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Inside Health

Factual: Health & Wellbeing

Series that demystifies health issues, bringing clarity to conflicting advice.

Series that demystifies health issues, separating fact from fiction and bringing clarity to conflicting health advice.

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Inside Health: Stroke man recovers speech, Apple watch and ECGs, Newborn heel prick test

25/09/2018

Stroke man recovers speech, Apple watch and ECGs, Newborn heel prick test

BBC Radio 4 - Inside Health, Stroke man recovers speech, Apple watch and ECGs, Newborn heel prick test

How one stroke robbed a man of speech and four years later another stroke brought it back

After a stroke Peter lost the ability to speak. For four years he wrote notes to communicate. But after a second stroke, he could suddenly talk again. He tells his remarkable story

Four years ago, Peter, a retired engineer from Gloucestershire, suffered a small stroke and lost the ability to speak. He communicated by hand signals and writing notes to his wife, Carol. But this summer, as he tells Dr Mark Porter, he woke up one morning and, much to everybody's amazement, began to talk....and he hasn't stopped since. Later that same day, a second stroke was diagnosed but his newly-returned speech was unaffected. It's a remarkable story and Alex Leff, Professor of Cognitive Neurology at the Queen Square Institute of Neurology in London discusses Peter's experience but describes what usually happens when stroke patients experience aphasia. 

We're all familiar with devices like FitBits and gym monitors that measure your pulse rate but the latest development in wearable tech is a watch that monitors your heart. The latest Apple watch will offer ECG-like capabilities which can spot potentially worrying disturbances in heart rhythm. But Inside Health's Dr Margaret McCartney has serious concerns about the use of such tech for screening in healthy populations. 

If you're under 50 you've almost certainly had it. The heel prick test or NHS newborn blood spot screening programme is done during the first week of life and it's designed to detect nine different conditions before they can cause symptoms or irreversible damage in young children. Dr Elaine Murphy is a consultant in inherited metabolic diseases at the Charles Dent Metabolic Unit at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in London and she tells Mark about the history of the heel prick test and describes the original condition, phenylketonuria or PKU, that the 1969 test was designed to detect. 

Producer: Fiona Hill

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