Children's Health
U.S. obesity rate appears to be slowing
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Americans are still too fat, but the obesity epidemic in the United States appears to be waning a bit, U.S. researchers said on Wednesday.
New government data show that 68 percent of U.S. adults are considered overweight, having a body mass index, or BMI, of 25 or higher. A third are obese, having a BMI of 30 or higher.
“Obesity continues to be a significant health concern,” Cynthia Ogden of the National Center for Health Statistics at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a telephone interview.
Less sleep for kids may mean higher blood sugar
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Young children may be more apt to have high blood sugar, a precursor to diabetes, if they average 8 hours or less of sleep a night, report Chinese and American researchers.
This risk may be even greater among obese youngsters, Dr. Zhijie Yu, at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shanghai and colleagues note in Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine.
Moreover, Yu said in an email to Reuters Health, shorter sleep seemed to influence blood sugar “independently of a large variety of risk factors,” such as age, gender, birth-related influences, early life feeding or later diet, recent illness, physical activity, body mass, and waist girth.
Parent mentors can improve the asthmatic care of minority children, UT Southwestern researchers find
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UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers have found that informed adults can help families stave off complications associated with asthma. The findings, available online and in the December issue of Pediatrics, suggest that interventions by parent mentors – caregivers of asthmatic children who have received specialized topical training – can effectively reduce wheezing, asthma attacks, emergency room visits and missed adult workdays.
“Childhood asthma disproportionately affects urban minority children,” said Dr. Glenn Flores, professor of pediatrics and the study’s lead author. “Asthma mortality among African-American children alone is almost five times higher than for white children. The goal for this study was to determine whether parent mentors would be more effective than traditional asthma care in improving asthma outcomes for minority children.”
Mentors in the study were parents or caregivers who got professional training from a nurse asthma specialist and a program coordinator on a variety of asthma-related topics. Training sessions and a manual were used to present examples of improving asthmatic care and focused on the importance of consistent treatment. The manual also discussed keeping asthmatic children out of hospitals, asthma medications and triggers, and cultural issues that can affect care.
Nintendo Wii may provide actual exercise-study
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The new active Wii video games from Nintendo Co Ltd may be creating a healthier generation of couch potato, according to a new study presented on Monday.
Some of the Nintendo Wii sports games and activities included in the Wii fit series, both of which require video- game enthusiasts to get up off the couch, may increase energy expenditure as much as moderate intensity exercise without ever leaving the TV room, researchers said at the American Heart Association (AHA) scientific meeting in Orlando.
“It’s a very easy and fun way to start exercising,” said Motohiko Miyachi, head of a physical activity program at the National Institute of Health and Nutrition in Tokyo, who led the study.
Potential for criminal behavior evident at age 3
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Children who don’t show normal fear responses to loud, unpleasant sounds at the age of 3 may be more likely to commit crimes as adults, according to a new study.
Yu Gao and colleagues in the United States and the United Kingdom compared results from a study of almost 1,800 children born in 1969 and 1970 on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius to criminal records of group members 20 years later.
At age 3, the children were tested to gauge their level of “fear conditioning,” or fear of consequences. The idea is that children who associate unpleasant sounds or other unpleasant experiences with fear will be less likely to commit antisocial acts because they will link such experiences with punishments for those acts.
Faithful mothers have healthier babies
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Faculty of 1000 reviewers examine a study from New Zealand on whether prolonged exposure to the father’s semen protects new mothers against pre-eclampsia and having an undersized baby
In this study by Kho and colleagues at the University of Auckland, published in the Journal of Reproductive Immunology, 2507 first-time pregnant women were interviewed about the length of their relationship with the baby’s biological father.
When the pregnancies came to term, pre-eclampsia (pregnancy-induced hypertension) was found to be less common in women who had long-term sexual relations exclusively with the biological father, than in those who had been with their partner only for a short time (i.e. less than six months).
Antidepressant and placebo are equally effective in child pain relief
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When used “off-label,” the antidepressant amitriptyline works just as well as placebo in treating pain-predominant gastrointestinal disorders in children, according to a new study in Gastroenterology, the official journal of the American Gastroenterological Association (AGA) Institute. To view this article’s video abstract, go to the AGA’s YouTube Channel at http://www.youtube.com/AmerGastroAssn.
“Many pharmaceutical products are prescribed for off-label use in children due to the lack of clinical trials testing the efficacy of the drugs in children and adolescents. Therefore, the pediatric gastroenterologist frequently has to make treatment decisions without the evidence of how drugs work in children,” said Miguel Saps, MD, of Children’s Memorial Hospital and lead author of the study. “The high placebo effect we identified in this study suggests that further studies of the use of certain antidepressants in children with functional bowel disorders are needed. While several trials have demonstrated a beneficial effect of antidepressants, including amitriptyline, for the treatment of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) in adults, more research is needed to determine how effective this drug is, if at all, in children.”
Amitriptyline (Elavil®) is used to treat symptoms of depression, however, it is often times prescribed to children for pain relief from pain-predominant functional gastrointestinal disorders (FGIDs). Pain-predominant FGIDs are among the most common causes for medical consultation in children. Such disorders include three common conditions: IBS, functional dyspepsia and functional abdominal pain.
Metabolic Syndrome Linked to Liver Disease in Obese Teenaged Boys
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Researchers studying a large sample of adolescent American boys have found an association between metabolic syndrome, which is a complication of obesity, and elevated liver enzymes that mark potentially serious liver disease.
The link between metabolic syndrome and the suspected liver disease did not appear in adolescent girls, said study leader Rose C. Graham, M.D., a pediatric gastroenterologist at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. There were ethnic differences among the boys as well, she added, between Hispanic and non-Hispanic males.
The study appears in the October 2009 print edition of the Journal of Pediatric Gastroenterology and Nutrition.
Picky Eater? What Parents Need to Know
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Catering to a child who is a picky-eater is like being a short-order cook: chaotic. Dinnertime becomes a war zone, with hopeless battles fought over vegetables and macaroni and cheese.
Picky-eating is as normal as potty-training, a right of passage in childhood development. Taste-buds evolve and food preferences expand in these early years. Even the best of parents can have a difficult time getting their child to eat. In fact, picky-eating is one of the most common occurrences in children, often outgrown as the child reaches adolescence. But if eating behavior inhibits normal developmental and physical growth processes, it could be something much more severe – a pediatric feeding disorder.
“The difference between a fussy eater and a child with a feeding disorder is the impact the eating behavior has on a child’s physical and mental health,” says Peter Girolami, Ph.D., Assistant Director of the Pediatric Feeding Disorders Program at the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore, Maryland – one the first programs of its kind in the United States and the largest in the world to treat pediatric feeding disorders.
Childhood cancer treatment may raise diabetes risk
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Cancer survivors who got radiation treatments as children have nearly twice the risk of developing diabetes as adults, U.S. researchers said on Monday.
They said children who were treated with total body radiation or abdominal radiation to fight off cancer appear to have higher diabetes risks later in life, regardless of whether they exercise regularly or maintain a normal weight.
The odds of surviving childhood cancer have improved with better therapies but several research teams have found that some treatments pose health risks later in life.
Kefir won’t stop diarrhea in many kids
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If you give your kids kefir to prevent the diarrhea they often get when they take antibiotics, here’s some news for you: if your kids are otherwise healthy, it probably won’t help, according to a new study.
Up to 35 percent of children who take antibiotics develop diarrhea, according to Dr. Daniel J. Merenstein at George Washington University Medical Center in Washington, DC and colleagues, who performed the study. Sometimes the diarrhea is so severe that the children can’t finish taking the medication.
Many sources report that kefir helps prevent antibiotic-associated diarrhea. Kefir, a cultured dairy beverage that’s a bit like drinkable yogurt, is rich with probiotics—bacteria present naturally in the body and sometimes added to food or dietary supplements to boost immune function.
Accidental Childhood Poisonings Mostly Due to Medicines
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More than two-thirds of all emergency department visits for childhood poisoning involve prescription and over-the-counter medications, more than twice the rate of poisonings from consumer products, reports a new study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
“We feel these data suggest that new poisoning prevention efforts should focus on the problems of medication poisoning,” said Daniel Budnitz, M.D., the senior study author.
Budnitz, director of the Medication Safety Program in the Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion at the CDC, and colleagues analyzed two years’ worth of data on pediatric emergency department (ED) visits for unintentional medication overdoses.
Drugs expose many premature babies to chemicals
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Premature babies are often exposed to additives in their medications that could put them at risk of brain and lung damage, according to a new study.
“Many liquid medications contain additives,” co-author Dr. Hitesh C. Pandya, of the University of Leicester, UK told Reuters Health. “Some of these are necessary to produce the medicine but many are not.”
“Some of these are thought to be toxic to small infants even in small quantities,” he added. “Furthermore, when small infants are given several drugs a day, there is a potential that they may be given quite large doses of a specific additive as a consequence of treatment.”
Parent stress, air pollution up kids’ asthma risk
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Children with stressed-out parents may be more prone to developing asthma associated with environmental “triggers” such as high levels of traffic-related pollution and tobacco smoke, hints a study published today.
In the study, researchers found that children whose parents reported high levels of psychological stress and who were exposed to cigarette smoke in the womb and to traffic-related pollution early in life had a much higher risk of developing asthma, compared to children only exposed to pollution.
“We found that it was children exposed to the combination of air pollution and life in a stressful environment who were at highest risk of developing asthma,” Dr. Rob McConnell, deputy director of the Children’s Environmental Health Center at University of Southern California, Los Angeles, told Reuters Health.
Kids up to age 12 at risk of car-crash spine injury
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Children younger than 12 are at heightened risk of suffering a spinal injury during a car accident—possibly because standard seat belts often do not fit them properly, researchers report.
In a study of children treated for car accident injuries at two Australian hospitals, researchers found that those younger than 12 were seven times more likely than their older counterparts to sustain a serious spine injury. [abs]
All of the 72 children and teenagers in the study had been restrained at the time of the accident. The higher spine-injury risk before age 12 “may reflect the adequacy of seat belt fit,” the researchers report in the Archives of Disease in Childhood.
