Health news round-up: relabelling prostate cancer, zoonotic diseases and e-cigarette chemicals

This week, The Pharmaceutical Journal has reported on the first UK guidance for polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome, a call to reclassify the morning-after pill as a general sales list item, funding for community pharmacy obesity care, the stalling of a community pharmacy PrEP pilot in Wales, and medicine cash flow issues in both primary and secondary care.

Read on for more health news you might have missed this week.

Could renaming lowest-risk prostate cancer save lives?

Relabelling Grade Group 1 prostate cancer — the earliest and lowest-risk form of the disease — as a precancerous condition could reduce unnecessary treatment and prevent thousands of prostate cancer deaths annually, a report published in JAMA Oncology has suggested.

Removing the condition’s “cancer” label could lead to more men choosing prostate-specific antigen screening and active surveillance, researchers said.

COVID-19 and zoonotic diseases

After France recently recorded its first case of Ebola, the UK’s Health and Social Care Committee has asked the government for details on how it is preparing for the potential arrival of the disease in the UK.

Separately, Cambridge researchers have found that COVID-19 vaccine boosters may help protect against some future coronaviruses that risk spreading from animals to humans.

Meanwhile, the results of a study, which analysed more than 11,000 YouTube videos and comments about avian influenza, have highlighted the platform’s dual role as both a source of public health information and a space where competing narratives about zoonotic disease risks rapidly emerge and spread.

Autism and ADHD

The findings of a study co-led by Aston University and the University of Hong Kong have shown no link between prenatal paracetamol use and autism or ADHD, following a data analysis of 700,000 mother–child pairs, which spanned two decades.

In addition, the results of a systematic review conducted by researchers from Wroclaw Medical University found that current evidence is insufficient to support psychedelics as a treatment for ADHD, despite growing public interest in microdosing.

Smoking cessation

Synthetic cooling chemicals used in some e-cigarettes may disrupt heart rhythm, the results of a study published in Circulation: Arrhythmia and Electrophysiology have suggested. Researchers pointed to potential risks such as irregular heartbeat and cardiac arrest.

The results of a separate meta-analysis from Adelaide University have shown that exercise can help people quit smoking by reducing cigarette consumption, easing cravings and improving their chances of quitting.