Isabel Healthcare Blog

This Sunday 7th April is World Health Day, with the World Health Organization (WHO) setting out a theme on which the whole world can focus, campaign for and work towards. It’s a cause we’ve supported for a long time now, blogging about our thoughts, actions and efforts on each year’s theme. We’ve written about a variety of the topics over the years, such as food poisoning, diabetes and mental health, and this year the theme chosen by WHO is in fact the same as 2018: Universal Health Coverage (UHC). It’s a big topic and one at the heart of WHO since the organization’s inception over 70 years ago. Since the historic UN summit of 2015, there are also a staggering 193 countries who have pledged to make UHC a reality by 2030 as part of the 17 sustainable development goals, so it’s no wonder WHO have made ‘health for all’ their main focus 2 years running.

This month saw World Tuberculosis (TB) day on 24th March 2019. Most people hear the word TB and think of the ‘olden days’ and Jane Austen novels, reflecting a time when many people would die of ‘consumption’ as it was called then. Little was known about this deadly disease, other than it gave the patient a terrible cough, eventually leading to them coughing blood and then declining quite rapidly until their lungs could no longer breathe. Today, we would not think of TB as one of the top medical issues facing patients and doctors, but the World Health Organization (WHO) states that it is still the leading infectious killer globally. It is true that developing countries have the highest prevalence of cases, and therefore highest death-rates, but did you know that there are around 9,000 recorded cases of TB in the USA and 6,000 in the UK, every year?

Dementia is not actually a specific disease, but rather a term that describes the significant loss of cognitive functioning and intellectual abilities which are severe enough to interfere with a person’s social or occupational functioning.

March is Ovarian Cancer Awareness Month in the UK, so we wanted to help charities raise awareness of this often frequently misdiagnosed condition. Ovarian cancer is the 4^th most common cause of cancer death amongst women in the UK, and 5^th in the US. It’s reputation as ‘the silent killer’ is somewhat accurate, as the majority of women don’t notice symptoms or aren’t diagnosed until the cancer has already spread, making treatment much more challenging. If diagnosed at its earliest stage, up to 90% of women survive 5 years or more but sadly this is just not happening. Figures currently reveal that of the 7,300 cases of the disease in the UK, 4,100 women will die. The UK currently has one of the worst survival rates in Europe. In the US, the figures are hardly any more positive, with nearly 14,000 deaths out of over 22,500 diagnoses each year.

It’s World Book Day today, where we celebrate the wonderful written word, and discuss our favorite pieces of literature. Children everywhere dress up as their favorite book characters, encouraging more reading in the young and in adults. We wanted to celebrate World Book Day this year by presenting you with some of our choices of books in the healthcare world. At Isabel we’re passionate about improving diagnosis, healthcare and technology, patient and doctor relationships, and the wellbeing of doctors. Our ‘reading list’ reflects this mission, and we hope you’ll consider reading some or all of our selection this World Book Day.

On the Isabel healthcare blog, one of our main aims is to educate, inform and raise awareness about personal health, enabling people to understand their own symptoms or recognize them in loved ones, and open up fruitful discussions with their medical providers. This can include symptoms, causes and diagnosis information on a huge variety of conditions and diseases. These discussions can be on common afflictions such as fevers, or intimidating cancers, rare diseases such as kawasaki disease, and mental health. Mental health particularly has become much more at the forefront of all medicine, as we deal with the ever-growing pressures of modern life and the stresses on our mind that this can take.

Frequent urination (urinary frequency) is the need to pass urine many times during the day, or during the night where the term nocturia is used.  Most people urinate 6 or 7 times in 24 hours.  Both urinary frequency and nocturia result in more frequent urination, and this can either be more frequent but with less volume of urine, or more frequent with the same volume of urine as usual. Urinary frequency is therefore defined as needing to urinate more than 8 times in a period of 24 hours whilst drinking about 2 litres of fluid.  Urinary frequency may be accompanied by the constant or frequent sensation of feeling the need to pass urine urgently. This symptom results from lower genitourinary tract disorders and bladder inflammation, which can cause the sensation of needing to urinate. This sensation doesn’t disappear when the bladder is emptied and patients experiencing urinary frequency continue trying to void but only pass small amounts of urine.  Frequent urination can affect your sleep, work and generally how you feel.

UK footballer Jonathan Walters hit the headlines recently when he bravely took to social media to tweet, not about his footwork skills on the pitch, but about his experience with a recent bowel screening test. In a bid to encourage more people to get checked, Walters spoke about the heartache of losing his mother at a young age to the disease, using Twitter to get his message out in a series of humorous tweets about the procedures used for bowel screening.

January 21st-27th was cervical cancer prevention week in the UK, where charities everywhere try to educate and raise awareness of cervical cancer, HPV vaccines and smear tests. We’ve written about cervical cancer and screenings for the disease before, so we won’t go into too many details about the symptoms and causes, but we did want to highlight the brilliant campaign that Jo’s Cervical Cancer Trust have been running this year, called #SmearforSmear

Encephalitis is a rare, acute brain disease which affects around 1 in every 200,000 people each year. Anyone can contract encephalitis, but it is most common in children, the elderly and those with a lowered immune system. There are many different types of encephalitis, and it is difficult to treat, meaning prognosis varies. Some people make a full recovery, others experience small changes to their brain, memory, mood or physical capabilities. For a small amount of people, encephalitis has a severe impact on their day to day life.