Entries for March 2009

Stimulant drugs like Ritalin that are used to treat ADHD don't improve children's symptoms long term, according to new research published online in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. That may come as a surprise to parents, but ADHD researchers have been arguing for the past 10 years over the findings of the Multimodal Treatment Study of Children with ADHD. Called the MTA study, it is the largest study conducted to compare the benefits of medication to behavioral interventions.

This latest report from the MTA study tracked 485 children for eight years and found those still taking stimulant medication fared no better in the reduction of symptoms such as inattention and hyperactivity or in social functioning than those who hadn't. Most of the children who had taken medication for the first 14 months were no longer taking it. This, the researchers wrote, raises "questions about whether medication treatment beyond two years continues to be beneficial or needed at all." Earlier reports found that children taking stimulants alone or combined with behavioral treatment did better in the first year than children who got no special care or who got behavioral treatment alone.

I just talked with Dimitri Sotis at WTOP Radio in Washington about how two new iIPhone apps may make it possible to monitor a child's blood glucose levels remotely and keep track of an aging parent's blood pressure from thousands of miles away. The applications also open the door to sharing personal health data with other people with the same condition. Imagine a group of 12-year-olds with type I diabetes comparing glucose levels throughout the day. If knowledge is power, this could be pretty darned powerful.

Healthcare systems have talked for decades about how remote health monitoring would make it simpler and less costly to track a person's vitals and report in to the doctor. These iPhone apps, and ones for other platforms that will be sure to follow if these work, may actually get us there.

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Are Peter Rabbit, Mother Goose, and Snow White giving our children lead poisoning? Not likely, but a new federal law aimed at protecting children from brain-damaging lead in toys, jewelry, and other products is causing problems in libraries, consignment shops, and used-book stores. The law makes it illegal to sell children's merchandise that has more than 600 parts per million of lead by weight, a level that will drop to 300 parts per million in August. It turns out that children's books printed before 1985 might have been printed with lead-based ink.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission has been besieged by complaints from parents and consignment store owners since it became clear that the new law holds consignment store owners liable if they unknowingly sell used clothes or toys with lead levels that violate the new standard. (Lead tests can cost hundreds of dollars, so that's not a viable option.) Now librarians find themselves in the same pickle. A story in today's Washington Post reports that librarians are mulling over whether this means they have to yank one sixth of their children's collection from the shelves. The Post reports a local Goodwill reluctantly pulling Bunnicula and other classics. Yet there's no evidence that any child has ever been exposed to hazardous amounts of lead as a result of reading. Time to call in the common-sense patrol: Books are good. Eating books is not so good, even if they're lead free. So encourage reading, even if the book is a hand-me-down from Grandma, and focus worry elsewhere.

Michelle Obama just became the hero of parent-gardeners across America by spading up a corner of the White House South Lawn and planting lettuce, chard, and kale. She's not alone; seed companies across the nation say they're swamped with orders from first-time gardeners eager to grow their own. And why not? Homegrown veggies are cheaper, they're local, they can be organic, and they are less likely to have food-safety issues. The first lady also pointed out that making a family effort to raise vegetables emphasizes the importance of healthy eating at a time when childhood obesity is a national epidemic. Plus, homegrown veggies are way yummier. So it's time to join Sasha and Malia in the garden. (Michelle joked that she expects to have the whole family, including the president, out there pulling weeds. We'll see.)

U.S. News sought out expert advice on backyard vegetables that kids will love planting and eating. These are almost foolproof to grow, don't need pesticides, and many will grow happily in a pot on the patio. Here's the list for your own White House garden:

Natasha Richardson's sudden death from a seemingly minor head injury is a big wake-up call for parents. If a healthy 45-year-old woman could die after falling on the bunny hill at a ski resort, what about our kids? Helmets are becoming more common on the ski slopes, but many parents, myself among them, wouldn't think you'd need one on the beginner's slope. Maybe it's time to think again.

Among children up to age 15, traumatic brain injury causes about 2,685 deaths, 37,000 hospitalizations, and 435,000 emergency room visits each year, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The experts think that many more cases are never reported; kids, parents, and coaches often don't recognize the symptoms of brain injury, which is also called concussion; and many think kids should "play hurt." (A study in January's Pediatrics found that 81 percent of high school football players in Minnesota who had a concussion kept playing that day. That's a really bad idea, because a second head impact while recovering from a previous blow can cause long-term cognitive problems and even potentially fatal sudden brain swelling.)

Parents could soon be using their iPhones to monitor a child's blood glucose levels throughout the day, whether that child is at school or at the beach. Of course, there are already dozens of iPhone apps available for tracking exercise, diet, and blood pressure—things where you type in the information yourself. But this new tool, unveiled yesterday by LifeScan Inc. of Milpitas, Calif., would be the first to monitor health information remotely, then share it with family members or doctors.

The prototype diabetes tracker was unveiled at the debut of the iPhone's new operating system in Cupertino, Calif. Anita Mathew, LifeScan's manager for alliances and corporate development, showed how a child at school could use the iPhone app to download a glucose reading from her monitor, calculate how much insulin she would need based on lunch and swim practice, and then send that information to Mom and Dad. "There's the potential to even share with the diabetes community," says Dave Detmers, director of communication for LifeScan. In other words, parents or kids could compare glucose control strategies, and trade tips, congratulate, or commiserate. This remote tracking app won't be on the market anytime soon, however. Because it is a medical device, it will need approval from the Food and Drug Administration.

Barack Obama thinks it's high time we all had our medical records online. In fact, the president is so excited about this that he put $19 billion in the stimulus package to get doctors and hospitals to go digital. This could be good news for parents who have to keep track of the family's shot records, X-rays, lab results, and prescriptions. No more having to recopy my daughter's shot record every time we go to the pediatrician! But the push to go digital also raises big questions about privacy and access.

I talked about the pluses and minuses of having an electronic medical record earlier this week with WTOP radio. Here's a big plus: Families in Hawaii, where Kaiser Permanente first rolled out its electronic medical record system, went to the doctor 25 percent fewer times, because they could ask the doctor questions and order up prescription refills online.

There are some serious potential risks: privacy problems and medical identity theft, to name just two. I've listed 6 ways electronic medical records could make healthcare better.

A peanut allergy is terrifying: Eating even a tiny bit of peanut can spark a fatal reaction, and up until now, the only way to avoid that fate was to never eat the legumes, which lurk in thousands of processed foods. Of the 150 deaths each year from food allergies, half are caused by peanuts, and most of those deaths happen in teenagers and young adults. That's why two new reports on an experimental treatment for peanut allergy are good news. They offer the possibility that some kids will be able to "outgrow" peanut allergy, as well as dangerous allergies to such foods as eggs, milk, tree nuts, and shellfish.

Ryan Cassada can now eat peanut M&Ms and peanut butter cookies, thanks to being one of the 33 children to try the experimental therapy. Ryan's parents signed him up for the study at Duke University Medical Center when he was 2½. "I was a little bit nervous about it," says Ryan's mother, Rhonda Cassada, because the treatment involved feeding peanuts to Ryan daily. "We decided if we could give our child a chance of getting over this allergy, it could potentially save his life one day."

• Stuart Brown says play makes kids happier, healthier, and better students, but how can parents make that happen in a stressed-out, overscheduled world? I talked with Brown earlier this week about his new book, Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul (Avery, $24.95). Since then, readers have weighed in with resources that can help parents bring more play into their children's lives at school, at home, and in the neighborhood. (I just checked on efforts to mandate more recess time, and it's clearly not getting much traction. Lawmakers in Maine are pondering at least two unstructured recess periods for elementary students, but they're in the minority.) Here are a few sites worth checking out:

Like many new parents, I took my toddler to the YMCA for swimming lessons. And like most parents, I wondered if that time spent paddling around while wearing a floatie pack made her safer or actually increased her risk of drowning by reducing her fear of water. It's no small question: Drowning is the leading cause of fatal injury in children ages 1 to 4.

Wonder no more. Young children are less likely to drown if they've taken swimming lessons, according to researchers at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Formal swimming lessons for preschoolers reduce their risk of drowning by 88 percent, the researchers found. Amazingly enough, this is the first scientific look into whether early childhood swimming lessons reduce the risk of drowning, although mom listservs abound with questions on the value of swimming lessons vs. "drownproofing" classes. The results were reported in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine.

Want your children to eat healthful food? Serve them X-Ray Vision Carrots! That's the news from researchers at Cornell University, who tested this on 186 four-year-olds. They ate almost twice as many X-Ray Vision Carrots as they did plain old baby carrots. The children kept eating about 50 percent more carrots even after the superhero names were discontinued.

The great news for parents: The carrots were one and the same. Cool names make for cool foods, according to researcher Brian Wansink, who tested the supercharged veggie names. He is a professor of marketing at Cornell University and author of Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think Wansink points out that the attraction to glammed-up names isn't unique to kids; grown-ups go for seductive descriptions on restaurant menus in a big way. In one memorable study, he found that adults thought a California cabernet much more delightful than a North Dakota wine. Both bottles were actually "Two-Buck Chuck" from Trader Joe's.