Mind & body, in brief

Help that waits on paperwork

In England, NHS care, school support and disability benefits mostly need a diagnosis first, the Fonagy review says. [3] In Los Angeles, many people who qualify for hospital aid never apply, and automatic checks have raised aid by up to half where hospitals use them. [19] In the United Arab Emirates, a suicide attempt is to stop being a crime, and a lawyer says losing that fear can bring people to ask for help sooner. [11]

Hard years showing up in minds

A study of 87,857 people in the UK found distress jumped after the Brexit vote and the first Covid lockdown and never fell back. [8] A WHO survey found more than two in three young Europeans had at least one hard childhood experience, such as abuse or a parent's death. [9] The Fonagy review names money worries, insecure work and unaffordable housing among the causes. [2]

US health rules reopened

US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. opened a clinic at the National Institutes of Health, the US medical research agency, to study vaccine injuries. [12] The FDA said its new safety review of mifepristone, the main abortion pill, will run until March 2027. [13] The FDA let four AI tools be used with Medicare patients, people covered by the US health scheme for over-65s, outside its normal approval route. [38]

More patients than services can see

England's waiting list for planned hospital care rose to 7.37 million treatments at the end of August. [17] Cary Adams, head of the Union for International Cancer Control, said less than half the world's people can reach the services that diagnose disease. [27] Kenya's first Ebola patient passed several airport temperature checks before he died. [20]

One pressure seen across the day runs through Mind & body too.

• US health officials reopening safety questionsBuilding ↑ · seen in 2 beats→

1. 1England's mental health review says young people's distress is real, and help should no longer wait behind a diagnosis
2. 2Five shocks left Britain more distressed
3. 3Two in three young Europeans had a hard childhood
4. 4A US clinic to study vaccine injuries
5. 5FDA's abortion pill review runs into 2027

Prof Peter Fonagy's 607-page review of mental health, ADHD and autism services in England was published on Friday. [1][2]

The next test is the mental health strategy due by the end of the year, which will show whether NHS care and school help can be reached without a diagnosis. [2]

Researchers led by Dr Annie Jeffery at University College London used yearly answers from 87,857 people in a UK household survey, from 2009 to 2024. [8]

They measured distress after five events: the Brexit vote, two Covid lockdowns, Russia's invasion of Ukraine and Liz Truss's 2022 mini-budget, which hurt the UK economy. [8]

The first lockdown did most harm, equal to about 900,000 more people seeing a family doctor for depression. [8] The Brexit vote added about 120,000. [8]

Distress has not fallen back to where it was before 2016. [8]

The study, in the journal BMJ Mental Health, was reported the day before the Fonagy review and points the same way: distress follows what happens to a country, not only to one person. [8]

Monthly NHS referrals for mental health rose from 360,000 in April 2022 to 530,000 in July 2026. [8]

The WHO's office for Europe surveyed more than 26,000 people aged 18 to 30 between November 2025 and January 2026. [9]

More than two in three had lived through at least one of nine hard childhood experiences, such as abuse, a parent's death or violence at home. [9]

More than one in five reported four or more. [9] Of those, 76.3% felt they had needed professional mental health help in the past year, against 36.7% of those with none. [9]

The most exposed were also more likely to say they did not get it. [9]

Long stress in early childhood disturbs how the brain develops and how the body handles stress, the report says. [9]

The WHO's own fact sheet says risks met in early childhood are especially harmful to mental health. [10]

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the US health secretary, who has questioned vaccine safety for years, opened a clinic at the National Institutes of Health on Monday. [12]

It will study people with possible vaccine-related injuries. [12]

Thousands of NIH staff were told to work from home that day, and the clinic was made public only later in the week. [12]

An internal memo seen by NPR says it will follow vaccinated people for complications and may study the childhood vaccine schedule. [12] Kennedy also proposes paying doctors to report vaccine complications. [12]

Vaccine experts such as Michael Osterholm of the University of Minnesota say systems already watch thousands of vaccinated people for side effects. [12]

They fear the clinic is meant to produce data for Kennedy's debunked claim that vaccines cause autism. [12]

People weigh what a diagnosis or a form will bring before they ask for one, so rewards bring more people and penalties bring fewer.

It can also show that a diagnosis now opens more doors, and the count alone cannot tell which.

None of them can count the people who never asked.

The US Food and Drug Administration told a federal court on Wednesday that its safety review of mifepristone, the main abortion pill, will run into next year. [13]

It expects to finish a safety study by mid-December and to report no later than March 2027, then decide whether to add limits. [13] Health secretary Robert F.

Kennedy Jr. ordered the review. [13] The FDA approved the pill in 2000, and a JAMA study in January found its past decisions on it followed the science. [13][15]

In May the US Supreme Court kept the pill available by post while a lawsuit from Louisiana goes on. [14]

Pills by post let women in states that ban abortion get it, which is why opponents want the review to restrict it. [13]

Also seen in Biotech.

The United Arab Emirates will no longer treat attempted suicide as a crime, under changes to its Crimes and Penalties Law reported on 8 October. [11]

A 2020 change had already let judges order mental health treatment instead of prison. [11]

The same changes set three to five years in prison for anyone whose actions push another person to attempt suicide and cause serious injury. [11]

Causing a child under 18 to attempt suicide will be charged as premeditated murder. [11]

Dr Hassan Elhais, a lawyer in the UAE, said removing the fear of prosecution can lead people to seek help earlier. [11]

It also lets families ask for urgent help without worrying that a relative will face charges. [11]

Suicide rates among Black Americans rose by more than 50% over about the past ten years, according to US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data cited by NPR. [18]

Rates among Black young people rose fastest. In 2022 the rate of Black youth suicides by gun passed that of white youth. [18]

Dr Paul Nestadt of the Johns Hopkins Center for Suicide Prevention says reported attempts by young Black people were at their lowest in years in 2025. [18]

Deaths rose anyway, he says, because more homes now hold guns. [18]

A gun turns far more attempts into deaths, so a fall in attempts and a rise in deaths can happen together. [18]

Nestadt ties the rise to a jump in gun buying from 2020, and says suicide is often a sudden act that can be interrupted. [18]

A 20-year-old man in Wajir County, in Kenya's north-east, tested negative for Ebola in early results announced on Thursday by the county governor. [20]

He had travelled from the Democratic Republic of the Congo through Uganda, the same route as the Kenyan man who died of Ebola in Nairobi this week. [20]

The outbreak in eastern Congo has killed at least 4,205 people among more than 8,700 cases. [20] It is caused by the Bundibugyo strain, for which no vaccine exists. [20]

Kenya's first case passed several airport temperature checks before he died, so the WHO is helping Kenya tighten checks on travellers. [20]

Kenya is the fourth country with a case linked to this outbreak. [20]

England's waiting list for planned hospital treatment rose for a second month, to about 7.37 million treatments for 6.24 million patients at the end of August. [17]

That is the highest since October 2025, even though the NHS did a record 4.7 million planned treatments over the summer. [17]

In September, 50,582 people waited more than 12 hours in A&E between a decision to admit them and a bed. [17]

NHS England's medical director, Prof Frankie Swords, said more people than usual are arriving with flu this early. [17]

The UK government's target of treating 92% of patients within 18 weeks by 2029 has not been met for a decade. [17]

The group that represents NHS hospitals says it will be missed again. [17]

Zambia signed a five-year health funding deal with the United States in Lusaka, its capital, on Thursday. [21]

The US will give about $1.5bn, and with Zambia's share the total is reported at $3.6bn. [21][22]

Clauses that would have sent Zambian biological samples to the US were removed, and patient records will not be shared, health minister Roma Chilengi said. [21]

Zambia's government said the deal is not tied to US access to Zambia's minerals. [22]

Since closing USAID, its aid agency, the US has asked African countries to pay a growing share of their own health care while its money is phased out. [21][22]

Ghana and Zimbabwe turned such deals down over data and sample sharing. [21]

China has nominated Song Li, a senior public health official, to lead the World Health Organization, the UN health agency, its foreign ministry said on Thursday. [23]

She works on care for mothers and children and was involved in the responses to SARS and Covid-19. [23]

Member countries will elect a successor to Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in May; he cannot run for a third term. [23]

Other candidates include Hans Kluge of Belgium, Maria Neira of Spain and Hanan Balkhy of Saudi Arabia. [23]

The United States left the WHO after Donald Trump returned to office in January 2025. [24]

Questions remain over China's openness about Covid-19, and Tedros has urged it to share early virus sequences. [24]

Dr Zainab Shinkafi-Bagudu, a Nigerian children's doctor, is president-elect of the Union for International Cancer Control, which links more than 1,100 cancer groups in over 170 countries. [27]

She is the first African to lead it. [27] The WHO's cancer agency counted 20.6 million new cancer cases and 9.8 million deaths in 2024. [27]

It forecasts cases rising 67% to more than 34 million by 2050, with most extra deaths in poorer countries. [27]

Only 14% of the 73 million people a year who need palliative care, which eases pain and symptoms, get it, figures at the World Cancer Congress showed. [27]

Bagudu says new cancer centres are not enough without screening, medicines and protection from treatment bills. [27]

A paper published on nature.com proposes a way the Covid virus could lead to diabetes. [35]

Proteins from the virus stuck to IAPP, a hormone made alongside insulin, and made it clump into stiff threads. [35]

In infected older macaque monkeys, these clumps filled the insulin-making cells and many of the cells died. [35] Younger infected monkeys showed little of this damage. [35]

In lab cells, the virus proteins cut the amount of insulin held. [35]

Diabetes cases have risen since the pandemic, the authors note, and this offers one possible route. [35] It was shown in monkeys and lab cells, not in people. [35]

Life Biosciences released the first safety data on Thursday from a human trial of cell reprogramming, a method that switches on genes to return old cells to a younger state. [30]

Three people with glaucoma, an eye disease that can cause blindness, got an eye injection plus eight weeks of daily antibiotics that turn the genes on. [30]

None had major side effects, the company said. [30] Two of the three improved on a standard eye exam. [30]

A safety board approved tripling the dose for the next group. [30]

Dr James Tsai, a glaucoma specialist not involved, called it exciting but very early, and said the gains may come from stronger signals in eyes that still had some sight. [30]

Rival companies backed by Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel are racing toward their own human trials. [30]

US federal health agencies are piloting AI tools that talk to patients, give therapy, diagnose and adjust treatment with less direct doctor involvement, KFF, a US health research group, reports. [38]

More than 200 companies have approval from CMS, the agency that runs Medicare, to test such tools, KFF says, citing The New York Times. [38]

The FDA allowed four of them for Medicare patients outside its usual approval route. [38] One is a chatbot that delivers cognitive behavioural therapy, a talking treatment for anxiety and depression. [38]

Of 950 AI devices the FDA had cleared by late 2024, 60 were recalled a combined 182 times, a 2025 study in JAMA Health Forum found. [38]

The American Medical Association says AI should support doctors, not replace them. [38]

About 800,000 people in Los Angeles County have medical bills they cannot pay, county public health officials estimate. [19]

Hospitals usually offer aid to low-income patients, but many who qualify never apply, because the information is hard to get and applying is slow. [19]

The county is helping hospitals check every patient for aid automatically, using public data such as credit history. [19]

Hospitals that already do this have given up to 50% more aid, says Dr Naman Shah, who leads the work. [19]

A California law makes all hospitals do it by next July. [19]

Unpaid bills lead people to skip prescriptions and appointments, which makes them sicker, Shah says. [19] Only about one in five hospitals in the county uses automatic checks today. [19]

Northwestern University researchers followed the fathers of all 130,267 babies born in the US state of Georgia in 2017, for five years. [31]

796 fathers died, and 60% of those deaths had preventable causes: killings, accidents, suicide and overdose. [31] Yet fathers died less often than men who were not fathers. [31]

At ages 30 to 34, the death rate was 120 per 100,000 for fathers and 231 for other men. [31] The study is in JAMA Pediatrics. [31]

US committees review the deaths of mothers around a birth, but nothing like that exists for fathers. [31]

A national count is not possible because names are removed when birth and death records are combined. [31]

A new Maryland law requires radiologists to tell patients when a mammogram, the breast X-ray used to look for cancer, shows calcium in the walls of breast arteries. [16]

These white flecks are not linked to breast cancer, but they can be a sign of heart and blood vessel disease. [16]

Result letters must now say yes or no, and suggest talking to a regular doctor about heart risk. [16]

Dr Lisa Mullen of Johns Hopkins University, who helped draft it, said reporting had been optional, with no national guideline. [16]

Two other Johns Hopkins breast radiologists opposed the law, saying there is no standard next step and it adds worry. [16]

The letter says only whether the calcium is there, not how much. [16]

The WHO marked World Mental Health Day, 10 October, with a webinar on 9 October and a new guide to moving care out of psychiatric hospitals and into communities. [25]

This year's theme is lived experience. [25] The WHO wants people who have had mental health conditions to help shape services and policy. [25][26]

Its office for the Eastern Mediterranean says more than 1 billion people live with a mental health condition. [26] These conditions cause one in six years lived with disability worldwide. [26]

The guide is about moving people with long-term mental illness out of large psychiatric hospitals and into care in their own communities. [25]

Ian Russell's 14-year-old daughter Molly took her own life in 2017 after viewing harmful content on Instagram. [29]

He will appear in a 30-second advert before UK screenings of The Social Reckoning, a film about the Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, which opened on Friday. [29]

In it he says too little has changed and asks viewers to support the Molly Rose Foundation, the charity set up in her name. [29]

Cinema advertiser Pearl & Dean gave the space free. [29]

Haugen's leaks included Meta's own research finding that Instagram content harmed some teenage girls' mental health. [29]

The company said at the time that the coverage focused on a limited set of findings. [29]

Yale researchers led by Chuan-Ju Liu tested lacosamide, an approved epilepsy drug, against osteoarthritis, the joint disease where cartilage wears away. [34]

The drug blocks Nav1.7, a protein that carries pain signals and, they found, also pushes cartilage cells to break tissue down. [34]

At a low dose it eased pain and made cartilage cells build tissue instead of breaking it down. [34]

In preclinical tests, done before any trial in people, one injection in a gel every four weeks prevented cartilage loss better than a daily pill. [34]

No approved medicine both stops osteoarthritis pain and halts cartilage loss, Liu says. [34] Because the drug is already approved for people, trials in osteoarthritis could start sooner. [34]

Radiologists at Seoul National University Bundang Hospital in South Korea trained an AI model on 46,478 chest X-rays paired with bone density scans. [36]

Osteoporosis, bone thinned until it breaks easily, is usually measured with a separate bone density scan called DXA. [36]

In two large health check-up groups, of 24,132 and 122,535 people, the model spotted osteoporosis with high accuracy. [36]

A simulation suggested it could halve the number of DXA scans while still catching 98 to 99% of cases. [36]

Chest X-rays are taken for many other reasons, so a picture already on file could flag who needs a bone scan. [36]

Researchers mapped which genes are switched on, cell by cell and in place, in endometriosis lesions from the ovary and the lining of the belly, in a paper published on 9 October. [37]

Endometriosis is tissue like the womb lining growing outside the womb, and it affects about one in ten people born female. [37]

The map found immune cells, rings of support cells around glands, and pain-sensing nerve cells close to immune cells. [37]

They tested the link by growing nerve cells beside endometriosis cells in the lab. [37]

What drives endometriosis pain is poorly understood, the authors say. [37] Knowing where nerves meet immune cells gives new treatments a place to aim. [37]

A review led by Prof Ian Givens of the University of Reading pooled 10 controlled diet trials and 12 long-term studies of the natural trans fats in milk, butter and cheese. [33]

In the trials, people eating 1.3 to 13.2 grams a day showed no meaningful change in the blood fats linked to heart risk. [33]

In the long-term studies, higher blood levels of dairy trans fats were not linked to heart disease, stroke or type 2 diabetes. [33]

Industrial trans fats from partly hardened oils remain strongly linked to heart disease. [33]

The authors say the finding could make food labels clearer, since labels often treat all trans fats alike. [33]

In a KFF survey of 3,538 US women aged 18 to 49, 15% said they or a partner had ever needed help to get pregnant or prevent a miscarriage. [39]

11% had received some help, mostly advice, tests or drugs to help ovulation, and few had used IVF. [39] 3% said they could not get the care they needed. [39]

No federal rule says health insurance must cover fertility care, and the Trump administration has not proposed one. [39]

IVF is costly and insurance often does not cover it, so cost decides much of who gets it. [39]