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Autism Genetic Test Doesn’t Answer Most Parents’ Questions
Tweet Share on Facebook March 15, 2010 Comment (20)From the headlines, you'd think that the new genetic test for autism described today in the journal Pediatrics will give parents of children with autism the answers they so desperately seek. Not so, alas. Although this test identifies more children who have genetic abnormalities associated with autism, it doesn't nail down the cause of about 90 percent of autism cases.
Right now, children suspected of having autism are tested for genetic abnormalities with two tests: the G-banded karyotype, which looks for abnormalities in the chromosomes, and fragile X testing, which looks for a specific variation on the X chromosome. Those two tests find genetic abnormalities in up to 5 percent of children with autism. In the new study, researchers used a newer test, chromosomal microarray analysis, to identify variations in much smaller chunks of DNA. That test turned up genetic abnormalities in about 7 percent of people with autism spectrum disorders, compared with about 2 percent of people tested with the karyotype method. The researchers, affiliated with institutions that are part of the Autism Consortium of Boston, point to that 5 percentage point difference and argue that the newer genetic test should be used widely in diagnosing children with autism.
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New Warning on Baby Slings and Safety Risks
Tweet Share on Facebook March 12, 2010 Comment (5)Baby slings are a godsend for parents who want to hold their baby close and have their hands free. But slings also pose a health risk, according to the federal Consumer Product Safety Commission. A baby can suffocate if the sling fabric presses against the baby's nose and mouth or if the sling curves the child's body into a C-like position.
The CPSC has investigated at least 13 sling-related deaths in the past 20 years, including three in 2009. Given that slings are increasingly popular (I used a baby sling when my daughter was an infant, and last weekend I saw a mom out cross-country skiing with her baby wrapped tightly to her chest!), the new caution makes sense.
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Vaccines and Children: What the Hutterites Can Teach Us About Altruism
Tweet Share on Facebook March 10, 2010 Comment (11)More and more parents are refusing to get their children vaccinated because they think that the shots aren't adequately tested or could cause autism. But when parents refuse vaccines over concerns about their own children, they may put the health of all children at risk. Putting it another way, having your kids immunized against infectious disease can be considered an altruistic act.
That's the message in a new study on how "herd immunity" combats infectious disease. It's a notion that's been around for centuries: When enough people in a population are vaccinated, disease can't spread, even if some people (such as those who, because of suppressed immune systems or other health problems, can't get the shots) aren't. About 75 to 95 percent of a group needs to be vaccinated for herd immunity to work; the proportion varies depending on how efficiently a given bug spreads. An 85 percent immunization rate halts polio, while more than 90 percent of a group needs to be vaccinated to derail pertussis. Rates of pertussis, measles, and mumps have been increasing in the past few years as more and more parents refuse vaccines.
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What Parents Can Do to Keep Kids From Snacking Their Way to Obesity
Tweet Share on Facebook March 3, 2010 Comment (13)The news on childhood obesity is almost universally bad, including this latest item: Kids snack three times a day on junk food, accounting for almost one third of their daily calories.
Barry Popkin, a professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill and author of a recent study on kids and snacks that was published in Health Affairs, warns that American children are developing a "dysfunctional eating pattern" of snarfing down three meals plus three snacks a day. Snacking has added 168 calories a day to children's intake over the last 25 years, according to Popkin. No wonder child obesity has become what Susan Dentzer, editor of Health Affairs, calls "child abuse."
Parents get beaten up on by doctors and public-health officials for feeding kids junk food and not making sure they get exercise. But parents aren't the only ones to blame, and the big actors in this drama make it hard for parents to make the necessary healthful changes. Systemic problems include:
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Two Simple Ways to Be a Happier Parent
Tweet Share on Facebook March 2, 2010 Comment (11)When Christine Carter became a parent, she realized that her work as a sociologist who studies happiness gave her a head start on being a good and happy parent. Rather than trying to solve problems in her family, she wanted to prevent them. That got her wondering what makes for happy families and children. The result of that questioning is Raising Happiness (Ballantine Books).
The book is chock-full of words—gratitude, forgiveness, optimism, and inner peace—I associate more with meditation than parenting manuals. But it's not at all woo-woo. Carter grounds her path to happiness in solid science, including behavioral psychology, which explains why praise is much more powerful in getting children to behave than punishment or nagging. Many of the findings are surprisingly simple. For instance, would you like to know the one thing that will make children do better in school, help them have fewer emotional problems, and make them less likely to become obese or have drug or alcohol problems? Eat dinner together as a family.
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Parents’ Vaccine Safety Fears Mean Big Trouble for Children’s Health
Tweet Share on Facebook March 1, 2010 Comment (40)Parents are really worried about childhood vaccine safety, but the public-health community doesn't seem to get it. A new survey reveals that 54 percent of parents are concerned about the adverse effects of vaccines, and 25 percent think some vaccines cause autism in healthy children. Yet just last week, the federal government vaccine advisory board called for all Americans 6 months and older to get flu shots next fall, including the vaccine against the H1N1 flu strain. If the goal is to protect the public's health, you'd think the feds would first want to address the fact that a big chunk of parents think vaccines aren't safe.
The vast majority of parents do have their children vaccinated against childhood diseases; 88 percent of the 1,552 parents polled in the January 2009 survey just published in Pediatrics said they follow their doctor's recommendation for childhood vaccines. But 11.5 percent said they'd refused at least one vaccine for their children. Here are some more numbers:
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3 Ways Electronic Media Harm Kids' Health and 3 Ways They Can Help
Tweet Share on Facebook March 1, 2010 Comment (8)Given that children now spend more than seven hours a day with their TV's, computers, cellphones, and other electronic media—more time than they spend in school and more than many of them sleep—we parents have got to get smart about our children's media use and how it affects their physical and mental health, and we need to develop a family strategy for managing media. Good luck figuring that out from the research, which is confusing and incomplete. For instance, the health effects of cellphones have been barely studied, despite the fact that most teens seem to text more than they breathe. But there's some help in a new article in Pediatrics, which evaluates the state of the science and lays out the good and bad.
"Most parents are clueless," says Victor Strasburger, a professor of pediatrics at the University of New Mexico, who led the study. "They have no idea about media effects. They probably have no idea what their children are watching. Parents need to understand that media can have an impact on everything they're concerned about with their children's health and development: school performance, learning disabilities, sex, drugs, aggressive behavior."
[Consider: Do kids learn better online?]
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Kids and Killer Hot Dogs? 3 Tips to Prevent Choking on Food
Tweet Share on Facebook February 22, 2010 Comment (51)It's easy to giggle over the killer-hot-dog headlines that have been sparked by the American Academy of Pediatrics' new recommendation that, to prevent choking, hot dogs should come with a warning label. What would it say—"Choking on this hot dog may be hazardous to your child's health"?
But I'd bet that most parents have had the awful experience of seeing a child's face suddenly turn red when a piece of food "went down the wrong pipe." I'll never forget the instructor in a baby CPR class who showed us how to whack a choking toddler between the shoulder blades and said: "You WILL have to do this." She was right.
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Are Sugar-Loving Kids Likely to Grow Up Alcoholic and Depressed?
Tweet Share on Facebook February 18, 2010 Comment (2)Kids like sweet things, a preference that starts with breast milk and continues on to lollipops and birthday cake. But for some children, intense cravings for sweets may be associated with a vulnerability to alcoholism and depression. And that same vulnerability may also make it harder for some children to cut back on sugary treats.
That news, from research published in the journal Addiction, was enough to get this mother of a candy-loving child hustling to call Julie Mennella, a biopsychologist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia who studies children's food preferences. Mennella led the study. Since the story broke, Mennella has been deluged with E-mails and calls from people saying, "This sounds like me! This sounds like my family!"
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Oxytocin-Autism Study: the Kind of Evidence-Based Research Parents Need
Tweet Share on Facebook February 16, 2010 Comment (6)Oxytocin may help improve social behavior in people with autism, according to a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. There's a lot this study can't tell us; researchers studied just 13 young adults with high-functioning autism or Asperger's syndrome, and it tested their social responses only in the laboratory, with a ball-tossing game and a measurement of how responsive they were to social cues in pictures of human faces.
Still, there's also a lot to get excited about. Oxytocin is a hormone produced by the hypothalamus that helps stimulate childbirth and breast-feeding. It's also sometimes called the "hormone of love" because it's thought to help regulate emotions. Some studies have found that children with autism have lower levels of oxytocin in their bodies. And other small studies of oxytocin's use in autistics have found that the hormone reduces repetitive behaviors and helps improve the ability to recognize emotions in voices and faces.
On Parenting
Parenting may be an art, but there's a lot of science behind raising healthy, thriving children. Contributing Editor Nancy Shute explores the latest discoveries and developments affecting children's health and parenting. Send her your comments and questions at onparenting@usnews.com.
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