Children's Health
Get ears pierced early to avoid keloids: study
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Delaying ear piercing until the pre-teen years or later may increase a person’s chances of developing keloids—raised, fibrous scar tissue—new study findings suggest.
Among a small group of patients with keloids that developed after ear piercing, the majority had their ears pierced at age 11 or older.
Keloids are a “common complaint” among patients who visit the dermatologist, study author Dr. Loretta S. Davis told Reuters Health. “You can get a keloid at any age,” she said, “however, it seems to be much less common (among those who get their ears pierced) in early childhood compared to after age 11.”
Vaccine safety concerns may discourage parents
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Most parents who choose not to vaccinate their kids do so out of fear that the vaccine will cause more harm than the disease it prevents, according to a new study.
However, study author Dr. Daniel A. Salmon of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Maryland cautioned that vaccines are “extremely safe and effective,” and parents who don’t vaccinate their children are leaving them—and other children—vulnerable to deadly diseases.
For instance, Salmon noted that many parents in England and Scotland have chosen not to vaccinate their children against measles, mumps and rubella (MMR), causing outbreaks of these life-threatening illnesses.
Group B strep infection of newborns persists
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Even though the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recommended since 2002 that expectant mothers be screened for carriage of group B strep, a few cases of early-onset group B streptococcal disease still occur in infants each year in the US, new research shows.
Group B strep used to be a leading cause of serious infection in newborns. It has a 10-20 percent mortality rate, and leaves many survivors with brain damage.
Most of the cases that still occur involve infants whose mothers screened negative for colonization with the microbe, according to a report in the medical journal Pediatrics.
Epidural during labor linked to abnormal head position
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Receiving epidural analgesia during labor seems to increase the risk that the baby will be delivered face up instead of the normal face -down position, new research shows. This may explain the higher rate of c-sections associated with epidurals.
It has been theorized that women with infants in the face-up or “occiput posterior” position have more painful labors, which leads to their request for epidural analgesia. However, in the current study, reported in the medical journal Obstetrics and Gynecology, the researchers found that it was, in fact, more likely that the epidural was administered before a fetus moved into this position.
