Medical Journal News

A UK government advisory committee has said that food and drink sweetened with non-sugar sweeteners (NSS) can help people lose a small amount of weight, contrasting with a previous conclusion from the World Health Organization.But younger children should not be given any drinks or foods containing NSS, the UK’s Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition (SACN) concluded.The updated advice has been published in response to 2023 WHO guidelines which concluded that NSS and foods that contain them should not be used to control body weight or reduce the risk of non-communicable diseases as there is no evidence of any long term benefit.12 WHO also warned that their long term use is associated with increased risk of type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, and mortality, although it said the evidence for this was of low certainty overall.In its response the SACN states that the WHO guideline prioritises evidence from prospective cohort studies rather...

New England Journal of Medicine, Ahead of Print.

New England Journal of Medicine, Ahead of Print.

New England Journal of Medicine, Ahead of Print.

New England Journal of Medicine, Ahead of Print.

New England Journal of Medicine, Ahead of Print.

New England Journal of Medicine, Ahead of Print.

Nearly 300 000 women die every year due to pregnancy or childbirth. Substantial inroads in reducing maternal mortality were made during the early part of the 21st century, but progress has stalled over the past decade and the world is not on track to meet the Sustainable Development Goal to reduce maternal deaths by 2030. World Health Day 2025, on April 7, marks the start of a year-long campaign by WHO, entitled “Healthy beginnings, hopeful futures”, which aims to reinvigorate much-needed efforts to ensure access to high-quality care for women and babies globally.

Progress in reducing neonatal and under-5 mortality have stalled as experts call for greater investment in services. Udani Samarasekera reports.

The panel will seek to understand the causes of suicide among students and formulate recommendations for prevention. Dinesh C Sharma reports.

Belarusian political prisoners report worsening medical care, particularly since a crackdown on political dissent. Ed Holt reports.

Suzanne O’Sullivan, author and consultant in neurology and clinical neurophysiology at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in London, UK, is nothing if not observant. Within minutes of our meeting, she has figured out something about me. “You don't have an Irish accent, but you keep saying grand”, she says. “What's your Irish background?” I confirm that my family are indeed Irish; this is the cue for her to talk about her own upbringing in Dublin. She is, she tells me, from a “typical kind of Irish family”; her parents worked hard to put her and her four siblings through school, and hers was the first generation to go to university.

Nearly a century has passed since writer Virginia Woolf alerted us to the breakdown of language when confronted with pain. Woolf noted that words provide an endless resource for those who dream or fall in love, “but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry”. First-person accounts of illness have grown widely since Woolf's 1926 essay On Being Ill, but the breakdown she describes still rings true, although it may have more to do with what we expect language to do when confronting pain or distress—and the form we assume it to take—than its functional limits.

As historians we rarely predict the future since we are trained to look at the past, draw lessons from it, and identify turning points in history. The Industrial Revolution, beginning around 1800, was such a turning point with its enormous resource needs, as was the period after 1945 with the rush to exploit fossil fuels on an unparalleled scale. There is a growing realisation that changes to our ecosystems are already damaging the health of populations and the planet. Perspectives from the arts and humanities can help illuminate issues related to the human-induced climate and health crisis.

Nurse who pioneered the enhanced role of the nurse practitioner and introduced the unification model of nurse training. Born in New York City, NY, USA, on Dec 28, 1920, she died on Jan 22, 2025, at her home in Wildwood, FL, USA, aged 104 years.

Lower limb venous disease is a common reason patients see primary care physicians. Presentations vary from varicose veins, to swelling, to venous skin changes (eg, eczema), and to ulceration. The reported prevalence rates are estimated at 40%. Combined with the negative effect on quality of life, and international annual health-care costs in excess of £3 billion a year, venous disease clearly presents a major health-care burden to patients and society.1 International guidelines recommend clinical and cost-effective management strategies: compression therapy applied to the lower limbs and surgical intervention for incompetent or non-functioning veins.

China's persistent decline in fertility rates and the accompanying demographic shift towards an ageing population have brought challenges to the country's health-care system, particularly in the realm of maternal and child health.1 Recently, the Chinese Government implemented a series of policy changes—most notably the three-child policy—in an attempt to address these demographic shifts.2 However, as fertility rates continue to decrease, the evolving needs of pregnant women and children require urgent attention.

On World AIDS Day 2024, UNAIDS proposed use of a human rights-based approach to end the HIV pandemic by 2030.1 Their approach is centred on achieving equity in access to HIV prevention and treatment, and is referred to as Take the Rights Path to End AIDS. As discussed in an Editorial,2 the HIV-1 capsid inhibitor lenacapavir is an important new tool for HIV prevention and should be made accessible to all in need. Many HIV-afflicted resource-constrained countries with generalised epidemics have predominantly rural populations.

In a Correspondence, Jaime Garcia-Iglesias and colleagues1 argue that the term mpox is inconsistently used in Spanish-speaking, French-speaking, and Portuguese-speaking countries. These countries sometimes still use stigmatising names with racist connotations, such as viruela del mono, variole du singe, and variola dos macacos. The authors advocate adopting viruela M, variole M, and variola M instead. Although we understand the authors’ rationale, their proposed nomenclature could cause confusion between mpox and smallpox, which is also known as viruela, variole, and variola.