October 4, 2006, 10:23 PM CT
Parent's Conversational Style
Parents who use a particular conversational style with their children--drawing them out to elicit detailed memories about past shared events and to talk about emotions--contribute to the child's secure attachment, sense of self-worth, and eventual social competence, says a new University of Illinois study published in a September special edition of Attachment and Human Development.
"As soon as children start talking, parents develop conversational patterns with their kids, and different parents have very different patterns," said Kelly K. Bost, a U of I associate professor of human development.
In the study, Bost and her colleagues compared the conversational styles of 90 mothers and their three-year-old children with assessments the researchers had made in the home of the children's attachment security. The research confirmed that mothers of securely attached children use a more elaborative conversational style than those of insecure children.
"In elaborative conversations, parents provide rich detail and lots of background information and try to get their child to provide new information from his memory as the conversation goes on," Bost said.
Experts believe elaborative conversations aid in memory development, foster the ability to organize and tell personal stories, and promote a sense of shared history with the parent, she said.........
Posted by: JoAnn Permalink Source
September 27, 2006, 9:22 PM CT
Abortion Notification And Consent
Laws that require minors to notify or get the consent of one or both parents before having an abortion reduce risky sexual behavior among teens, as per a Florida State University law professor in Tallahassee, Fla.
Jonathan Klick, the Jeffrey A. Stoops Professor of Law, and Thomas Stratmann, professor of economics at George Mason University, came to that conclusion after they looked at the rates of gonorrhea among teenage girls as a measure of risky sex in connection to the parental notification or consent laws that were in effect at the time.
The scientists observed that teen gonorrhea rates dropped by an average of 20 percent for Hispanic girls and 12 percent for white girls in states where parental notification laws were in effect. The results were not statistically significant for black girls. The study will be published in an upcoming edition of The Journal of Law Economics and Organization.
"Incentives matter," Klick said. "They matter even in activities as primal as sex, and they matter even among teenagers, who are conventionally believed to be short-sighted. If the expected costs of risky sex are raised, teens will substitute less risky activities such as protected sex or abstinence."
In this case, the incentive for teens is to avoid having to tell their parents about a pregnancy by substituting less risky sex activities. In doing so, the scientists say, the rates of gonorrhea among girls under the age of 20 went down.........
Posted by: Emily Permalink Source
September 24, 2006, 10:27 PM CT
Hearing Loss From Chemotherapy
Children with cancer who suffer hearing loss due to the toxic effects of chemotherapy might one day be able to get their hearing back through pharmacological and gene treatment, thanks to work done with mouse models at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. Mice with a variety of genetic mutations that disrupt different parts of the ear will also help researchers understand age-related hearing loss in adults, as well as hearing loss caused by long-term exposure to loud noise, as per the researchers.
The researchers took the first step toward these ambitious goals by identifying 17 families of mice whose offspring carry one or more of a variety of mutations that cause them to lose the ability to hear high-frequency sounds, as per Jian Zuo, Ph.D., associate member of the St. Jude Department of Developmental Neurobiology. Zuo is senior author of a report on this work that appears in the recent issue of Hearing Research.
These models will help researchers understand what happens in the ears of children who suffer ototoxicity (toxic damage to the inner ear due to chemotherapy) and eventually, which genes are responsible for that damage. "Our ongoing study of these mouse models will advance understanding of age-related and noise-induced hearing loss in humans--such as long-term exposure to loud music--which are similar to the damage that occurs in children receiving chemotherapy," Zuo said.........
Posted by: Janet Permalink Source
September 18, 2006, 9:30 PM CT
A Mother Prompting Her Child To Eat And Obesity?
The prevalence of childhood obesity has increased significantly since the 1980s. A number of factors contribute to childhood obesity; however, parents are in a key position to help shape children's eating behaviors and eating environments. A study in the recent issue of The Journal of Pediatrics evaluates the role of mothers prompting their child to eat, the child's compliance with those prompts, and the potential contribution of each to the risk of obesity.
Dr. Julie Lumeng and Ms. Lori Burke from the University of Michigan videotaped and reviewed the tasting of four different foods by 71 mother-child pairs. Two of the foods presented were familiar (a cream-filled sponge cake and potato chips) and two were unfamiliar (a sweet Chinese dessert cake and fried vegetable chips). The scientists recorded how a number of times the mother prompted her child to take a bite and whether the child obeyed these prompts. On average, children complied with their mother's prompts to take another bite approximately two-thirds of the time.
Low maternal education, the presentation of unfamiliar foods, and younger age of the child were factors that predicted more prompting from the mother. Conversely, the mother being obese, the offering of familiar foods, and older age of the child were factors that predicted the child's compliance with the prompts. In children of obese mothers, variables that predicted a higher body mass index in the child were low maternal education, more prompts by the mother to eat unfamiliar foods, and fewer prompts to eat and bites of the familiar foods. In contrast, in children of mothers who were not obese, none of these behaviors were correlation to the child's weight status.........
Posted by: JoAnn Permalink Source
September 14, 2006, 7:27 PM CT
Are the Dangers of Food Allergies in Children Exaggerated?
Since I started writing this blog, I have encountered reports of increasing incidences of food allergies innumerable times. It is alarming and intriguing. Conversely, to some extent, it is comforting knowing that my son who had, and still has, many food allergies, is not an isolated case. There are a number of of us, and I believe in the strength of numbers.
But Dr. Allan Colver, a professor of community child health at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, says that the dangers of childhood food allergies are over-estimated, and that prescribing adrenaline-injecting EpiPens to children with food allergies may only be fuelling anxiety in parents unnecessarily.
Jonathan Hourihane, a professor of pediatrics and child health at University College Cork in Ireland, however, disagrees, and maintains that autoinjectors are justified as part of an integrated care plan.
Read about their debate in the CBC News, or the full article reported in the British Medical Journal. You may also want to read a comment left by Jonathan Shaw, Director of The Allergy Show, who disagrees with Dr. Colver:........
Posted by: JoAnn Permalink Source
September 13, 2006, 9:34 PM CT
Depressive Symptoms In Teens
There has been much controversy in recent years regarding the connection between teenage suicide and the use of antidepressant drugs. At an FDA meeting reviewing this topic, the majority of clinical trials examined did not show that the drugs were effective in treating depression in children and adolescents.
In a recent study reported in the recent issue of the Journal of Clinical Pharmacology, Dr. Richard Malone, from the Department of Psychiatry at Drexel University College of Medicine and Philadelphia Health & Education Corporation, and his colleagues suggest that the short duration of depressive symptoms in this age group makes it difficult to distinguish drug efficacy from placebo.
Using a naturalistic study design, the scientists advise using multiple assessments to establish a continuous baseline before randomizing patients to therapy, which would remove those who spontaneously recover in a very short period of time. In addition to having an impact on the accuracy of future clinical trials, this approach may help decrease the number of children who are exposed to unnecessary long-term drug treatment and possible side effects, since those who spontaneously recover quickly would not be started on drug treatment.
The article "Impersistence of Depression in Youth: Implications for Drug Study Design" can be accessed at no-charge for a limited time at The Journal of Clinical Pharmacology's web site at www.jclinpharm.org/cgi/reprint/46/9/1044........
Posted by: JoAnn Permalink Source
September 13, 2006, 5:06 AM CT
Violence In The Home And Childhood Bullying
Children who were exposed to violence in the home engaged in higher levels of physical bullying than youngsters who were not witnesses to such behavior, as per a research studyby scientists from the University of Washington and Indiana University.
The study is one of the first in the United States to specifically examine the association between child exposure to intimate partner violence and involvement in bullying. It also is one of the first to break down bullying into physical aggression (hitting, pushing and other forms outward aggression) and relational aggression (teasing, being mean and ostracizing peers).
Overall, 34 percent of the children studied engaged in bullying and 73 percent reported being the victim of some form of bullying in the prior year. Almost all of the bullies, 97 percent, said they were also victims of bullying.
"Children learn from seeing what their primary caregivers do. They are very attuned and very observant about what goes on in a household," said Dr. Nerissa Bauer, lead author of the study and a former UW pediatrician who is now an assistant professor of pediatrics at Indian and Riley Children's Hospital.
"Parents are very powerful role models and children will mimic the behavior of parents, wanting to be like them. They may believe violence is OK and they can use it with peers. After all, they may think, 'If Daddy can do this, perhaps I can hit this kid to get my way.' When parents engage in violence, children may assume violence is the right way to do things," she said.........
Posted by: JoAnn Permalink Source
September 13, 2006, 4:25 AM CT
Children's Behavioral And Mental Health Problems
Limited access to services for children and adolescents with behavioral problems or mental illness often leads to inadequate care and therapy based on insufficient scientific evidence of safety and effectiveness, concludes a report by the American Psychological Association (APA) released recently.
As per the report, a product of the APA Working Group on Psychotropic Medications for Children and Adolescents, gaps in the scientific knowledge concerning which therapys work best for specific diagnoses and patients, a dearth of clinicians specifically trained to work with children, cuts in Medicaid funding, and poor reimbursement for mental health services leads to a number of children being treated with medicine despite limited efficacy and safety for their use especially with children.
Research published earlier this year showed a five-fold increase in the use of antipsychotic drugs to treat behavioral and emotional problems in children and adolescents from 1993 to 2002.
"This entire state of affairs is in part correlation to our health care system's failure to provide sufficiently for children, especially in the area of pediatric mental health care," states Ronald T. Brown, PhD, chair of the APA Working Group and Professor of Public Health and Dean at Temple University. "As a result, much of the care provided to children for mental health issues has been limited to medicine even though a number of psychosocial therapys have been found to be effective and some with better risk profiles. Psychosocial therapys, however, can be more labor intensive and more expensive." .........
Posted by: JoAnn Permalink Source
September 13, 2006, 4:19 AM CT
Fighting Diarrhea In Kids
University of Leicester researchers are heading a worldwide research project which could revolutionise the diagnosis and therapy of diarrhoea in children in developing countries.
The four-year project, the results of which are now being piloted in four hospitals in India, will offer a means of identifying the two most deadly forms of the disease quickly, cheaply and with little training necessary for practitioners.
The implications for improving children's health could be enormous. Diarrhoea is a major killer in developing countries. World Health Organisation statistics indicate that more than 2 million people die each year from the effects of diarrhoea, most of them children under five years old.
Diarrhoea is caused by a range of bacterial, viral and parasitic organisms, and is commonly spread by contaminated water and poor sanitation. Two particular bacteria , enteropathogenic E.coli (EPEC), which causes a persistent infection lasting more than 14 days, and Shigella, the cause of dysentery - are the most deadly in terms of killing children. They cause only 20% of cases of diarrhoea but result in 60% of deaths. It is these two killers - EPEC and Shigella - that the Leicester-led project is targeting.
Peter Williams, Professor of Microbiology in the Department of Genetics, and Leicester colleagues Uta Praekelt and Marie Singer, are working with researchers at the Robert Koch Institute in Gera number of and Anna University in Chennai India, and with doctors at the Christian Medical College in Vellore, India, and at Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta, Indonesia.........
Posted by: JoAnn Permalink Source
September 11, 2006, 10:12 PM CT
Wearing A Helmet Puts Cyclists At Risk
Drivers pass closer when overtaking cyclists wearing helmets than when overtaking bare-headed cyclists, increasing the risk of a collision, the research has found.
Dr Ian Walker, a traffic psychology expert from the University of Bath, used a bicycle fitted with a computer and an ultrasonic distance sensor to record data from over 2,500 overtaking motorists in Salisbury and Bristol.
Dr Walker, who was struck by a bus and a truck in the course of the experiment, spent half the time wearing a cycle helmet and half the time bare-headed. He was wearing the helmet both times he was struck.
He observed that drivers were as much as twice as likely to get especially close to the bicycle when he was wearing the helmet.
Across the board, drivers passed an average of 8.5 cm (3 1/3 inches) closer with the helmet than without.
The research has been accepted for publication in the journal Accident Analysis & Prevention.
"This study shows that when drivers overtake a cyclist, the margin for error they leave is affected by the cyclist's appearance," said Dr Walker, from the University's Department of Psychology.
"By leaving the cyclist less room, drivers reduce the safety margin that cyclists need to deal with obstacles in the road, such as drain covers and potholes, as well as the margin for error in their own judgements.........
Posted by: JoAnn Permalink Source
