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Why Parents Who Smoke Put Their Kids at Risk
Tweet Share on Facebook June 30, 2010 Comment (5)Everyone knows that cigarette smoking is bad for your health. And it's bad for your children's health, too, increasing the risk that your offspring will suffer from obesity and mental health problems. Children of mothers who smoked while pregnant are more likely to have behavioral problems by age 4, according to researchers at the University of Bristol in England. And pregnant women aren't the only ones who should worry about the ill effects of smoking on children. Kids whose fathers smoked while they were in the womb were more likely to later become obese, according to researchers in Hong Kong. Both sets of scientists looked at data on thousands of children, and both papers were published in the July issue of Pediatrics.
Scientists have long known that pregnant women who smoke increase the risk that their children will be born prematurely, have low birth weight, decreased lung function, and developmental delays. Moms who smoke after a child is born also increase the odds that their child will have pneumonia, asthma, ear infections, and sudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS. But this new information suggests that children face a higher risk of obesity, which itself is a key risk factor for diabetes and heart disease, from secondhand smoke as well as maternal smoking.
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2 Ways to Lower Your Child's Cholesterol Without Statins
Tweet Share on Facebook June 29, 2010 Comment (3)Parents should think twice before starting children on statin drugs to lower cholesterol, according to a new report on children and statins from Consumer Reports Best Buy Drugs. That's because the powerful drugs have not been extensively tested in children, and they can have serious side effects, especially muscle pain. Instead, parents should consider the two best ways to lower cholesterol without drugs: more exercise, and a healthy diet.
With about 20 percent of children now considered obese and at risk of high cholesterol, many more parents will be facing the question of whether they should put children on statins, an idea that would have seemed odd just a few years ago. In 2008, the American Academy of Pediatrics said that statins could be used for children ages 8 and above, and that 2-year-olds should be given cholesterol tests if they appear to be at risk of obesity. In 2009, doctors wrote children 2.3 million prescriptions for statins. But John Santa, an internist who directs Consumer Reports Health Ratings Center, says parents should ask themselves two questions if their child has been diagnosed with high cholesterol before turning to statins:
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Should Kids Take Big Risks? Teenage Sailor’s Rescue Raises Big Questions
Tweet Share on Facebook June 15, 2010 Comment (5)The good news that 16-year-old Abby Sunderland was rescued at sea in the midst of her attempt to sail around the world alone gave parents good reason to heave a sigh of relief, and also ask themselves if they would let their own teenager take on such a dangerous task.
Bloggers have been flaming Sunderland's parents for letting the teenager set out on a voyage that would be challenging even for a seasoned sailor. "If people are looking at age, they're looking at the wrong thing here," dad Laurence Sunderland told reporters Friday as a rescue ship headed to the girl's disabled boat in the Indian Ocean. "Age is not a criteria. Abby is a fine sailor," he added. "I've never advocated this for 16-year-olds. I've advocated this for experienced sailors."
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2 Simple Ways to Get Kids to Watch Less TV
Tweet Share on Facebook June 14, 2010 Comment (4)About one third of children watch more than the daily two hours of TV recommended by pediatricians, but parents often wince at the battles they face in prying children away from the tube. Here's help.
Children and teenagers who say their parents had rules about how much time they could spend watching TV or playing video games were much more likely to stay within the recommended limits for screen time, according to a new study in Pediatrics. The study, conducted by researchers at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and several universities, asked 7,415 children and teens ages 9 to 15 about their TV and computer habits. They found evidence that two simple tactics work: setting family rules for screen time and getting kids moving, whether through organized sports or free-time play.
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To Help Cure Autism, Share Your DNA
Tweet Share on Facebook June 9, 2010 Comment (11)The news that children with autism have rare genetic variants unique to them is big, fancy science. It comes from the largest study ever on the genetics of autism, involving the DNA of 996 children with autism and their families, and more than 120 scientists in 11 countries. Not only did children with autism have rare genetic variations, the researchers found, they didn't share those variations with their parents, meaning that the variations were not inherited. But if you're the parent of a child with autism, news like this that doesn't include a cure, better treatments, or even a clear-cut cause doesn't sound so exciting.
Not so, says Stanley Nelson, a geneticist at the University of California-Los Angeles, who sent me an E-mail this morning so vehement that I just had to call him up and get the scoop. Clearly, finding more autism genes could make it easier to identify the causes of autism and discover potential treatments. So I was at first surprised by what Nelson said. "This work is grossly inadequate, even though it reflects about 15 to 20 years of sample collection, tens of millions [of dollars] in molecular testing, and analytical effort," he wrote, adding that this biggest-ever study, published online in Nature, explains the genetic basis of only about 3 percent of diagnosed cases of autism.
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Risky Teen Behaviors: The 5 Biggies Parents Should Know About
Tweet Share on Facebook June 8, 2010 Comment (7)When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention asked teenagers if they had ever used a prescription drug that wasn't prescribed to them, 23 percent said "Yes." That was the big news in the CDC's new Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which anonymously polled 16,000 high school students in 2009 about whether they had been drinking, smoking, using illegal drugs, or indulging in other risky behaviors.
Twenty-three percent may sound like a lot, but it's not a big surprise to researchers. Teenage abuse of ADHD drugs, like Adderal, has risen 76 percent in the past eight years, according to a study published last year in Pediatrics. And opioid drugs like OxyContin, which are widely prescribed to adults for pain relief, are the third-most-popular drugs of abuse for teenagers. Both ADHD medications and OxyContin are easy to find in medicine cabinets and teenagers figure most parents will never notice if one or two pills go missing.
