Coach says he won't allow autistic Little Leaguer to play. WOOD's Dani Carlson reports.
A Michigan family is fighting to allow their autistic son to play on a Little League team. The coach, Tim Frisbie, has expressed concerns over the safety of the boy and his teammates. Watch the video from WOOD's Dani Carlson.
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Many pediatricians don't take kids' pain seriously - particularly when it comes to ear infections and sore throats, writes Dr. Ralph Berberich in Pediatrics.
Wendi Fellner always nursed her baby daughter when she got her childhood immunizations, and that baby has grown into a 9-year-old who’s pretty fearless about shots.
But Fellner, who lives in Winter Park, Fla., will never forget her first -- and last -- visit to the office of a new pediatrician she tried when her daughter was four months old.
The nurse told her it was against the practice’s policy to allow moms to breastfeed babies while they were getting shots. Infants could choke on breast milk if they started crying from the shot, don’t you know?
In fact, the nurse went on, it was against policy for parents even to touch infants who were getting immunized. Liability issues, you know, she told Fellner. What if the parent jumped when the baby screamed?
Policy-schmolicy, Fellner thought. She persuaded the reluctant nurse to bend both of the rules and then quickly found another doctor for her daughter’s next checkup.
Pediatrician Ralph Berberich, who practices in Berkeley, Calif., has heard too many stories like that. Frustrated, Berberich and Dr. Neil Schechter, a pain doctor at Children’s Hospital Boston, wrote an article entitled “Pediatric Office Pain: Crying for Attention,” that will be published next month in Pediatrics. The journal posted the piece online Monday.
Many doctors, and their office staffs, don’t take kids’ pain seriously, Berberich told msnbc.com. They view shots as a rite of childhood that prepares them for a lifetime of doctor-inflicted pain.
“They don’t know that the literature shows there are indeed lasting consequences,” Berberich says. One in 10 adults is phobic about needles, he notes, and you can bet that fear stems from a heavy-handed doctor in childhood.
Even less attention is paid to pain from sore throats and ear infections, Berberich says. “Doctors are very afraid to put medications in the hands of parents and trust that they will know how to use them.”
Study: Sugar water helps newborns' pain
In 2009, Berberich reported in Pediatrics about a method to distract kids from shot pain. It involves a cooling spray on the site of the injection and a vibrating massager that meanders down the other arm.
When the massager reaches their elbow, children are told to say “elbow,” which makes them forget to say “ouch,” Berberich says.
While the method “is very successful,” it requires an extra nurse and perhaps a couple more minutes of time, he says. Ultimately, though, it saves time and money, because he doesn’t have to cajole frightened patients into letting him administer shots.
Parents can help, too. Recent research supports Fellner’s belief that breast milk might be the perfect pain reliever for infants. And, Berberich says, “If the parent says, ‘I would rather have my child in my lap, most pediatricians would agree.”
With toddlers own up; be honest. Don’t say the shot won’t hurt, but also don’t say it will hurt only a little. Best to say “I don’t know how it’s going to feel for you,” and change the subject to what treat you have planned for afterward.
In his practice, Berberich tops off children’s shots with a cookie.
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By Christopher Wanjek
LiveScience
Sex education is failing to reduce adolescent birthrates in conservative states, according to a new study.
Perhaps paradoxically, states with a majority conservative population and higher degree of religiosity tend to have higher teen birthrates. The findings suggest that the social structure of the state, such as the degree of conservatism, can undermine the effect of the sex curricula.
The researchers, from Washington University in St. Louis (WUSL), do not recommend abstinence-based education, but rather crafting sex education curricula that take into account the influences of a state's sociopolitical composition. The study appears today (Feb. 6) in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.
The U.S. adolescent birthrate is by far the highest among industrialized nations. The birthrate among girls ages 15 to 19 was 39.1 per 1,000 teens in this age group in 2009, the most recent year for which statistics are available. The rate in Western Europe ranges from about 24 per 1,000 teens in the U.K. (slightly lower than the U.S. white non-Hispanic rate) to four in the Netherlands.
Broken down by race, the U.S. rate ranges from 70.1 among Hispanic Americans to 14.6 among Asian Americans, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The rate is falling, however, and is at its lowest point since recordkeeping began 70 years ago. Health experts cannot fully explain the cause for the decline after a recent peak in the 1980s, nor do they know the reason for disparity from state to state. Thus, there is an ongoing debate over the efficacy of comprehensive sexuality-based programs, which teach about both abstinence and condom use to reduce the risk of pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, compared with abstinence-based programs, which exclude information about birth control and safe sex.
Researchers led by Patricia Cavazos-Rehg of WUSL narrowed their analysis to birthrates among girls ages 15 to 17 in 24 U.S. states during years of steady decline from 1997 to 2005. (The national birthrates climbed slightly in 2006 and 2007 before declining again in 2008 and 2009.) They found what many researchers have stated previously — that an increase in comprehensive sex education in school is associated with lower adolescent birthrates. [ 10 Surprising Sex Statistics ]
The association disappears, however, when the researchers controlled for state characteristics, such as religiosity and abortion policies. The apparent irony is that states with higher religiosity rankings and greater political conservatism had higher adolescent birthrates.
That much was not a total surprise. Researchers at Drexel University reported a similar finding in 2009 in the journal Reproductive Health. The latest findings provide the added twist that a state's level of conservatism might compromise the value or quality of sex education.
The WUSL researchers postulate that girls living in conservative states or counties either get a watered-down version of the sex education curriculum, disregard the lesson, or are less willing or able to have an abortion, all leading to higher statewide teen birthrates.
"State adolescent births vary widely, and these disparities across states should be acknowledged as a major public health concern," Cavazos-Rehg told LiveScience. She noted the difference in birthrates among girls ages 15 to 17 in Arkansas and New Hampshire. Arkansas, with high conservatism, had the highest birthrate in this study, 34.8 per 1,000 girls in this age range. New Hampshire, with high liberalism, had the lowest birthrate, 9.7. [ Teen Pregnancy: A 'Winnable' Public Health Battle? ]
Yet the analysis failed to consider pregnancy rates, which Cavazos-Rehg said are more difficult to obtain than birthrates. Could it be that, despite sex education, girls in both conservative and liberal states are getting pregnant at about the same rate, and that the girls in Arkansas are carrying their babies to term, perhaps as a result of higher religiosity, a lack of access to abortion services, or both?
The analysis also assumed that statewide data faithfully represented all schools within the state. But states are large geographic entities with many different school districts and schools, which individually make choices about what to offer in terms of sex education. Policies are made primarily at the local and individual school level.
"The study shows the difficulty of mounting an intervention at the state level that would be sufficient to shift teenage birthrates," said Freya Sonenstein, director for the Center for Adolescent Health Promotion and Disease Prevention at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. "But at the local and school levels, there is plenty of other evidence that implementing particular curriculums can produce improvements in students' risk-taking behaviors."
Cavazos-Rehg said she hopes to conduct a follow-up study with data on pregnancy and sexual behavior. Yet for now, she added, "though it still remains unclear as to what 'truly effective' sex education is, what we now know is that any future evaluations of sex education must consider the effects of sociopolitical characteristics in comprehensive analyses."
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By Rachael Rettner
MyHealthNewsDaily
A group of compounds used in a variety of products, including water-resistant clothing and microwave popcorn, may prevent childhood vaccinations from working properly, a new study says.
In the study, children who had higher concentrations of these compounds, called perfluorinated compounds (PFCs), in their blood had lower immune responses to diphtheria and tetanus vaccinations. An insufficient immune response to a vaccination can mean a child is actually vulnerable to catching a disease even though they've been vaccinated against it.
Indeed, the levels of antibodies in the blood of some children exposed to PFCs indicated they were not protected against these diseases by age 7.
"When we take our kids to the doctor's office to get their shots, we expect that the vaccines are going to work," said study researcher Dr. Philippe Grandjean, of the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston. "What we found was that there was an increasing risk that they didn’t work if the kids had been exposed to the PFCs," Grandjean said.
The study is provocative, but the findings are not of immediate public health concern, said Dr. William Schaffner, chairman of the department of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. Despite the link found in this study, vaccines have largely protected the public against diphtheria and tetanus over the same period of time that PFCs have accumulated in the environment, Schaffner said.
"These are illnesses that have been virtually eliminated from children," in the United States, Schaffner said.
However, Schaffner said investigations into the link between vaccines' effectiveness and PFCs, along with other potential environmental hazards, should continue.
The study will be published tomorrow (Jan. 25) in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
PFCs have thousands of uses in manufacturing, and most people have the compounds in their bodies, Grandjean said. They are slow to break down and persist for many years in the environment.
Studies in animals have suggested PFCs may lower the body's immune response, but their impact on people's health is unclear.
Grandjean and colleagues analyzed data from 587 children living in the Faroe Islands, in the northern Atlantic Ocean between Scotland and Iceland. These islands were chosen because their inhabitants frequently consume seafood, which is associated with increased exposure to PFCs. Still, overall,levels of PFCs in this area are similar to those found in other countries, including the United States, Grandjean said.
The researchers measured levels of PFCs in the blood of 5-year-old children, and tested the children's immune response to tetanus and diphtheria vaccinations at ages 5 and 7. The kids received complete vaccinations against these diseases, including a booster shot at age 5.
The higher the levels of PFCs were in the blood, the lower the children's response was to the vaccines.
A doubling of the exposure to PFCs was associated with a 49 percent lower level of blood antibodies in children at age 7, Grandjean said.
Children with some of the highest levels of PFCs were two to four times more likely to have antibodies in their blood at a level below what is thought to protect against these diseases.
The study "emphasizes the importance of making sure that the world does not pollute the natural environment," Schaffner said. "Clearly, greater efforts must be made to keep these perfluorinated compounds out of the environment," hesaid.
It's not clear exactly how people come to accumulate levels of PFCs in their body, so advice on how to avoid them may not necessarily work. But Grandjean said, "It would be prudent to avoid microwave popcorn [and] treatment of furniture, carpets, shoes and clothing with stain repellants," unless they are known not to contain PFCs.
Future studies into the health impact of PFCs should examine their effect on the immune system, Grandjean said. The researchers would also like to know if exposure to PFCs is associated with a reduced immune response to other vaccinations.
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Many low-income parents feel they must resort to “formula stretching,” to keep their infants fed, even with government food assistance programs, a new study shows.
The study found that 30 percent of parents who brought their infants to an inner city children’s clinic didn’t have enough food to make it through each month. And a full 15 percent, or about 1 in 8, made ends meet by watering down their babies’ formula or by feeding less frequently, according to the study which was published in Clinical Pediatrics.
“We knew this was a high-risk population,” said study co-author Andrew Beck, a fellow in general academic pediatrics at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. “But these numbers are still staggering.”
Up till now there has been little research on infants in families that don’t have enough food, Beck said. Studies of hunger and food shortages across the nation have found that 16 to 22 percent of American families come up short some months.
Beck and his colleagues surveyed 144 parents of infants who attended the hospital’s Pediatric Primary Care Center. The vast majority of families who come to the clinic are covered by Medicaid and receive food stamps as well as assistance getting infant formula through a program called WIC.
The researchers asked about food availability and feeding behavior in a 37-question survey that also looked at sociodemographic characteristics such as patient age, race, parental age, education, ethnicity and source of insurance.
Even though the majority of parents were receiving help through foods stamps and WIC, many did not have enough food to feed their families. In fact, some 65 percent of families ran out of WIC-supplied infant formula most months. And the result, in many cases, was that parents diluted or cut back on formula for their infants.
This kind of formula stretching may have consequences for the infants, Beck said.
“There will be a subset of children who will have what is called ‘failure to thrive,’” Beck explained. “More often, though, the ramifications of this tend to be less visible -- problems with cognition and behavior. In some it may lead to obesity later in life.”
While some might point to breast feeding as a solution, not every mom is in the position to do this for her child. In some jobs it’s virtually impossible to express milk during the day when a mom is away from her baby.
“Clearly, we encourage and actively support breastfeeding,” Beck said. “The reality is that a relatively low percentage of our patients breastfeed by the time they reach us. If they do, we continue to encourage it and have a breastfeeding clinic if they need it. Although they likely wouldn't require formula, we need to do education and a nutritional assessment for mom. Also, as the first year progresses, even fewer families continue to nurse.”
Many of these patients may be slipping through the cracks, Beck said. At his hospital, residents reported problems with food availability in only 2 percent of parents attending the clinic.
It was clear, Beck said, that residents didn’t know how to ferret out these kinds of issues. In a second study, published in Pediatrics, the researchers showed that the numbers shot up when doctors were given the right questions to ask of their patients.
Right now Beck and his colleagues are working on finding solutions for parents who don’t have enough to feed their kids. But those solutions will only work if doctors can figure out who needs help, Beck said.
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Florida Atlantic University
On their way to learning to talk, babies, like this one in a study at Florida Atlantic University, become good lip readers, new research shows. That discovery could help doctors detect autism earlier.
By Joan Raymond
For years, the conventional wisdom was that babies learned how to talk by listening to their parents. But a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that our little angels are using more than their ears to acquire language. They’re using their eyes, too, and are actually pretty good lip readers.
The finding could lead to earlier diagnosis and intervention for autism spectrum disorders, estimated, on average, to affect 1 in 110 children in the United States alone.
In the study, researchers from Florida Atlantic University tested groups of infants, ranging from four to 12 months of age and a group of adults for comparison.
The babies watched videos of women speaking either in English, the native language used in the home, or in Spanish, a language foreign to them. Using an eye tracker device to study eye movements, the researchers looked at developmental changes in attention to the eyes and mouth.
Results showed that at four months of age, babies focused almost solely on the women’s eyes. But by six to eight months of age, when the infants entered the so-called “babbling” stage of language acquisition and reached a milestone of cognitive development in which they can direct their attention to things they find interesting, their focus shifted to the women’s mouths. They continue to “lip read” until about 10 months of age, a point when they finally begin mastering the basic features of their native language. At this point, infants also begin to shift their attention back to the eyes.
The researchers believe this second shift in attention is due to the emergence of speech, and their burgeoning ability to better understand “social cues shared meanings, beliefs, and desires,” explains lead author David J. Lewkowicz, a professor of psychology.
In a second part of the study, the researchers looked at the role of early experience with a specific language and how it relates to lip reading in infancy.
Videos of a Spanish speaking woman were shown to English-learning babies between 4 and 12 months of age. The researchers found these infants also shifted their attention to the mouth by 8 months of age, but they continued to lip read as late as 12 months of age, unlike the babies who were exposed to the English video.
“These babies were experts at English, and now when they heard Spanish, it was like ‘Ok, this is weird, I better start looking at the mouth again, instead of the eyes, so I can figure out what’s going on.'”
The study data suggest that infants who continue to focus most of their attention on the mouth past 12 months of age, “... are probably not developing age-appropriate perceptual and cognitive skills and may be at risk for disorders like autism,” Lewkowicz says.
Although more research is needed, the finding may be able to provide about six months of earlier intervention for autism, which currently can be diagnosed with behavioral testing beginning at about 18 months of age. “The earlier we can diagnose it (autism), the more effectively we can ensure the best possible developmental outcomes,” says Lewkowicz.
With these twins, fame comes in a double helping.
The number of twins born to American women has risen dramatically over the past three decades, a new government study shows.
The twin birth rate rose 76 percent from 1980 through 2009, according to report from the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention that was released Wednesday. While 189 out of every 10,000 births was a twin delivery in 1980, in 2009, 333 out of 10,000 births involved twins.
Put another way, in 2009 one in every 30 babies born in the United States was a twin, as compared to one in every 53 babies born in 1980.
Researchers say that the uptick in twin births is due to both the increased use of infertility treatments and the tendency for women to delay child-birth till they are older.
The increase in twin births is concerning, said the study’s lead author Joyce A. Martin, an epidemiologist at the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics.
“It’s really important to note that outcome for twins is much less positive than for singleton pregnancies,” Martin said. “Twins tend to be born earlier and smaller.. Their mothers are more likely to require hospitalization. And the twins themselves are more likely than singletons to require hospitalization."
But, Martin added, “although they are at greater risk overall, most twin births do very well.”
The rate of twinning isn’t the same all over the country. In New Mexico, for example, 223 out of 10,000 births were twin deliveries. But in Connecticut the number was far higher: 459 out of 10,000 births.
The increases seen by Martin and her colleagues also varied by race and ethnic group. The biggest increase in twins was among white non-Hispanic mothers. For them, the rate of twins doubled over the past three decades.
Interestingly, black women have had a higher rate of twinning all along. Nobody knows why this is, but experts assume it’s mostly explained by genes, just as the tendency to twin seems to run in certain families, said Dr. Joseph Sanfilippo, a professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences and director of reproductive endocrinology and infertility at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.
It’s clear that there are big variations in women’s tendency to have twins, Sanfilippo said. That can be due to genetics and environment. Rates vary widely from country to country, Sanfilippo said. Yoruba has the highest rate with 450 to 500 sets of twins per 10,000, he added.
The big increases Martin and her colleagues have seen in the U.S. in white non-Hispanic women have almost caught them up with black women.
While the rise in the rate of twins occurred in every age group, the biggest surges were in women 30 and older. From 1980 to 2009, the rate of twins increased 76 percent among women aged 30 to 34 and nearly 100 percent for women aged 35 to 39. Among women aged 40 and older the rate surged more than 200 percent, the Martin and her colleagues reported.
Nobody knows exactly why older women are more prone to twinning, Sanfilippo said. But the most likely explanation is that older women have older eggs.
While these older eggs still have DNA that is intact enough to produce a healthy baby, the mechanisms that allow the fertilized egg to grow and divide may be somewhat compromised and this is what may lead to more twinning.
“The egg is the orchestra leader,” Sanfilippo explained. “If it’s been sitting around in the ovaries for 35 to 40 years it doesn’t work as well. Certainly not as well as one that is just 25 years old.”
Ultimately older moms are only responsible for one third of the increase in twins, Martin said. The rest of the surge is due to increasing use of infertility therapies like in vitro fertilization.
And that’s something that doctors and patients can control. These days more and more infertility centers are choosing to put only one embryo back into a woman’s uterus during IVF, hoping to stem the surge in multiple births.
The hope, Sanfilippo said, is that this will lead to healthier moms and babies.
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Real 'Benjamin Button'? Stem cells reverse aging in mice
Mothers who have jobs are healthier than those who are not employed, at least when their children are very young, a new study finds.
Working mothers in the study were less depressed and reported better overall health than moms who stayed at home with their young children, though this benefit of working did not extend into children's school years.
There was no difference between the health of mothers who worked part time and those who worked full time, the researchers said.
Stay-at-home moms may be more socially isolated than working moms, which might increase their chances of being depressed, the researchers said. Stay-at-home moms might also be under more stress as a result of being at home with their children all day. This stress may be relieved somewhat when their children start school, which may explain why the link disappeared when children entered preschool.
The study is published in the December issue of the Journal of Family Psychology
The results are based on interviews, starting in 1991, with 1,364 mothers from Arkansas, California, Kansas, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin. Researchers interviewed women throughout their children's infancy, preschool years and into elementary school.
The researchers defined working part time as working one-to-32 hours per week. About 25 percent of mothers were employed part time during the study period, although mothers moved in and out of part-time work. Mothers reported whether they experienced symptoms of depression and rated their overall health as "poor," "fair," "good" or "excellent."
Moms, do you work outside the home or stay home?
The mothers also answered questions about conflicts between their work and family lives, and how involved they were in their child's schooling.
Working moms reported fewer symptoms of depression and were more likely to rate their health "excellent," compared with nonemployed mothers, according to the study.
Mothers working part time tended to report less conflict between work and family than those working full time, the researchers said.
Mothers employed part time reported being just as involved in their child's schooling as stay-at-home moms, and more involved than moms who worked full time. In addition, mothers working part time provided more learning opportunities for their toddlers than stay-at-home moms and moms working full time, the researchers said.
Couples' emotional intimacy did not appear to be affected by the mothers' employment status: the level of emotional understanding between partners was similar for working moms and stay-at-home moms.
The findings in the study held even after the researchers took into account factors that could have influenced the results, including the mother's education and certain personality traits.
The researchers noted they examined the mother's well-being in relation to one child only, and additional siblings should be considered in future studies.
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Working moms multitask way more than dads - and hate it
Give other moms a break on 'No Judgment Day'
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Working moms multitask about 10 hours a week more than working dads, a new study finds. When women multitask, it often centers on taking care of the kids and doing housework, while men are more likely to multitask by socializing and doing self-care.
It's 7 p.m. You're e-mailing your boss, doing the dinner dishes, checking your 10-year-old's homework, and trying to calm your angry 3-year-old, who is screaming like a howler monkey. You'd like to scream, too. At your husband, who thinks everything is just fine.
According to a new study published in the December issue of the journal American Sociological Review, working moms not only multitask more frequently than working dads but also experience more negative emotions.
“The mother-nurture-care concept is part of our social unit,” says co-author and sociologist Barbara Schneider of Michigan State University. “That’s not a bad thing, but the pressures of everyday life have made it very difficult.”
The study participants were part of the 500 Family Study, which collected data from 1999 to 2000 in eight urban and suburban communities to find out how middle-class families balance family and work obligations.
The researchers found that working moms spend 48.3 hours per week, or about 40 percent of their waking hours, doing the multitask shuffle, compared to dads, who spend 38.9 per week doing two or more things at once.
Moms are more likely to get stuck with labor-intensive housework or childcare activities, while dads generally multitask by talking to several people at once or performing self-care. Dads are also more involved in kids' recreational activities.
While multitasking is generally a positive experience for dads, moms feel stressed and conflicted when they multitask at home as well as in public places, mostly due to the type of activities performed, which could leave them open to scrutiny and judgment.
To help ease the strain, the authors suggest sharing the load by getting dad more involved in the mundane aspects of home and child care.
“Simply doing things together as a family in the context of the home can go a long way,” says Schneider.
Although the study did not look at the current situation of these families, there’s no reason to think things have improved, says University of Notre Dame sociologist Elizabeth Aura McClintock. For example, among dual-income married couples working 35 or more hours a week, men's median weekly housework hours increased in the 1970s to about 5 hours per week, but have not changed much since then.
Today’s economic climate is also likely taking a toll.
“Families are stressed,” says Schneider. “With resources it was tough; imagine what it’s like now when there are probably fewer resources due to layoffs and rising expenses.”
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