Media Monitoring: 2nd – 8th October

A common but often undiagnosed genetic condition may be causing delays in type 2 diabetes diagnoses for thousands of Black and South Asian men in the UK – and potentially millions worldwide. These delays in diagnosis and treatment increase the risk of serious complications.
The study found that around 1 in 7 Black and 1 in 63 South Asian men in the UK carry a genetic variant known as G6PD deficiency. Men with G6PD deficiency are, on average, diagnosed with type 2 diabetes 4 years later than those without the gene variant. But despite this, fewer than 1 in 50 have been diagnosed with the condition.
G6PD deficiency does not cause diabetes, but it makes results from the widely used HbA1c blood test – which diagnoses and monitors diabetes – appear artificially low. This can mislead doctors and patients, leading to delayed diabetes diagnosis and treatment.

Health minister Ashley Dalton has opened up about her fight with cancer, warning that “none of us know what’s around the corner”.
The MP for West Lancashire, who is working on Labour’s national cancer plan, was diagnosed with incurable metastatic breast cancer last summer.

The internationally renowned expert in the calculation and communication of risk and statistics, Sir David Spiegelhalter, discusses the concept of a ‘preference zone’ to frame the demands of safety, efficacy and choice in the era of personalised medicine.

The UK Sepsis Trust has commissioned and is fully funding a new study, led by the University of St Andrews, which aims to improve sepsis diagnosis and lead to lifesaving interventions.
The study, entitled Improving Patient Care & Research on Sepsis Scotland (IPCReSS), aims to determine, across an entire population, whether Scottish Electronic Medical Records (EMR) can be used to identify opportunities to diagnose sepsis earlier.
The study will involve new ways of analysing routinely collected datasets to assess the feasibility of diagnosing sepsis earlier. Example datasets include patient vital signs, as well as laboratory results, such as blood results. If successful, the study will then explore the potential of using these findings to predict those patients that are at highest risk of delayed diagnosis of sepsis, paving the way towards earlier intervention. The study will take just over a year, and might well lead to the development of a national Sepsis Registry in Scotland.

A genetic analysis has found that people with autism spectrum disorder diagnosed in late childhood or adolescence actually have “a different form of autism,” not a less severe one, said Varun Warrier, senior author of a study published Wednesday in Nature.
The “genetic profile” of people with late-diagnosis autism actually looks more like depression, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder than early childhood autism, said Warrier, an autism researcher at the University of Cambridge.
The study illustrates that autism is not a single condition with one root cause, but rather an umbrella term for a cluster of conditions with similar — although not identical — features, said Geraldine Dawson, founding director of the Duke Center for Autism and Brain Development, who wasn’t involved in the new report.