A round-up of today's other stories in brief
• Smoking partners: People who live with smokers nearly double their risk of suffering eyesight problems later in life, according to new research.
Passive smoking in the home for five years or more means you are almost twice as likely to develop one of the leading causes of blindness, a team from Cambridge University found.
Age-related macular degeneration affects the ability to perform tasks such as reading and driving, and can cause vision to go entirely. It gets increasingly common once people pass the age of 60.
The researchers looked at the cases of 435 people with extreme forms of the condition in Britain, and 280 partners who lived with them.
They found that the more an individual smoked, the greater their chance of developing age-related macular degeneration.
Getting through more than a pack a day for 40 years almost tripled the risk compared with non-smokers, and the dangers also doubled for partners who lived with a smoker for five years or more.
• Rise in dementia: The number of people with dementia across the world is set to double every 20 years, according to new research.
The study found a new case of dementia arises every seven seconds and experts say the illness is a "ticking time bomb" for the governments around the globe.
It estimates that 24.3 million people currently have dementia, with 4.6 million new cases being diagnosed annually. By 2040 the number will have risen to 81.1 million. The report, which has been produced for Alzheimer's Disease International (ADI) and published in the Lancet, comes 100 years after the first description of Alzheimer's disease.
It says that most people living with dementia are in the developing world, with five million in China alone. This compares with 4.8 million in Western Europe and 3.4 million in North America.
• Primary care centre: Health Service Executive chief Prof Brendan Drumm has officially opened the Liberties Primary Care Centre. Following on the recommendations of the Primary Care Strategy, Primary Care - A New Direction, the centre, one of 10 initial primary care implementation projects countrywide, offers a new way of delivering integrated primary care services. Based in a newly refurbished building on the former Meath Hospital campus in Dublin 8, the building cost €550,000 to revamp. A further €585,000 has been provided in additional annual revenue funding and €100,000 for once-off information and communications technology costs. The centre is open to those who are registered with any of the GPs, living within the Dublin 2 and 8 areas, between the canal and the River Liffey, and between Westmoreland Street and Kilmainham.
It covers a population of 8,000 people and is home to six GPs, a GP registrar, two practice nurses, two public health nurses and a registered general nurse. The team also includes other allied healthcare professionals - a senior physiotherapist, a senior occupational therapist and a healthcare assistant.
• Memory workout: Memory exercises and stress reduction coupled with a healthy diet and regular physical exercise improves memory in older adults, a new study has concluded.
This four-component lifestyle programme "not only improved memory but also improved brain efficiency in just two short weeks", study chief Dr Gary Small from the University of California, Los Angeles said.
"Initially, we were sceptical that we could have an impact in such a brief period of time but we were pleasantly surprised because the volunteers who followed the lifestyle programme not only noticed better memory ability but when we tested them with objective tests we found that there was significant improvement in memory," he said.
Dr Small details the memory improvement plan used in this study in his book called The Memory Prescription. He presented results of the current study during the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology's annual meeting in Hawaii.
• Hospital apology: A hospital trust apologised yesterday after a seven-year-old girl was sent home from hospital after staff failed to spot that she had broken her arm. Medics at the Gloucestershire Royal Hospital told Abigail Thomas's parents that she should keep moving her "badly sprained" shoulder, which was injured when she fell from a horse.
But Theresa and Simon Thomas, from Parkend in the Forest of Dean, took their daughter back to a community hospital after she had complained of still being in great pain. The family said they were shocked when an X-ray taken at Lydney Hospital a week later clearly showed that Abigail had broken her arm.
Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundations Trust has now launched an investigation into the incident.