By Nick Triggle Health correspondent, BBC News

Sir David Nicholson has led the NHS for the past seven years

The head of the NHS in England Sir David Nicholson is stepping down from the post next year.

Sir David has announced he will retire in March 2014 from his position as chief executive of NHS England.

He has already spent seven years in charge of the NHS, but in recent months has found himself under attack for his role in the Stafford Hospital scandal.

He spent 10 months in charge of the regional health authority in 2005 and 2006 – at the height of the problems.

By Nick Triggle Health correspondent, BBC News

Pressures have been growing on A&E units for a number of years

A&E is on a “cliff edge”, NHS leaders say as MPs begin an inquiry into the state of emergency care in England.

The warning by NHS Confederation chief executive Mike Farrar comes as the Health Select Committee holds its first hearing on the issue.

He said if the pressures continued to grow, the workload would become “simply impossible” to deal with.

Meanwhile, the Independent reports that A&E chiefs in the West Midlands say they can no longer guarantee safety.

In a letter sent to NHS managers across the region and seen by the newspaper, emergency care managers said they were finding themselves in a position where the delivery of unsafe care was happening on “too frequent a basis”.

The latest warnings come after weeks of mounting concern.

The Care Quality Commission has already said it believes the rise in demand for A&E is unsustainable, while NHS England is carrying out a review of the problems.

Attendances have risen by 50% over the past decade, and this winter large parts of the health service started missing the four-hour waiting time target.

There have even been reports of temporary waiting areas being set up in hospital car parks and store rooms.

It has been described as the most challenging period for A&E for a decade.

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NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – People will choose larger portions of food if they are labeled as being “healthier,” even if they have the same number of calories, according to a new study.

“People think (healthier food) is lower in calories,” said Pierre Chandon, a marketing professor at the INSEAD Social Science Research Center in France, and they “tend to consume more of it.”

That misconception can lead to people eating larger portion sizes of so-called healthy foods, and therefore more calories.

“Foods are marketed as being healthier for a reason, because food producers believe, and they correctly believe, that those labels will influence us to eat their products and perhaps eat more of their products,” said Dr. Cliodhna Foley Nolan the director of Human Health and Nutrition at Safefood, a government agency in Ireland.

Safefood commissioned the study, led by Barbara Livingstone, a professor at the University of Ulster.

Foley Nolan said that the portion sizes of food have become larger over the years, and Safefood wanted to see whether health and nutrition claims had any influence.

The researchers asked 186 adults to assess the appropriate portion sizes of foods.

Given a bowl of coleslaw, the participants served themselves more of the coleslaw labeled “healthier” than the coleslaw labeled “standard.”

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NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – A new study has confirmed that removing the tonsils and adenoids of children with obstructive sleep apnea can reduce sleepiness and improve the quality of life, but putting off the surgery might not hurt either.

The study is the first controlled test to compare the operation with so-called watchful waiting as a strategy for stopping childhood obstructive sleep apnea syndrome, where the structures in the back of the mouth can temporarily block breathing during sleep.

The findings, released May 21 at an American Thoracic Society International Conference in Philadelphia, and appearing online in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that after seven months, surgery improved many gauges of everyday living.

“Improvements in emotional regulation, attention, organizational skills, reduced sleepiness, improved quality of life including socialization and physical and emotional wellbeing were quite large, larger than we anticipated,” coauthor Dr. Susan Redline of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston told Reuters Health.

Yet when the children were formally tested, youngsters in both groups performed equally well, an indication that the sleep disturbance wasn’t causing any measurable cognitive problems.

“Where you objectively measure these cognitive tasks, children can do fairly well in that motivated and structured environment” whether or not they have surgery, she said. “It shows that over a 7-month period of watchful waiting, cognition does not decline.”

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NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – People will choose larger portions of food if they are labeled as being “healthier,” even if they have the same number of calories, according to a new study.

“People think (healthier food) is lower in calories,” said Pierre Chandon, a marketing professor at the INSEAD Social Science Research Center in France, and they “tend to consume more of it.”

That misconception can lead to people eating larger portion sizes of so-called healthy foods, and therefore more calories.

“Foods are marketed as being healthier for a reason, because food producers believe, and they correctly believe, that those labels will influence us to eat their products and perhaps eat more of their products,” said Dr. Cliodhna Foley Nolan the director of Human Health and Nutrition at Safefood, a government agency in Ireland.

Safefood commissioned the study, led by Barbara Livingstone, a professor at the University of Ulster.

Foley Nolan said that the portion sizes of food have become larger over the years, and Safefood wanted to see whether health and nutrition claims had any influence.

The researchers asked 186 adults to assess the appropriate portion sizes of foods.

Given a bowl of coleslaw, the participants served themselves more of the coleslaw labeled “healthier” than the coleslaw labeled “standard.”

Read the rest of this article...