Children's Health
How is Dysthymia in Children Treated?
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Dysthymia is a mood disorder which is less severe than depression. Children diagnosed with dysthymia can be treated using medications, therapy, or both approaches together.
Introduction:
Dysthymia is considered a chronic mood disorder which falls under the category of depression. Like adults, children also suffer from this type of mood disorder. While chronic depression is a very serious condition, dysthymia in children is treatable. Treatments which are considered to be effective include medications and non-medicated therapy such as psychotherapeutic approaches. The main goals for treating this condition include decreasing symptoms of depression, decreasing risk of the development of other mood disorders, and reinforcement of psychosocial functioning.
Burning straw, dung tied to kids’ anemia
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Households in developing countries that regularly burn wood, straw, dung and other natural materials are more likely to also contain children with anemia, a new report finds.
Families in 29 countries who burned so-called “biofuels” for cooking or heating were 7 percent more likely to include a child with mild anemia.
When the researchers from McMaster University in Canada compared national-level data, they found that the countries with more residents burning biofuels were also home to more children with moderate or severe anemia.
Magnetic fields won’t up kids’ brain cancer risk
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Exposure to extremely low-frequency magnetic fields (ELF-MFs)—emitted by anything from power lines to appliances or improperly grounded wiring—is not likely to increase children’s risk of developing brain tumors, the authors of a new analysis conclude.
Researchers have been investigating the health risks of these magnetic fields since 1979, Dr. Leeka Kheifets of the University of California, Los Angeles, and her colleagues note in the American Journal of Epidemiology. There is some evidence that exposure at certain levels may be related to childhood leukemia, they add.
Evidence for a link between ELF-MF exposure and childhood brain tumors is weaker, according to Kheifets and her team, but to date a pooled analysis investigating the association has not been performed. Pooled analyses involve taking data from several different studies of the same topic and analyzing them as a whole, using a variety of statistical techniques to take as many differences between the studies into account as possible.
Children Who Eat Vended Foods Face Health Problems, Poor Diet
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School children who consume foods purchased in vending machines are more likely to develop poor diet quality – and that may be associated with being overweight, obese or at risk for chronic health problems such as diabetes and coronary artery disease, according to research from the University of Michigan Medical School.
The study also looked at foods sold in school stores, snack bars and other related sales that compete with USDA lunch program offerings and found that these pose the same health and diet risks in school-aged children.
“The foods that children are exposed to early on in life influence the pattern for their eating habits as adults,” says lead study author Madhuri Kakarala, M.D., Ph.D., clinical lecturer of internal medicine at the U-M Medical School.
Acetaminophen use in adolescents linked to doubled risk of asthma
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New evidence linking the use of acetaminophen to development of asthma and eczema suggests that even monthly use of the drug in adolescents may more than double risk of asthma in adolescents compared to those who used none at all; yearly use was associated with a 50 percent increase in the risk of asthma.
The research results will be published online on the American Thoracic Society’s Web site ahead of the print edition of the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.
“This study has identified that the reported use of acetaminophen in 13- and 14 year old adolescent children was associated with an exposure-dependent increased risk of asthma symptoms,” said study first author Richard Beasley, M.D., professor of medicine, at the Medical Research Institute of New Zealand on behalf of the International Study of Asthma and Allergies in Childhood (ISAAC).
Pass child nutrition bill: Michelle Obama
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First Lady Michelle Obama is calling on the Congress to pass legislation to improve nutritional standards and help fight childhood obesity in American schools.
“We owe it to the children who aren’t reaching their potential because they’re not getting the nutrition they need during the day,” she wrote in the Monday edition of the Washington Post.
“And we owe it to our country - because our prosperity depends on the health and vitality of the next generation.”
Benefit confirmed in “bubble boy” treatment
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A 10-year study of nine boys born without the ability to ward off germs has found that gene therapy is an effective long-term treatment, but it carries a price: four of them developed leukemia.
The technique is designed to help boys with X-linked severe combined immunodeficiency disease, or SCID, a rare mutation that prevents the body from making mature T cells or natural killer cells, which are vital tools for fighting infections.
Without a bone marrow transplant, which works best with a matching donor, such “bubble babies” have to live in germ-free environments and usually die within a year. Doctors hope gene therapy will work when no donor is available.
Doctors See Trend in Summer Injuries Among Children
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It is a time most families look forward to every year – summertime. For parents, the warm summer months are often filled with family vacations and cookouts. For kids, it is a chance to play outdoors and enjoy a few months without homework. However, doctors at Nationwide Children’s Hospital have recently noticed a trend in injuries that occur in children during the summer months that are both predictable and preventable.
With the long school days in the past, most kids become more active during the summer and often have more free time. Kathy Nuss, MD, associate medical director of Trauma Services at Nationwide Children’s Hospital, and a team of doctors, have narrowed down a list of the most common mechanisms of injuries that cause children to end up in hospitals during the summer months.
• Falls – Falls are constantly topping the list of summer injuries. While objects such as trampolines have proven to be dangerous, many injuries arise from things that parents may assume are much safer.
Babies Born at 23 Weeks Make It Home Just in Time for Father’s Day
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This Sunday, many fathers will settle in for a nice BBQ, go fishing with the kids or play with a new electronic gadget. For one dad, who works nights and weekends and stays home with the kids during the day, having his whole family home is the best gift he could hope for.
“It’s been a long road over the last eight months of just being at the NICU (Neonatal Intensive Care Unit) and having to stay somewhere else,” says Nich Pollak, 29, of Albion (Mich.). “Having my whole family home is wonderful.”
Nich and his wife Jennie Pollak, 25, had tried for a year to give their daughter Hailey, 4, a sibling. But after Jennie had surgery for endometriosis, the couple had been unable to conceive. The young family was stunned, however, when one month on a low-dose fertility drug led to Jennie becoming pregnant with quadruplets.
Parents Throw Tantrum over Chocolate Formula
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With childhood obesity rates soaring, a new chocolate-flavored toddler formula has sparked outrage from parents and nutritionists and has forced the manufacturer to pull it from the market.
The sugary beverage, marketed under the name Enfagrow Premium, was aimed at children as young as one year of age - especially picky or erratic eaters who need “nutritional support” after being weaned off breast milk or formula, the manufacturer, Mead Johnson, said in a prepared statement.
The company claims the beverage has “a superior nutritional profile to many other beverages typically consumed by toddlers, including apple juice, grape juice and similarly flavored dairy drinks.”
Child obesity linked to domestic violence
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Mothers who reported some form of intimate partner violence were more likely than others to have children who were obese by age 5, U.S. researchers found.
Dr. Renee Boynton-Jarrett of the Boston University School of Medicine and colleagues tracked 1,595 children born from 1998 to 2000 until the children were age 5.
The study, published in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, found 49.4 percent of mothers reported some form of intimate partner violence and of these women, 16.5 percent of the children were obese at age 5.
New Techniques Offer Valuable Tools in Analysis of Congenital Anomalies
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New techniques to detect chromosomal abnormalities can offer a higher degree of accuracy. Chromosomal abnormalities are a well-known cause of multiple congenital anomalies, and conventional methods of culture analysis have proven unsuccessful in 10% to 40% of cases. Comparative genomic hybridization (CGH) and fluorescent in situ hybridization (FISH) techniques were tested and found successful by analyzing tissue from children who had multiple congenital anomalies.
The May issue of the journal Pediatric and Developmental Pathology reports results from this study, which examined the feasibility of CGH and FISH in retrospective genetic analysis to detect chromosomal abnormalities.
CGH is a new molecular technique that allows the entire genome to be analyzed in frozen or paraffin-embedded tissue. It is based on DNA rather than metaphase cultures like traditional methods of analysis.
Community interventions and in-home visits may slow excess weight gain in American Indian children
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Community intervention can help American Indian families change behavior related to early childhood weight gain and obesity, according to a new Kaiser Permanente and Northwest Portland Area Indian Health Board (NPAIHB) study.
The study, published online in the Journal of Community Health, also finds that adding in-home visits to the community intervention has an even more profound effect on behavior change, and can reduce a child’s body mass index.
Funded by the National Institutes of Health, this is the first study to target obesity prevention among American Indian children starting at birth.
Obesity in Adolescents
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Obesity and overweight are the second most major reasons of preventable deaths in America. Stagnant lifestyle and junk food is to be blamed for more than three hundred thousand deaths per annum. The sad thing is that this problem is on the rise. Obesity is a chronic disease which poses serious health risk to the health of an individual. Also, obesity is the easiest recognizable medical problem, but is very difficult to deal with.
People usually confuse obesity with overweight. Overweight is gaining of a few extra pounds. A person is considered obese when the total body weight is minimum ten percent more than the recommended weight for his/her body structure and height. According to an estimate every year hundred billion dollars are spent on the obesity problem. It is very important to treat the problem as early as possible. Obese children between the age of ten and thirteen have eighty percent chances of growing into obese adults, unless they change their ways and adopt a healthier lifestyle. The obesity problem starts from the age of five and continue till adolescence.
Obesity can be caused due to complex reasons including biological, genetic, cultural and behavioral factors. Usually a person gets obese when he/she consumes more calories than the body burns.
Health leaders discuss polio, alcohol, childhood obesity at WHA
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From the 63rd World Health Assembly (WHA) in Geneva, the Associated Press reports on what some “describe as a new strategy to get rid of” polio that focuses on developing solutions to “problems in each country, provides more WHO monitoring, like more teleconferences, and holds governments more accountable.” The plans also provide “[n]ew [polio] outbreak response plans,” according to the AP.
Some “say there is little new [in this strategy] and that if this effort fails ... serious questions about whether to continue the campaign should be raised,” the news service reports.
“Since WHO, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, UNICEF and Rotary International set out to eradicate polio in 1988, they have come tantalizingly close,” the news service writes. “By 2003, cases had dropped by more than 99 percent. But progress has stalled since and several deadlines have been missed.”
