Children's Health
Extremely Low-Birth-Weight Infants Reaching Functional Outcomes
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The majority of extremely low-birth-weight infants appear to be attaining similar levels of education, employment and independence as young adults, compared with normal birth-weight infants, according to a study in the February 8 issue of JAMA.
Despite the recent dramatic improvements in survival, extremely low-birth-weight (ELBW, weighing less than 2.2 lbs.) and very low-birth-weight (VLBW, weighing less than 3.3 lbs.) children and adolescents remain disadvantaged on many measures of cognition, academic achievement, behavior, and social adaptation, according to background information in the article. Survivors from the early postneonatal intensive care era have only now reached young adulthood. Although some aspects of longer-term outcomes on VLBW young adults have been reported in a few studies, details of certain functional outcomes of former ELBW infants at young adulthood are unknown.
Nearly 8 million children born with defects
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Nearly 8 million children are born with birth defects around the world every year and most of them either die or are disabled for life as a result, according to a report released on Monday.
With proper medical care up to 70 percent of these defects could be prevented, or at least treated, the report from the March of Dimes said.
Phonics teaching: a child’s passport to literacy
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Systematic phonics should feature in every child’s reading instruction and it should be part of every literacy teacher’s repertoire, according to a Government-funded review of research by academics at the Universities of York and Sheffield.
The review, commissioned by the Department for Education and Skills (DfES), found that systematic phonics - letters and sounds taught in sequence from early childhood—resulted in better progress in reading accuracy among children of all abilities. But evidence for corresponding improvements in reading comprehension and spelling was inconclusive.
Breastfeeding may reduce risk of celiac disease
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Sufferers from celiac disease can’t tolerate wheat and gluten in their diet, but people who were breastfed as babies seem to be less likely to develop the condition, a UK study shows.
Dr. A. K. Akobeng, of Booth Hall Children’s Hospital, Manchester, and colleague note in the Archives of Diseases in Childhood that “recent observational studies suggest that breastfeeding may prevent the development of celiac disease.”
Health risks rise from teens to young adulthood
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During the transition from adolescence to adulthood, health risk increases and access to health care decreases across all race/ethnic groups, according to a study funded by the National institutes of Health.
The ethnically diverse National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health followed some 14,000 adolescents over time into young adulthood. Participants were first interviewed when they were 12 to 19 years of age, and then when they were 19 to 26 years old.
Falling asleep with baby on the sofa can be fatal
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Despite the fact that the number of cases of babies dying from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) has fallen dramatically over the last two decades, it seems that the number of deaths in children while sleeping with a parent on a sofa have risen 400 percent.
Researchers at the the Royal Hospital for Children in Bristol, England, say campaigns to inform parents about SIDS, or cot deaths, have had an impact, but parents need to be aware of the danger of falling asleep with a baby on a sofa.
How Medicaid Can Help Drive Quality Improvement in Pediatrics
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The nation’s leading children’s healthcare leaders gathered today to begin building a coalition to safeguard Medicaid and improve quality measurement standards. The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, along with the National Association of Children’s Hospitals, joined forces to create an alliance advocating for quality improvement measures to not only strengthen Medicaid but also to improve the state of pediatric practice.
“Medicaid has changed dramatically over the past 20 to 30 years,” said Steven M. Altschuler, M.D., president and chief executive officer of The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “The fear is that the government will run out of money, that Medicaid will go bankrupt. This is a crisis. Medicaid is a safety net for a large segment of our population – and especially for children. Eighty percent of Medicaid recipients are children – yet children represent only 20 percent of Medicaid utilization. As Medicaid funding is reduced, children bear the brunt of those cuts.
Doctors urge change in child supplement guidelines
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Global guidelines for giving iron and folic acid supplements to young children should be revised because they could be dangerous for some youngsters, doctors said on Friday.
Researchers from the United States and Tanzania called for the rethink after discovering that the supplements can cause severe illness and death if they are given to children in areas with high rates of malaria.
Infants in the ICU too easily misidentified
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The odds are high for misidentification of infants in hospital neonatal intensive care units (NICUs), largely due to similarities in patients’ names and medical record numbers, doctors warn in a report in the journal Pediatrics.
“A recent review by our group demonstrated that medical errors related to patient misidentification accounted for 11 percent of all reported NICU errors,” Dr. James E. Gray told Reuters Health. Similarly, a recent report from England found that 25 percent of serious medication errors in a NICU were caused by patient misidentification, he added.
Girls and black infants have better chances of survival when born very premature
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Black baby girls born weighing 2.2 pounds or less are more than twice as likely to survive as white baby boys born at the same weight, when many preemies are still too tiny to make it on their own, University of Florida researchers have found.
Analyzing data from more than 5,000 premature births, UF researchers pinpointed a link between gender and race and the survival rates of babies born at extremely low weights, according to findings released in the journal Pediatrics. It’s the first scientific evidence of a phenomenon doctors have observed for years, said Steven B. Morse, M.D., M.P.H., a UF assistant professor of pediatrics and the article’s lead author.
Unsafe neighborhoods linked to children’s weight
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Children who live in dangerous neighborhoods are more likely to be overweight than those who live in safer environments, a new study suggests.
Researchers found that 7-year-olds whose parents felt their neighborhood was unsafe were up to four times more likely than other children to be overweight. The study did not investigate the reasons for the link, but the researchers suspect that fearful parents may often keep their children from playing outdoors, which limits their amount of physical activity.
Cheerleading injuries double among U.S. kids
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The number of injuries related to cheerleading among U.S. children has more than doubled since 1990, likely owing to increasingly risky gymnastic moves and stunts, researchers reported Tuesday.
Their study, published in the journal Pediatrics, found that between 1990 and 2002, there was a 110 percent increase in the number of cheerleading injuries requiring a hospital visit—from 10,900 in 1990 to 22,900 in 2002.
Potter magic helps accident-prone children
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Boy wizard Harry Potter has already cast his spell on millions worldwide, but new research shows his magic has a hitherto unimagined effect.
He has been shown to protect accident-prone children.
Radiologists use lights, films to soothe children
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Three-year old Jack Law used to be so nervous when he went to hospital for regular scans he had to be sedated, only coming round several hours later. This time it was different, and a lot quicker.
He was the first patient in the world’s first “ambient experience” radiology suite, a special room designed to soothe children that opened in August at the Advocate Lutheran General Children’s Hospital in Park Ridge, Illinois in the United States.
Kids with specific gene variant more at risk from passive smoking
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When U.S. children who possess a variant gene are exposed to second-hand smoke in their homes, they are at a substantially greater risk for developing respiratory illnesses that lead to school absences.
The findings are reported in the second issue of the December 2005 American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, published by the American Thoracic Society.
