Study: Doctors are becoming overwhelmed by constant visits from ‘frequent attenders’

December 23, 2021

Is there such a thing as going to the doctor too much? A new study by reearchers at the University of Manchester in England finds that family doctors are being overwhelmed by “frequent attenders”—who, they estimate, visit their practices five times more often than other patients, reports Study Finds.

Based on the recent study, these individuals make up around 40% of consultations. This isn’t a new trend either. The proportion of medical “regulars” has soared over the past two decades, years before the emergence of COVID-19.

“A relatively small number of patients are accounting for a large proportion of GP workload including face-to-face consultations,” says corresponding author Professor Evangelos Kontopantelis in a media release.

“Frequent attenders appear to be a major driver for the increase in consultations that have contributed to perceptions of increased workload in general practice,” the study author adds. “GPs should be looking at this group of patients more closely to understand who they are and why they are consulting more frequently.”

The findings come from an analysis of nearly 1.7 billion doctor’s appointments involving just 12.3 million patients over 20 years. The results also come after the pandemic has caused severe disruptions to medical practices over the last two years.

GPs have repeatedly sounded the alarm on the increasing pressures of an aging population, the complexity of care, and initiatives to shift treatment from hospitals into the community. A poll earlier this year found that doctors were working 11 hours a day on average and seeing 37 patients — a third more than what experts consider safe.

In-person care rose from an average of 38% between 2000 and 2001, to 43% between 2018 and 2019—and from an average of 38% to 40% for all practice staff.

The Manchester team drew on anonymized information in the Clinical Practice Research Database. It covered 845 surgeries across the U.K. between April 2000 and March 2019, with 113 contributing doctor’s offices throughout the entire period. Frequent attenders show up for an examination around five times as frequently as the average patient.

“While many of these patients may have comorbidities and may need to be seen regularly, research suggest that they have wider social and psychological needs,” the researchers write in the journal BMJ Open.

Who are the most frequent attenders? The evidence across Europe reveals that frequent attenders are more likely to be female, older, and have more social and psychiatric problems. They are also more likely to be taking drugs for mental illness, have more medically unexplainable symptoms, and more long-term conditions.

Among frequent attenders, all types of consultations with GPs rose from an average of 13 to 21 a year during the study. However, those consultations with other practice staff rose from an average of 27 a year to 60 between April 2000 and March 2019.

There was relatively little regional variation across the entire United Kingdom in any of the trends, but face-to-face consultations with GPs and all staff were highest in Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Typically, frequent attenders visit their family doctor between 20 to 40 times a year. Researchers note this is an observational study and can’t determine the exact cause of this trend, but health officials believe loneliness may be part of the issue.

Research contact: @StudyFinds

March 24, 2023

The world’s top alien hunter is about to embark on his most ambitious—and potentially, historical—mission yet, reports The Daily Beast.

Harvard physicist Avi Loeb is organizing a $1.5-million expedition to Papua New Guinea to search for fragments of a very strange meteorite that impacted just off the coast of the Pacific nation in 2014.

There is compelling evidence that the half-meter-wide meteorite, called CNEOS1 2014-01-08, traveled from outside our solar system. And that it’s made of extremely hard rock or metal—a material that’s hard and tough enough to prove the meteorite isn’t a meteorite at all. Maybe it’s an alien probe.

It’s a long-shot effort. After years of work, Loeb and his team have, with a big assist from the U.S. military, narrowed down CNEOS1 2014-01-08’s likely impact zone to a square kilometer of the ocean floor, nearly two kilometers underwater. But the fragments themselves are probably just a few millimeters in size. It’s worse than looking for a needle in a haystack. Loeb is basically preparing to look for big sand in a square-kilometer patch of small sand.

It’s worth the risk, Loeb told The Daily Beast. Any fragments the team recovers could turn out to be “technological”—that is, clearly manufactured and thus strong evidence of the existence of aliens. Or maybe they’re not artificial, but are made of some super-strong material that we’ve never observed until now. A rare metal forged in the hearts of neutron stars, for example.

In any event, “we will learn something new,” Loeb said.

The expedition is almost ready to depart for Papua New Guinea. “We have a boat,” Loeb wrote in on a post on Medium on January 27. “We have a dream team, including some of the most experienced and qualified professionals in ocean expeditions. We have complete design and manufacturing plans for the required sled, magnets, collection nets and mass spectrometer.

“And most importantly,” he wrote, “today we received the green light to go ahead,” referring to the approval of Papua New Guinea’s for the mission.

The plan, Loeb said, is to deploy a variety of custom sand-sifters—some with magnets, others like huge sieves—and methodically search the seafloor for two weeks. The main reason it’s taken eight years to organize the mission is that, first, Loeb and his team had to figure out where the meteorite’s fragments came down to Earth.

It was easier said than done, since no single instrument precisely captured CNEOS1 2014-01-08’s journey to the seafloor. But if anyone was motivated to try, it was Loeb. While these days more and more scientists are coming around to the idea that we’re probably not alone in the universe, Loeb was banging that drum even when it was unpopular.

When a very odd, shiny, football-field-size object streaked across then out of the solar system in 2017, Loeb was among the first scientists to say out loud what others may only have been thinking: This object, which scientists later named ’Oumuamua ( Hawaiian for “scout”), might be an alien probe.

And Loeb isn’t afraid to put his money—well, his donors’ money—where his mouth is. In addition to studying strange interstellar objects such as ’Oumuamua, Loeb through his Galileo Project is painstakingly building humanity’s first global network of small telescopes , which will scan the sky for alien craft, or at least the remains of alien craft.

To narrow down CNEOS1 2014-01-08’s impact zone, Loeb needed data from two sets of instruments. The first set was from U.S. military missile-warning satellites that, thanks to their sensitive infrared sensors, tend to also detect meteorites while scanning for missile-launches.

These satellites can not only provide at least a vague indication of where a meteorite is heading; they also capture images of the fireball that results from a meteorite’s fast, hot trip through Earth’s atmosphere. The timing and intensity of a fireball can tell us a lot about a meteorite’s composition. Basically, the longer it takes for the atmosphere to ignite a meteor, the tougher the meteor is.

After much wheedling, Loeb convinced the Pentagon to release the full fireball data for CNEOS1 2014-01-08. They indicated the 2014 meteorite might be the hardest meteorite on record.

The second set of data Loeb needed was much more precise telemetry for the meteorite’s path than the military could provide. So, he checked on nearby earthquake sensors. “We found that the blast wave from the meteor explosion generated a high-quality signal in a seismometer located at Manus Island,” which is part of Papua New Guinea, Loeb wrote at Medium.

Armed with the two data sets, Loeb and his team were able to narrow the likely impact zone from 100 square kilometers to just one square kilometer. “This reduction in the geographic uncertainty of the … fireball improves the search efficiency in the forthcoming ocean expedition to recover its fragments,” Loeb and company wrote in a study, not yet peer-reviewed, that appeared online on March 13.

After having arranged funding and manpower, narrowing the search zone, and getting the Papua New Guinean government’s approval, Loeb and his team are now putting the finishing touches on their special sand-sifting equipment for recovering magnetic meteoritic debris from the seafloor.

Once it’s all ready, hopefully this summer, Loeb and his team will set sail.

Expectations are running high. But Loeb said he’s bracing for disappointment. “There is a chance it will fail,” he said of his expedition. Even success could be something of a letdown, if the team recovers fragments, but those fragments turn out to be natural in origin rather than artificial.

It’s important to frame even that secondary discovery as a major advancement, Ravi Kopparapu, an astronomer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, told The Daily Beast. “This could give us more confidence on the nature of the interstellar meteor—and could point to whether this meteor is unique or a new class of meteorites.”

Maybe Loeb and his team will go to all that trouble to find the remains of CNEOS1 2014-01-08, only to confirm it isn’t an alien probe. But don’t expect a setback like that to cause Loeb to give up his search for evidence of extraterrestrials. He said he understands how convincing the proof needs to be, and how hard it might be to find it. “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” he said.

Research contact: @thedailybeast