A short while back a friend mentioned in casual conversation that she’d been feeling fatigued for a while and had been referred by her GP to a consultant specialising in endocrine function. I suppose most people might have ignored this, but as it happened, when I got home I had a look at the data for the activity of hospital consultants in this field and had a bit of a surprise.
The field of endocrinology is all to do with the way hormones in the body work. The chart above suggests that something significant appears to have happened over the past three years. Intrigued, I popped over to the OpenPrescribing website to see if there had been any significant change in the prescription of drugs related to endocrine function. However, examination of these data didn’t highlight any particular problem for common endocrine disorders such as those associated with impairment of the function of the thyroid gland.
There did, however, appear to be a significant statistical signal for one set of endocrine disorders in the NHS prescription data. While hormones are responsible for regulating a huge number of biological processes in the body, arguably the most common interpretation of the word ‘hormone’ will be with sex hormones. We don’t have data for GP appointments specifically regarding dysregulation of sex hormones, but we can see what drugs they are prescribing – which for women will predominantly mean hormone replacement therapy associated with the menopause.
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