course of an emotional state. “We found that, for a majority of individuals, emotional intensity decreased rapidly after their explicit expression in an ‘I feel’ statement,” the researchers write in their paper in Nature Human Behaviour.
BPS Blog post. What strategies do you use to push through a tough challenge, be it a run on a treadmill or a stressful phone call with your boss? Perhaps you remind yourself of what you have to gain from completing the task, or you use distraction, or you think about the bad things that will happen if you give in? For a paper in the European Journal of Personality, a team led by Marie Hennecke at the University of Zurich has conducted what they say is the first ever investigation of these strategies, and others, that people use spontaneously in their everyday lives to “regulate their persistence during aversive activities”.