How To Avoid Middle-Aged Spread: Go To Private School
The title of this post, is the same as that of this article in The Times.
This is the sub-heading.
In their mid-forties, those who were educated privately are more likely to be a healthy weight and have lower blood pressure, the research found
These two paragraphs give some more details.
People who go to private school or a Russell Group university are healthier and slimmer in middle age, research has shown.
In their mid-forties, those who were educated privately are more likely to be a healthy weight, have lower blood pressure and perform better on a cognitive task than those who went to state schools.
Note.
- I went to a good grammar school and a Russell Group University.
- So did my late wife!
- Both us were slim and fairly fit until our late fifties.
The research was from University College London.
Can I Please Have A Good Night’s Sleep?
In all my seventy-six years, I’ve never had trouble getting to sleep. I can sleep on trains and in planes and like my father, I have no trouble going to sleep in a hard upright chair.
But everything changed two weeks ago. I would go to bed at my usual 23:00 and perhaps drop off for a quarter if an hour and then start to lie there fully awake.
Normally, I now get up at about two-thirty and do the puzzles in The Times.
Welcome to the chewed-string lifestyle.
I’ve tried herbal sleeping tables, but they don’t help!
I went to see my GP and she made no suggestions.
Can I Please Have A Good Night’s Sleep?
Council Wants To Only Serve Vegan Food At Events
The title of this post, is the same as that of this article on the BBC.
This is the sub-heading.
A West Yorkshire council will only provide vegan food at its meetings and events if a new catering plan is approved.
These three paragraphs explain the policy.
Calderdale Council wants its menus to be entirely plant-based, with a preference for seasonal and non-processed foods.
The council adopted a climate change emergency policy in 2020, which included a commitment to using plant-based catering.
Senior councillors will be asked to recommend that the vegan food scheme is adopted at a meeting on 3 June.
I am coeliac and have to eat a gluten-free diet. Sometimes, I will eat meals marked as vegan, but only after I have checked they are gluten-free.
A couple of times in my life, I have been told that I will be fine with a restaurants’s organic vegan food.
These incidents weren’t in the UK and I quickly moved on to a restaurant, which served food, that I could eat.
But you don’t know, where these sort of restrictions will lead.
- Suppose a Muslim-dominated council, insisted that all women kept their hair covered.
- Or all butcher’s shops in the area were to be closed!
- Will the local hosputal have to serve vegan food?
Any restaurant or catering facility, must serve, what its patrons want or need to eat.
An Incident In My Childhood
I must have been about five or six.
All I can remember, is that she found me very red all over, grabbed me and took me upstairs where she put me in a bath.
I don’t think, she called the doctor.
I now wonder, if the incident was when a low-pressure went over and it drained the water out of my body.
Last night, there was rain in the night, and I’ve woken up with a pain in my hip. I shall have a bath soon.
Strangely, none of my three boys seemed to suffer similar incidents. So perhaps, they don’t have my strange leaky skin?
Last Night, I Had A Very Bad Night’s Sleep
I usually sleep very well. In fact like my father, if I need a nap, I can even take it on a hard upright chair.
He would have a nap like this every day in his printworks. It also looks like my 53 year old middle son has this ability to take a quick nap.
Last night, I slept very badly and woke about two, with a pain in my hip.
I nearly phoned 111, as I felt so rough. Luckily I didn’t!
I didn’t get much more sleep and eventually had perhaps a nap of an hour or so, before I gave up and got out of bed to do a few puzzles on the Internet.
After a large mug of tea, the pain in my hip receded.
My now-retired GP, reckoned I suffered when the atmospheric pressure was low.
So, did an area of low pressure pass through last night and suck water out of my body?
After a good bath, I certainly feel better now, with no pain in my hip.
In My Strange Skin, I describe an incident, where weather sucked water out of my body!
It’s Now Ten O’Clock
I’ve survived the day and managed to take a train to Reading and back.
I had intended to take pictures in Oxford, but when I got to Reading, it was raining hard and I turned back.
Should All Hospital In-Patients Be Tested For Coeliac Disease?
I went to a medical lecture tonight and I came home on the tube with a cardiologist. As we chatted, the title of this post occurred to me.
Consider.
- A diagnosed coeliac on a gluten-free diet tends to have a stronger immune system.
- I am a diagnosed coeliac on a gluten-free diet.
- An undiagnosed coeliac tends to have a poor immune system.
- It would certainly mean, you got the right diet in hospital.
I also have some further more detailed thoughts.
My Son, George
NHS advice on those, who need to be tested for coeliac disease includes this sentence.
Testing is also recommended if you have a first-degree relative (parent, sibling or child) with coeliac disease.
When I was diagnosed as a coeliac in 1997, I told my three sons to get tested. None did!
A month or so before he did, George ended up in Trafford Park Hospital.
If they had tested him, would they have picked up his pancreatic cancer earlier?
Probably not, but it’s a question that must be asked.
Research From The University Of Padua
This paper on the US National Library of Medicine, which is from the University of Padua in Italy.
The University followed a group of 138 patients with coeliac disease, who had been on a gluten-free diet for at least six years, through the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic in Padua.
This sentence, sums up the study.
In this analysis we report a real life “snapshot” of a cohort of CeD patients during the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak in Italy, all followed in one tertiary centre in a red area of Northern Italy. Our data show, in accordance with Emmi et al., the absolute absence of COVID-19 diagnosis in our population, although 18 subjects experienced flu-like symptoms with only one having undergone naso-pharyngeal swab.
It says that no test subject caught Covid-19, in an admittedly smallish number of patients.ost
But it reinforces my call for more research into whether if you are a diagnosed coeliac on a long-term gluten-free diet, you have an immune system, that gives you a degree of protection from the Covids.
Conditions Linked To Coeliac Disease
This page on the Coeliac UK web site is entitled Conditions Linked To Coeliac Disease, has the following subsections.
- Autoimmune Disease
- Type 1 Diabetes
- Autoimmune Thyroid Disease
- Down’s and Turner Syndrome
- Osteoporosis
- Lactose Intolerance
- Lymphoma And Small Bowel Cancer
- Autism
- Fertility
Some of the keywords are linked to other pages on the Coeliac UK web site.
Testing For Coeliac Disease
Testing for coeliac disease is not an expensive process and just involves a simple blood test, where the blood goes to the lab.
My now-retired GP reckoned in nearly all cases, the test is decisive.
Dr. David Owen And The NHS Infected Blood Scandal
I am writing this post, mainly using Dr. David Owen’s Wikipedia entry.
This paragraph describes Dr. Owen’s early days as a minister in Harold Wilson’s first government and the early days of Harold Wilson’s second government
From 1968 to 1970, Owen served as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for the Navy in Harold Wilson’s first government. After Labour’s defeat in the 1970 general election, he became the party’s Junior Defence Spokesman until 1972 when he resigned with Roy Jenkins over Labour’s opposition to the European Community. On Labour’s return to government in March 1974, he became Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Health before being promoted to Minister of State for Health in July 1974.
There is also this paragraph describing his involvement as Minister of State for Health in the NHS Infected Blood Scandal.
As Minister of State for Health he encouraged Britain to become “self-sufficient” in blood products such as Factor VIII, a recommendation also promoted by the World Health Organisation. This was principally due to the risk of Hepatitis infection from high-risk blood donors overseas who were often paid and from “skid-row” locations. David Owen has been outspoken that his policy of “Self-Sufficiency” was not put into place (although he was, himself, Minister of Health) and gave rise to the Tainted Blood Scandal which saw 5,000 British Haemophiliacs infected with Hepatitis C, 1,200 of those were also infected with HIV. It was later described in the House of Lords as “the worst treatment disaster in the history of the National Health Service”.
So why did Dr. Owen’s and the World Health Organisation’s view of making the UK “self-sufficient” in blood products such as Factor VIII not prevail?
Did Sir Brian Langstaff and his team go through minutes of cabinet meetings, when Dr. David Owen was Minister of State for Health?
Did Harold Wilson or the Chancellor; Denis Healey overrule David Owen’s view, as they needed what little money we had for other purposes?
I must admit, that if I had been in Dr. Owen’s position in 1974 and the Government were proposing to something against, my engineering experience, I would have resigned. Note that Dr. Owen did resign in 1972, over Labour’s opposition to the European Community.
If any doctors are reading this, who were qualified at the time, I’d like to hear their views.
Conclusion
One way to ascertain the truth, would be to charge Dr. Owen with something serious and led the Law decide.
Thoughts On The NHS Infected Blood Scandal
In the early 1970s, I was working with the Chief Management Accountant of a retail bank, writing a computer system to analyse and compare the performance and costs of all their branches.
We used scatter diagrams and other graphical techniques to show all the branches on single sheets produced by line printers on a powerful time-shared computer. It would be so much easier today.
Any branch not following the rules was often found sitting alone away from the mass of branches on the graphs.
I remember one branch had costs, that were much higher than expected. It turned out it was the Stevenage Branch, where the premises were rented rather than owned freehold.
Expanding The System To Other Industries
The Accountant, who had also been Chief Accountant of a FTSE 500 company, felt that the techniques we had developed had other applications in the management and auditing of large companies and organisations.
Sadly my partner in crime, died of cancer and I went on to other things.
From my own generally good family experiences of the NHS, I feel that this sort of analysis used rigorously could give early warning of some of the scandals we’ve seen in the NHS.
Around the turn of the century, I used similar techniques to improve the manufacturing quality in a diesel engine factory.
Conclusion
Perhaps we need an independent Office of NHS Responsibility?
Gluten Sensitivity And Epilepsy: A Systematic Review
Yesterday, The Times published this article, which was entitled ‘Game-Changing’ NHS Laser Therapy To Prevent Epileptic Seizures.
One reader had made this comment.
Be ace too if they can tweak to help migraine.
I used to suffer from something like migraine about thirty years ago. But after being found to be coeliac and going gluten-free, what ever it was seemed to disappear from my life.
Type “Coeliac Disease and Migraine” into Dr. Google and there are lots of references.
This indicates to me that serious scientists and doctors, must believe there could be a link.
There certainly is with me and going gluten-free eased my migraine-like symptoms.
I then typed “Coeliac Disease and Epilepsy” into Dr. Google and found this paper, which was entitled Gluten Sensitivity And Epilepsy: A Systematic Review.
This information is from the Abstract of the paper
Objective
The aim of this systematic review was to establish the prevalence of epilepsy in patients with coeliac disease (CD) or gluten sensitivity (GS) and vice versa and to characterise the phenomenology of the epileptic syndromes that these patients present with.
Methodology
A systematic computer-based literature search was conducted on the PubMed database. Information regarding prevalence, demographics and epilepsy phenomenology was extracted.
Results
Epilepsy is 1.8 times more prevalent in patients with CD, compared to the general population. CD is over 2 times more prevalent in patients with epilepsy compared to the general population. Further studies are necessary to assess the prevalence of GS in epilepsy. The data indicate that the prevalence of CD or GS is higher amongst particular epileptic presentations including in childhood partial epilepsy with occipital paroxysms, in adult patients with fixation off sensitivity (FOS) and in those with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) with hippocampal sclerosis. A particularly interesting presentation of epilepsy in the context of gluten-related disorders is a syndrome of coeliac disease, epilepsy and cerebral calcification (CEC syndrome) which is frequently described in the literature. Gluten-free diet (GFD) is effective in the management of epilepsy in 53% of cases, either reducing seizure frequency, enabling reduced doses of antiepileptic drugs or even stopping antiepileptic drugs.
Conclusion
Patients with epilepsy of unknown aetiology should be investigated for serological markers of gluten sensitivity as such patients may benefit from a GFD.
My Thoughts
These are my thoughts.
Coeliacs Prior To 1960
Consider.
- Even if my excellent GP; Doctor Egerton White, felt I was coeliac, there was no test until 1960 for coeliac disease.
- And the test that was developed using endoscopy wasn’t anywhere near to the endoscopies of the present day.
- My late wife, who was a family barrister, likened the test to child abuse on a young child.
- I have heard some terrible horror stories of doctors looking for coeliac disease in young children in the 1950s.
- But there were some successes. A friend of mine, who is in her eighties, was successfully diagnosed by her parents using food elimination. But they were both GPs.
- Recently, I’ve met two elderly ladies, who only in the last couple of years have been diagnosed as coeliacs.
Luckily, I was never tested until 1997 and I was diagnosed in 48 hours, by gene testing.
Methodology
The methodology was based on a systematic computer-based literature search of the PubMed database.
This has these advantages.
- The rules for the search can be published and peer-reviewed.
- Its Wikipedia entry says PubMed is a free database including primarily the MEDLINE database of references and abstracts on life sciences and biomedical topics.
- The technique can surely be applied repeatedly, to see how results are changing with time.
- The search can be modified to analyse any topic, drug or condition, that appears in the PubMed database.
- The analysis could surely be applied to other databases.
As a writer of data analysis software, developing this sort of software, would be really enjoyable.
AstraZeneca Withdraws Covid Vaccine After Drop In Demand
The title of this post, is the same as that of this article on The Times.
This is the first paragraph.
AstraZeneca is withdrawing its Covid-19 vaccine worldwide, citing a “surplus of available updated vaccines” since the pandemic that target newer variants of the virus.
This was my experience of the vaccine.
I am coeliac and have a very strong immune system, as it gets all the fuel it needs.
When I had my first AZ vaccine, my immune system started to attack the chimpanzee adenovirus-based viral vector vaccine.
I felt dreadful and I’ve now been advised by doctors, not to have any more viral vector vaccines.
Interestingly, I had no reaction to the second dose, so my immune system had probably decided it was a friend.
When I had that second dose, there was all the controversy raging, about whether the AZ vaccine causes blood clots.
So I did an experiment, which I described in My INR Readings Before And After My Second AstraZeneca Jab.
I found that my INT bounced all over place, just as when a wheel hits a pothole.
Conclusion
I shall not be taking the AstraZeneca Vaccine for COVID-19 again and would think twice before allowing myself to be injected with a viral vector vaccine.
The Anonymous Widower 