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EXTRACTS FROM THE “OTHER” JOURNALS
RELATING TO CHILDREN, YOUTH AND FAMILIES —
IN THE FIELDS OF HEALTH,
SUBSTANCE ABUSE, EDUCATION, PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE ...
November 2006
Children's grades aren't hurt by time online, study shows
One in every five American parents think their kids are spending too much time on the Internet, though most say the online activities haven't affected grades.
In a study to be released today by the University of Southern California, 21 percent of adult Internet users with children think the kids are online too long, compared with 11 percent in 2000. Still, that's less than the 49 percent who complain their kids watch too much TV. About 80 percent of the children say the Internet is important for schoolwork, although three-quarters of the parents say grades haven't gone up or down since they got Internet access. Forty-seven percent of the adults say they have withheld Internet use as a form of punishment. Banning television is still more popular, reported by 57 percent of adults surveyed.
The study has been conducted most years since 2000. Over that time, researchers have seen Internet use grow to 78 percent, from 67 percent. Access at home increased to 68 percent, from 47 percent. In one of the few surveys to look at why people are offline, the study found the lack of a working computer most often to blame. Of the 22 percent of Americans who do not use the Internet, more than one-quarter are former users who dropped out. "Almost nobody drops out out of dissatisfaction," said Jeffrey Cole, director of USC's Center for the Digital Future. "The reason most people drop off is they change jobs or their computer breaks."
But more than half of the former users have no intention of returning online, the most ever. Overall, 60 percent of nonusers have no plans to go online within the next year. Cole said the numbers raise the prospect of a permanent group of nonusers. "Internet penetration has largely plateaued," he said.
Americans 66 and older remain the most disconnected, with 38 percent online. For all other age groups, at least 74 percent are online, with penetration hitting 99 percent for those 18 and younger, likely because most U.S. schools have some form of Internet access. On average, users spend 14 hours a week online, compared with 9.4 hours in 2000.
Thirty-seven percent of home Internet users have dial-up accounts, compared with 26 percent for high-speed cable modems and 24 percent for DSL. Eleven percent of Internet users go online through mobile devices — not necessarily exclusively — averaging two hours a week.
The study revealed little change in the effect on television. Thirty-six percent of home Internet users say they have spent less time watching TV since they started using the Internet, roughly the same as the 33 percent who said that in a 2001 survey.
The telephone survey of 2,269 U.S. households was conducted from February to April and included follow-up interviews with respondents to previous studies. The study has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
Anick Jesdanun
29 November 2006
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2003452575_internet29.html
Study: Juvenile pretrial lockup may make more crimes more likely
Locking up juveniles before trial may make them more likely to commit crimes afterward, according to a new report by the Justice Policy Institute, a Washington-based think tank that seeks alternatives to incarceration.
Young people in a San Francisco program to keep young people out of detention are half as likely to commit later crimes than those who stay in detention or the juvenile justice system, said the report by by Barry Holman and Jason Ziedenberg.
"Detention centers do serve a role by temporarily supervising the most at-risk youth," they wrote. "However, with 70 percent being held for nonviolent offenses, it is not clear whether the mass detention of youth is necessary — or being borne equally." Overall, they wrote, about 500,000 juveniles are held before trial each year. A study for the Wisconsin Legislature looked at four counties and found that 70 percent of the juveniles held before trial were arrested again within a year.
The 20-page "policy brief" was being released Tuesday, as part of a conference for the 75 court systems, including New Orleans, working with the Annie E. Casey Foundation's Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative. A news release from the institute said New Orleans was chosen for the conference because of its success in changing the juvenile crime system after Hurricane Katrina hit Aug. 29, 2005.
Both juvenile arrests and pretrial incarceration have dropped dramatically, said New Orleans Juvenile Court Chief Judge David Bell, who was elected one of the city's six juvenile court judges eight months before the hurricane. In the eight months prior to Hurricane Katrina, there were approximately 5,700 juvenile arrests. "And on any given day, there were a minimum of 108 kids in detetention, Bell said. So far this year, he said, slightly more than 300 juveniles have been arrested, and the detention facility has held about 13 people a day. That's not 13 new arrests, but 13 kids a day, he said. And, he said, the city's 147 murders this year have not been fueled by juvenile crime. Post-Katrina, we have yet to have one child in Orleans Parish arrested for murder," he said, adding that there was one juvenile arrested for attempted murder.
Sgt. Jeffrey Johnson, a New Orleans Police Department spokesman, said that before the storm detention was automatic for arrested juveniles. Now, he said, police call a detention judge who decides whether to hold the child. The following morning, the district attorney decides whether to release them or take them to a judge at noon.
New Orleans' juvenile courts have just received a grant to create a center where juveniles will be assessed for danger to themselves and the community almost as soon as they are arrested, Bell said. Plans are for police to call the center, which would decide whether the juvenile should be released directly to his or her parents, be fitted with an electronic monitor, or be held, he said.
Janet McConnaghhey
28 November 2006
Violent video game effects linger in brain
Teens who play violent video games show increased activity in areas of the brain linked to emotional arousal and decreased responses in regions that govern self-control, a study released on Tuesday found. The study used functional magnetic resonance imaging to record tiny metabolic changes in brain activity in 44 adolescents who were asked to perform a series of tasks after playing either a violent or nonviolent video game for 30 minutes.
The children, with no history of behavior problems, ranged in age from 13 to 17. Half played a T-rated first-person shooter game called "Medal of Honor: Frontline," involving military combat, while the other group played a nonviolent game called "Need for Speed: Underground."
Those who played the violent video game showed more activation in the amygdala, which is involved in emotional arousal, and less activation in the prefrontal portions of the brain associated with control, focus and concentration than the teens who played the nonviolent game. "Our study suggests that playing a certain type of violent video game may have different short-term effects on brain function than playing a nonviolent, but exciting, game," said Dr. Vincent Mathews, a professor of radiology at Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis and the study's author.
After playing the games, the children completed tasks requiring concentration and processing of emotional stimuli while their brain activity was scanned. Alterations in brain function reflecting changes in blood flow appeared as brightly colored areas on the magnetic resonance images. "What we showed is there is an increase in emotional arousal. The fight or flight response is activated after playing a violent video game," Mathews said.
The findings were presented at a meeting of the Radiological Society of North America.
The $13 billion U.S. video game industry, with revenue rivaling Hollywood box office sales, is at the center of a cultural battle over violent content. Lawmakers' various attempts to ban the sale of violent video games to children have been blocked by courts in Louisiana, Illinois, California. Michigan and Minnesota.
Video games with a T-rating (for Teen) are considered suitable for ages 13 and older. They may contain violent content, strong language or suggestive themes.
Numerous behavioral and cognitive studies have linked exposure to violent media and aggressive behavior. Now, researchers are using advanced imaging technology to scan the brain for clues to whether violent video games cause increases in aggression.
Mathews said he hopes to conduct additional studies on the long-term effects on brain function of exposure to violent video games.
Susan Kelly
28 November 2006
Kids who smoked have higher asthma risk
Children who smoke are almost four times more likely to develop asthma than those who don't smoke, and their risk is even greater if their mothers smoked while pregnant with them, a new study shows. The increased risk of developing an activity-limiting chronic disease, such as asthma, after becoming a regular smoker "may provide new motivation for adolescents to refrain from smoking," Dr. Frank D. Gilliland of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and colleagues state.
While a mother's exposure to second-hand smoke during pregnancy has been tied to greater childhood asthma risk, along with being exposed to second-hand smoke in childhood, the effect of a child or teen's own smoking on asthma development is less clear, Gilliland and his team write. To investigate, they followed 2,609 fourth- and seventh-graders in 12 southern California communities through their graduation from high school. Researchers interviewed the study participants annually and classified them according to smoking status.
During follow-up, 28 percent of the children reported any smoking at all, while 13.8 percent smoked weekly and 6.9 percent smoked daily (regular smokers). Children who said they smoked seven cigarettes a week in the previous year had a 3.1-times greater risk of developing asthma during the course of the study, while those who had smoked at least 300 cigarettes in the past year were at 3.9-fold increased risk. And children exposed to their mother's smoking while in the womb who later took up the habit themselves were 8.8-times more likely to develop asthma. When the researchers separated out children who smoked regularly but whose mothers had not smoked while pregnant with them, they found their risk of asthma was increased by just 20 percent.
Adolescents who had no allergies were at greater risk of developing asthma if they smoked than were non-allergic kids, the researchers found. Non-allergic kids who smoked and whose mothers had smoked during pregnancy were at a 10.6-fold increased asthma risk.
Gilliland and his team previously proposed that exposure to cigarette smoke in the womb might make adolescents more vulnerable to developing asthma if they started smoking themselves. "Effective tobacco control efforts focusing on the prevention of smoking among children, adolescents, and women of childbearing age are urgently needed to reduce the number of these preventable cases of asthma," the researchers conclude.
SOURCE: American Journal of Respiratory and
Critical Care Medicine,
November 15, 2006.
28 November 2006
N.J. launches inhalant-abuse prevention program
New efforts are under way to deter children, some not yet into their teens, from toying with an array of common household items, such as cleansers, cosmetics and glues, to get high, amid their often unaware parents and teachers.
What makes the issue more pressing is the youngsters' belief they are not potentially imperiling their health in a pursuit that medical professionals have for years has said can cause damage to the brain, organs and muscles. "These things are around the house. No one is telling the kids these can be dangerous, like they do with drugs, smoking or alcohol. So they think what they are doing is OK," said state Assemblyman Douglas Fisher, D-Cumberland.
Fisher and others gathered recently at the Statehouse to launch what they called the "NJ Inhalant-Abuse Prevention Program," teaming with the state's school counselors' group and others to try to make people aware of the issue. "We are seeing a significant rise in children huffing and sniffing, and New Jersey's children aren't immune to this," said Joe Healy, president of the Alliance for Consumer Education Board.
New Jersey's 2005 "Youth Risk Behavior Survey," for which the state Department of Education relies on students' honesty, reported that one in 10 students had said they sniffed glues, sprays or paints to get high. That 10.1 percent was down from 12.7 percent in 2001. Responders age 15 and younger scored 11.5 percent as abusers in 2005; 16- and 17-year-olds, 10.3 percent; and young men and women 18 and older, 6.2 percent.
The Statehouse presentation offered a startling look at a subculture far removed from many of today's public-policy issues driven by the baby-boomer bulge in the populace, such as Social Security, health care, taxes and property values. This is an as yet unpublicized world of recreational chemicals possessing its own language used by a much younger generation. "Do you know what a "pharm party' is?" asked Fisher, knowing his question inspired visions of hay rides under the moon or fiddles whining from the barn. "It's where kids take the prescription drugs from the medicine cabinet and get together and toss them in a bowl, mix them up, and then take them — a pharm party, P-H," he said, adding the partyers also down alcohol with their pharmacological grab-bags. "Bagging" is breathing from a paper bag into which one has placed any number of aromatics. "Chroming" is sniffing fumes of metallic spray paint. "Glading" is sniffing air fresheners. A "gluey" is one who prefers sniffing glue, while a "huffer" is a fan of inhalants, be they deodorants, whipped creams, computer keyboard cleaners or any other essence and bouquet.
Healy's alliance says more than 1,400 consumer goods, all common to the household, can be misused. The alliance points to correction fluids, nail-polish remover, hair spray, dessert toppings, air fresheners, markers, lighters, paints, glues and cleaners.
A problem for parents and teachers is that, like so many other teen-year issues, an abuser does not exhibit identifiable behavior beyond the usual moodiness. But unexplained and repeated nausea can be a telling sign, the alliance says.
Tom Baldwin
27 November 2006
http://www.thnt.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061127/NEWS/611270417/1001
Confusion arises from a shortage of child psychiatrists, multiple diagnoses
Children's psychiatry falling short
At a time when increasing numbers of children are being treated for psychiatric problems, naming those problems remains more an art than a science. Doctors often disagree about what is wrong. A child's problems are now routinely given two or more diagnoses at the same time, such as attention deficit and bipolar disorders. And parents say they hear an alphabet soup of labels that seem to change as often as a child's shoe size.
The confusion is due in part to the patchwork nature of the health care system, experts say. Child psychiatrists are in desperately short supply nationwide, and family doctors, pediatricians, psychologists and social workers, each with their own biases, routinely hand out diagnoses.
Psychiatrists have no blood tests or brain scans to diagnose mental disorders. They have to make judgments, based on interviews, questionnaires and checklists of symptoms. And unlike most adults, young children often are unable or unwilling to talk about their symptoms, leaving doctors to rely on observation and secondary sources of information such as parents and teachers.
Children can develop so fast that what looks like attention deficit disorder in the fall may look like anxiety or nothing at all in the summer. And the field is fiercely divided over some fundamental questions, most notably about bipolar disorder, a condition classically defined by moods that zigzag between periods of exuberance or increased energy and despair. Some experts say that bipolar disorder is being overdiagnosed, but others say it is too often missed. "Psychiatry has made great strides in helping kids manage mental illness, particularly moderate conditions, but the system of diagnosis is still 200 to 300 years behind other branches of medicine," said Dr. E. Jane Costello, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University. If a family can find some combination of treatments that help a child improve, Costello said, "then the diagnosis may not matter much at all."
Specialists who manage children's psychiatric disorders are trying to bring more standards and clarity to the field. Harvard researchers are completing the most comprehensive nationwide survey of mental illness in minors and hope to publish a report next year.
Dr. Darrel Regier of the American Psychiatric Association, who is coordinating work on the next edition of the association's diagnostic manual for mental disorders, due out in 2011, said that teams of researchers would be focusing on drawing distinctions among several childhood disorders, including bipolar disorder, attention deficit disorder and the loose category of problems now called "conduct disorder." "The point is that not everything is ADHD, not everything is bipolar, and it doesn't happen like you see in the movies," said Dr. Carolyn King, who treats children in community clinics around Detroit.
Benedict Carey
25 November 2006
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/health/4358647.html
Depressed kids more apt to drink at an early age
Children and preadolescents who show signs of depression may turn to alcohol sooner rather than later, researchers report. All the more reason, they say, to catch and treat early-life depression. "Little is known about the impact of depression on the onset of alcohol use in adolescents," Dr. Ping Wu from Columbia University, New York, told Reuters Health.
Wu and colleagues explored this topic in a cohort of Puerto Rican 10- to 13-year-olds participating in a long-term mental health study. They conducted face-to-face interviews with the children and their parents on several occasions between 2000 and 2004. Among a total of 1119 children who had never used alcohol at the start of the study, 110 (9.8 percent) reported using alcohol in the previous year at one or more follow-up assessment. The researchers defined alcohol use as drinking a full can of beer, a glass of wine or wine cooler, a shot of liquor, or a mixed drink -- not just sips from another person's drink.
Depressive symptoms were positively related with the early onset of drinking, report Wu and colleagues in the medical journal Pediatrics. Rates of alcohol initiation during follow-up varied markedly by level of depression. Roughly 4.1 percent of children with one or fewer depressive symptoms at baseline starting drinking during follow-up, compared with 10.2 percent of those with two to nine depressive symptoms, and 14.1 percent of those with 10 or more depressive symptoms.
The 899 children with medium to high levels of depressive symptoms were more than twice as likely to use alcohol as the 220 children with low levels of depressive symptoms, according to the report. "The finding that early life depressive symptoms may lead to earlier onset of alcohol use has important clinical and policy implications," Wu told Reuters Health, "because studies have shown that people who had early onset of alcohol use were much more likely to develop alcohol abuse/dependence later in their lives." Therefore, "it is important to identify and treat depression in preadolescent children," Wu emphasized.
SOURCE: Pediatrics, November 2006.
Megan Rauscher
23 November 2006
Styles of conflict between parents have different implications for children and families
A considerable amount of research has examined how children fare when their parents fight. A new study goes further by examining how different types of conflict between parents affect children and families.
We've long known that conflict between parents detracts from parents' abilities to be warm, supportive, and emotionally available to their children, while also negatively affecting children's mental health. But much of the research that's been done so far has examined only one aspect of this type of conflict--hostility. Because parents differ in the ways they argue, how might different types of conflict (such as withdrawal or detachment) affect children? What effect might these different forms of discord have on the family as a whole?
Researchers at the University of Rochester and the University of Notre Dame studied 212 families with 6-year-old children over a three-year period. Their findings are published in the November/December 2006 issue of the journal Child Development.
The study concludes that different types of conflict may have different implications for how mothers and fathers carry out their parenting duties. For example, mothers had difficulty being warm, supportive, and involved with their children when they experienced hostility with their spouse and when there was withdrawal between the parents. But fathers' ability to engage with their children was influenced mainly when there was withdrawal between the parents, not when there was hostility between them.
The study also found that the way fathers parent when they experience withdrawal from their spouses may have a greater effect on children's psychological problems than the way mothers parent under the same circumstances. Specifically, when fathers are emotionally unavailable, their children are more anxious, depressed, and withdrawn, and they also may exhibit more aggressive and delinquent behavior and have more trouble adjusting to school. When mothers are emotionally unavailable, only children's adjustment to school suffers.
"Taken together, the findings from the present study stress the importance of understanding how parents fight and the implications of this for the broader family system," according to Melissa Sturge-Apple, the study's lead author and a researcher at the Mount Hope Family Center at the University of Rochester. "Our results highlight the possibility that hostility and withdrawal between parents may negatively affect parenting and, in turn, child adjustment over time, and that these types of conflict may have distinct meanings and implications for the child and family system as a whole."
Source: Child Development Nov/Dec 2006
Medical News Today
23 November 2006
http://www.tehrantimes.com/Description.asp?Da=11/23/2006&Cat=5&Num=1
HIV infection on rise in all regions: U.N.
HIV infection is rising in every region of the world and most worryingly in countries like Uganda and Thailand, which had been heralded as success stories in the fight against AIDS, the United Nations said on Tuesday. Nearly 40 million adults and children are infected worldwide. The most striking increases in new cases are in east Asia and in eastern Europe/central Asia, mainly due to drug use and unsafe sex, UNAIDS and the World Health Organisation said.
Somebody is infected with the HIV virus every 8 seconds, equivalent to 11,000 infections worldwide every day, while another 8,000 infected people die, the two agencies said in a joint annual report "2006 AIDS Epidemic Update". "Evidence shows again that the global epidemic is growing in all areas, Peter Piot, executive director of UNAIDS, told a news conference. Perhaps of even greater concern to me is the fact that in some countries that had known real results in the fight against AIDS -- Uganda and some western countries -- we see an increase in infection rates."
Some 4.3 million people across the globe became infected with HIV this year, with a heavy concentration among young people, bringing the total number to an estimated 39.5 million. Sub-Saharan Africa, which recorded 2.8 million new infections, still bears the brunt of the AIDS scourge, with 24.7 million people living with HIV, according to the report.
Of the 2.9 million global deaths from AIDS last year -- which Piot said was the highest number recorded -- 2.1 million occurred in Africa, the core area of the 25-year-old epidemic. China's drug-fuelled HIV epidemic, which accounts for about half the country's estimated 650,000 infections, has reached "alarming proportions", according to the report. "With HIV spreading gradually from most-at-risk populations to the general population, the number of HIV infections in women is growing too," it said of China.
Past success Stories
Uganda is among countries suffering a
resurgence of infection rates which were previously stable or declining.
New data showed erratic condom use in Uganda and more men having sex
with more than one partner, as well as evidence of rising HIV prevalence
in some rural areas, according to Karen Stanecki, UNAIDS senior
epidemiologist. "In Thailand, another one of our past success stories,
the number of new infections continues to drop but the epidemic is
changing and countries such as Thailand and Uganda need to take into
account the fact that epidemics do change over time," Stanecki said. In
Thailand, a large percentage of new HIV infections occur in people
considered "low risk", she added, noting one third of new infections are
among married women. "In Thailand it's a shift, it is not the same
people who are infected today as who were infected 10 years ago.
The sex industry, we can say, is safe but the government neglected grossly the problem among injecting drug-users," Piot said. Aid agencies called for a funding boost to provide access to anti-retroviral drug treatment, which only 1.65 million or 24 percent of the 6.8 million people in need are receiving. "As the yearly ritual of the UNAIDS figures comes round again, leaders of the rich world should be reaching for their collective checkbooks," said the London-based group ActionAid.
The report cited evidence of diminishing or stable HIV spread in most east African and west African countries, while epidemics still grow in Mozambique, South Africa and Swaziland. In South Africa, where an estimated 5.5 million people have HIV, the epidemic continues unabated, suggesting the disease's prevalence has not yet reached a plateau, the report said.
In Asia, an estimated 8.6 million people are living with HIV, an increase of nearly one million, and 630,000 people died from AIDS-related illnesses in the vast region this year.
India, where the epidemic appears to be stable or diminishing in some parts while growing modestly in others, has 5.7 million infected people, mainly through heterosexual sex.
Stephanie Nebehay
21 November 2006
Schizophrenia much more likely in children of single parents
Social adversity may cause higher incidence
Study debunks belief that illness is purely genetic
Children born into families which split up before they are 16 are two and a half times more likely to develop schizophrenia in later life than those brought up by parents who stay together, psychiatrists leading the largest UK study into why people develop psychosis revealed yesterday. The risk occurs if children have been separated from parents for at least a year, or if either parent dies, or both. It makes no difference which parent leaves, and the risk remains even if the child maintains regular contact with the absent parent. One in four children in Britain are brought up by single parents.
The finding - which flies in the face of the long-held assumption that schizophrenia and psychosis are purely genetic - emerged when researchers at the institute of psychiatry, King's College London, began looking into why African-Caribbean and African communities in Britain suffer from "remarkably high" rates of schizophrenia and manic psychosis.
The researchers, who had been investigating the incidence of psychosis among different ethnic groups in south London, Nottingham and Bristol, found that African-Caribbean people were nine times more likely to develop schizophrenia than white Britons and eight times more likely to develop manic psychosis. Black Africans were six times more likely to develop schizophrenia and six times more likely to develop manic psychosis. The rates were consistent for men and women, and across all age groups from 16 to 64. The standard risk for schizophrenia or psychosis is one in 100.
In determining the higher incidence, researchers led by Dr Craig Morgan looked at long-term separation from parents. "We found separation or loss of one or both parents before 16 was associated with a two to three increase in the risk of psychosis," said Dr Morgan. Long-term separation was almost twice as common in African-Caribbean communities compared with white British, with 31% of African-Caribbean families separating compared with 18% of white British families.
Dr Morgan, who compared 390 patients with 390 controls in the largest case-control study ever to explore the issue, said it was unclear whether it was the stress of separation, the stress of abuse that may precede this, or the poverty often associated with separation that was responsible. "We don't know whether this is to do with the separation itself or to do with the associated social adversity - which we think is most likely" he said. He refused to predict that schizophrenia or psychosis would rise if the number of children in one-parent families increased: "Family breakdown may be particularly important [as a risk factor] when it's rare - when children's peers aren't in that situation."
Sarah Hall
22 November 2006
http://society.guardian.co.uk/socialcare/story/0,,1953959,00.html
Low literacy a pressing Canadian child health problem: Physicians key to change
Nine million working-age Canadians do not have the minimum literacy skills for coping with everyday life, according to a new statement released by the Canadian Paediatric Society. The process for learning to read begins at birth, making low literacy a critical child health issue. And it's one that costs Canada up to 10 billion dollars per year.
The Canadian Paediatric Society is calling on all physicians to discuss family literacy at regular health care visits and to encourage parents to read, speak and sing to their children from birth. Physicians are being urged to ask about the frequency of book sharing, access to children's books in the home, use of books in children's routines and caregivers' literacy levels. It's hoped that these steps will contribute to an overall increase in Canadians' literacy levels.
Children who have little or no exposure to books at home often fail to learn to read and write as quickly or as well as other children. If these critical skills are not learned early on, children can suffer a lifetime of problems. "Children who do not learn to read well in elementary school are more likely to have significant health problems as adults, making early literacy an issue Canadians cannot afford to ignore, says Dr. Alyson Shaw, principal author of the position statement published in the November issue of Paediatrics & Child Health. Parents reading aloud to their children and interacting with them from birth is extremely important for successful reading and literacy," says Dr. Shaw, a paediatrician at the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario in Ottawa.
Preschoolers who are read to are significantly more likely to have the literacy skills required for early school success, and parents and physicians must play a crucial part in shaping the early experiences that lay down the foundation for later reading skills.
Press release: CNW
20 November 2006
http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/November2006/20/c6456.html
Preemies at risk for behavior problems at age 5
Very preterm or very low birth weight children are more likely to have behavioral and emotional problems when they start school, suggests a study conducted in the Netherlands.
Dr. S. A. Reijneveld, of University Medical Center Groningen and colleagues compared the prevalence of behavioral and emotional problems at age 5 years between 431 children born prematurely (less than 32 weeks' gestation) and weighing less than 1500 grams with that of 6,007 "control" children of the same age in the general population.
Overall, 13.2 percent of preterm/low birth weight children scored in the "clinical range" of emotional and behavioral problems, compared to 8.7 percent of children in the general population, a significant difference. The very preterm/low birth weight children were 60 percent more likely to have these problems.
The largest differences were observed for social and attention problems. "The increased prevalence of problems among this group can...be expected to increase the burden of mental health morbidity among children in the community, Reijneveld and colleagues write. Pediatricians and other child health professionals working with (these) children should thus be prepared to meet relatively many behavioral and attention problems, and should also prepare parents concerning this."
SOURCE: Archives of Disease in Childhood: Fetal and
Neonatal Edition, November 2006.
20 November 2006
Young people in developed countries unhappy - survey
Young people in developing nations are at least twice as likely to feel happy about their lives than their richer counterparts, a survey says. Indians are the happiest overall and Japanese the most miserable.
According to an MTV Networks International (MTVNI) global survey that covered more than 5,400 young people in 14 countries, only 43 percent of the world's 16- to 34-year-olds say they are happy with their lives. MTVNI said this figure was dragged down by young people in the developed world, including those in Britain and the United States where fewer than 30 percent of young people said they were happy with the way things were. Only eight percent in Japan said they were happy.
Reasons for unhappiness across the developed world included a lack of optimism, concern over jobs and pressure to succeed. In developing countries a majority in the same age group expected their lives to be more enjoyable in the future, led by China with 84 percent. "The happier young people of the developing world are also the most religious," the survey said.
The MTVNI survey took six months to complete and resulted in the Wellbeing Index which compared the feelings of young people, based on their perceptions of how they feel about safety, where they fit into society and how they see their future.
Young people from Argentina and South Africa came joint top in the list of how happy they were at 75 percent. The overall Wellbeing Index was more mixed between rich and poor. India came top followed by Sweden and Brazil came last. "In developing countries, economic growth is on the go ... so you could see that logically there should be optimism and a positive feeling," Bill Roedy, the President of MTVNI, told Reuters.
Developed countries were particularly pessimistic about globalisation, with 95 percent of young Germans thinking it is ruining their culture, while developing countries which tended to be more receptive to globalisation were also more optimistic about their economic future and more proud of their nationality. MTVNI said one of the trends they spotted was that young people with access to mass media tended to feel less safe as they did not have the cognitive skills to interpret real risk.
In the UK, more than 80 percent of 16- to 34-year-olds said they were as afraid of terrorism as they were of the getting cancer -- though the latter was far more likely to hurt them. The 14 countries included in the survey were Argentina, Brazil, China, Denmark, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, South Africa, Sweden, the UK and the U.S.
Kate Holton
19 November 2006
Website for disabled children
An image-led website aimed at disabled children and
young people has just launched in the UK. Owned by the Children's
Society, askability.org.uk uses a pictorial language called Symbol as
well as text. Young disabled people - especially those with learning
difficulties - will be able to access news and information in a format
that suits them. The technology comes from Solutions Squared and Widgit
Software, with finance from the Big Lottery Fund.
connect to the site here
The idea for askability came from the Children's Society project in Solihull in the West Midlands. In its current form the Web is heavily text-based - a medium that many people with learning difficulties find difficult to understand. The Children's Society says that the majority of children use the internet for learning, information and entertainment - and those who have difficulty with text have, until now, been denied this opportunity. "Askability offers disabled children the chance to enjoy their own website, said Maureen Murray from the Children's Society in Solihull. I hope they find it fun, user-friendly and informative - it's obviously a massive development for children with special needs."
The website covers local and national news, sport, music and film. Visitors are encouraged to interact by providing their own stories, jokes and feedback. Any content created is automatically converted to Symbol. "Working with Widget Software to create a web-based 'Symboliser' was a step into a new sphere of technology," said Solutions Squared director, Angela Gallacher. And the company says it now has a system that can convert any website into Symbol. The site - which took 18 months to develop - has two part-time employees. One of them - a young disabled man - attended the Children's Society Project in Solihull and went on to get a degree in computer science. The Society said that young people felt isolated from mainstream news and found that television and newspapers were not accessible to them.
Among those present at the launch in Solihull was Jamil Dhillon who starred as a disabled boy with no speech in the BBC sitcom, All About Me.
Geoff Adams-Spink
15 November 2006
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6151482.stm
'Wired' youth cause for concern
It's a scenario many parents are familiar with: Their teenagers are so engrossed communicating online that their 'real world' conversations are often little more than a series of grunts. While some might argue young people are simply finding their social interaction in a different medium, a new study suggests there's real cause for concern over the amount of time some teens are spending in the wired world.
Jennifer Shapka, a University of British Columbia educational psychologist, says her research finds 14-year-olds spend an average of 2.5 hours daily on the Internet, during which they send and receive an average of 40 messages. However, a few teens spend several hours daily online, sending and receiving an average of 160 messages. Shapka says she is "very concerned" about excessive Internet users and her ongoing study will examine how their Internet use affects cognitive development, social skills and obesity rates.
While the pilot phase of Shapka's study found instant messaging was the most popular activity for youth, one in four didn't use instant messaging at all, perhaps a sign they are socially isolated. Concern over social isolation and Internet obsession among all ages has been raised in other recent studies. Statistics Canada found heavy Internet users in 2005 spent more than an hour a day online, often skipping activities involving friends and family. A U.S. study of 18,000 Internet users found 5.7 per cent were "compulsive" users, particularly of chat rooms and e-mail.
The content of all this online communication is often depressingly thin, with many 'conversations' going something like this:
"What are you doing?"
"Nothing much. What about you?"
"Nothing."
Young people need to know the world happily functioned before cellphone text messaging and e-mail. 'Wired' communication isn't a substitute for face-to-face time with family and friends.
16 November 2006
Filmmaker captures slow suicide of anorexia
At the heart of anorexia lies a human pain that cannot be explained simply as vanity, according to the director of a new film chronicling the potentially deadly psychiatric disorder. Lauren Greenfield's documentary "Thin" debuts on Tuesday on Time Warner Inc.'s cable television network HBO, following four women who entered Florida's Renfrew Center to treat their eating disorders. It tracks the treatment of Shelly, 25, who lived for five years with a feeding tube surgically planted in her stomach to ensure she received nutrients. See more
Alisa, 30, whittled her diet down to 170 calories a day during over 15 years battling with the illness while at other times, she could breakfast on a dozen doughnuts, several orders of hash browns and two half-gallons of ice cream in a single binge, vomit the entire meal and start again for lunch. "I'm addicted to the process, Alisa admits in the film. I just want to be thin. If it takes dying the get there, so be it. At least I'll get there."
For while many may view anorexia as an extreme fear of growing fat influenced by a culture obsessed with diets and wisp-figured celebrities, Greenfield found a far stronger urge to seek relief even at the brink of death. One in seven U.S. women suffer from an eating disorder, while as many as 14 percent of people with anorexia will die from the illness, according to data from the researchers. They also cite statistics showing nearly 25 percent of college-aged women purge food to help keep down their weight. "I really did not understand what eating disorders were all about," Greenfield said in an interview. I came to it being interested in from the body image side, as the extreme side of ... this body project we are all engaged in to some degree. What I found is it was really a coping mechanism that girls use, like drugs or alcohol, to numb intolerable pain."
The resulting film is an intimate portrait of the realities surrounding anorexia and its treatment, from pre-dawn weight checks to counseling sessions involving parents and siblings. "It's not even something that they necessarily think is going to make them look better, said Greenfield. They know they are engaging in a kind of slow suicide."
But while medical studies show many factors come to play in anorexia, from cultural pressure to family dynamics and genetics, Greenfield warns against trying to find an easy place to lay blame for the disease. "It's a really, really tenacious illness and it's hard to get better even if you want to, she said. It doesn't matter if you are famous or not, rich or poor. You're really trapped in the same prison of this illness."
Michele Gershberg
15 November 2006
Childhood: Fathers influence a child’s language development
In families with two working parents, fathers may have more impact on a child’s language development than mothers, a new study suggests.
Researchers recruited 92 families from 11 child care centers before their children were a year old, interviewing each to establish income, level of education and child care arrangements. Over all, it was a group of well-educated middle-class families, with married parents both living in the home.
When the children were 2, researchers videotaped them at home in free-play sessions with both parents, recording all of their speech. The study will appear in the November issue of The Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology.
The scientists measured the total number of utterances of the parents, the number of different words they used, the complexity of their sentences and other aspects of their speech. On average, fathers spoke less than mothers did, but they did not differ in the length of utterances or proportion of questions asked.
Finally, the researchers analyzed the children’s speech at age 3, using a standardized language test. The only predictors of high scores on the test were the mother’s level of education, the quality of child care and the number of different words the father used.
The researchers are unsure why the father’s speech, and not the mother’s, had an effect. “It’s well established that the mother’s language does have an impact,” said Nadya Pancsofar, the lead author of the study and a graduate research assistant at the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute at the University of North Carolina. It could be that the high-functioning mothers in the study had already had a strong influence on their children’s speech development, Ms. Pancsofar said, “or it may be that mothers are contributing in a way we didn’t measure in the study.”
Nicholas Bakalar
14 November 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/14/health/14chil.html?em&ex=1163653200&en=37937ee08328f510&ei=5087%0A
FDA proposes 'abnormal behavior' warning for Tamiflu
label
Doctors and parents should watch for signs of bizarre behavior in children treated with the flu drug Tamiflu, federal health officials suggested today, citing an increasing number of problem cases overseas.
Food and Drug Administration officials still don't know if the more than 100 new cases, including three deaths from falls, are linked to the drug or the flu virus -- or a combination of both. Most of the reported cases involved children. Still, FDA staff suggested updating Tamiflu's label to recommend that all patients, especially children, be monitored closely while on the drug. They also acknowledged that stopping treatment with Tamiflu could harm influenza patients if the virus is the cause of delirium, hallucinations and other abnormal behavior, such as aggression and suicidal thoughts. The FDA's pediatric advisory committee is to discuss the recommendation Thursday.
The FDA isn't required to follow the advice of its outside panels but usually does. An FDA spokeswoman did not immediately return a call seeking comment. The meeting comes a year after the same panel of outside experts rejected linking Tamiflu to reports of 12 deaths in Japanese children since 2000 and voted against changing the drug's label to suggest any such concern. At that time, however, the committee did recommend that the FDA continue to monitor the drug's safety and return a year later with an update.
The panel's decision after reviewing the new information is likely to be watched closely because Tamiflu could play an important role in an outbreak of bird flu. The drug doesn't prevent flu but can reduce the length and severity of its symptoms. Most of the 103 new cases of bizarre behavior are from Japan, where the number of Tamiflu prescriptions is about 10 times that in the United States, with more than twice the population. The new cases occurred between Aug. 29, 2005, and July 6, 2006. The tally marks a sharp increase above the 126 similar cases logged over more than five years between the drug's approval in 1999 and August 2005, the FDA said. The Japanese Tamiflu label warns that disturbances in consciousness, abnormal behavior, delirium, hallucination, delusion and convulsion may occur. It also recommends that patients be monitored carefully and the drug stopped if any abnormality is observed. Even though severe cases of the flu can spark those conditions, the number and nature of the cases -- along with comments from doctors who believe the abnormal behavior was associated with the drug -- keep the FDA from ruling out Tamiflu as the cause, according to agency documents. For that reason, the proposed changes would bring the U.S. label more in line with the Japanese one and warn of abnormal behavior and recommend that patients, especially children, be closely monitored.
However, the proposed U.S. version would recommend treatment be stopped only on a doctor's advice. FDA staff called the proposed changes "prudent" because U.S. Tamiflu use could jump to Japanese levels. The current U.S. label mentions only "seizure and confusion" seen in some patients. Tamiflu is made by the Swiss pharmaceutical company Roche Holding AG. A Roche spokesman did not immediately return messages seeking comment. Roche previously has cited studies from the United States and Canada that show the death incidence rate of influenza patients who took Tamiflu was far below those who did not. Tamiflu is one of the few drugs believed effective in treating bird flu, which health officials fear could spark a pandemic should it mutate into a form easily passed from human to human.
13 November 2006
http://www.washingtontimes.com/business/20061113-030753-1382r.htm
Controlling the amount of TV kids watch crucial to healthy weight
Looking for a simple way to increase your child's physical activity level? Try turning off the television, says University of Toronto research. "Because television is so commonplace in our society, we don't realize how much of an impact it has on youth, says co-author Professor Ken Allison of the department of public health sciences and principal investigator in the physical activity research program. We need to be reminded that it is crucial to turn them off in order to establish healthy and active patterns in childhood and adolescence that will remain with individuals into adulthood."
Television viewing has been long-suspected of whittling away valuable exercise time and U of T researchers have now shown a direct link between the tube and inactivity. In a recent study reported in the Journal of Adolescent Health, researchers tracked the weekly time spent on sedentary activities such as computer usage, video game playing and television viewing and then measured physical inactivity through daily energy expenditures assessed using a questionnaire. The researchers found a statistically significant link between TV viewing and lack of exercise; the more television children watch, the less energy they expend on physical activity.
The study was based on a sample of 7982 Canadian adolescents, ages 12 to19, from the 2000-2001 Canadian Community Health Survey, conducted by Statistics Canada. The survey revealed an alarmingly large portion of Canadian youth were inactive ? 50.3 per cent of males and 67.8 per cent of females. Inactivity was defined as energy expenditure less than three kilocalories per kilogram of body weight per day, which is equivalent to approximately 60 minutes of brisk walking.
After controlling for sociodemographic variables, health status and body mass index, television viewing was significantly associated with inactivity for both males and females. For males this relationship was significant for those watching 20 or more hours of TV per week, while for females the relationship was significant with as little as 6 or more hours of TV viewing per week..
"We know that females report greater barriers to physical activity than males, so it may be that they feel they have less latitude in their discretionary time than males," says Allison. For example, he says that female adolescents attach more importance to a lack of time due to schoolwork, other interests, and family activities than males. Also females tend to have more family responsibilities than males, such as helping around the house and child care for young siblings.
While Allison admits breaking the television watching habit might be difficult for many adolescents, he offers some tips for parents looking to increase their kids' physical activity:
Provide a positive role model for your kids by limiting your own TV viewing time. Plan television watching schedule and allow them to pick their favourite shows. Limit the use of snack foods while watching TV to once a week. Allison concludes, "All kids, including my own, like to watch TV. The key here is to control the amount of TV viewing per week. This is crucial in order to promote physical activity and healthy weights among our greatest asset - our children."
Source: University of Toronto
Child Health News
13 November 2006
http://www.news-medical.net/?id=20968
Babies need building blocks, not TV, research finds
Forget all the media products for babies on the market and go for the classic building blocks, suggests a new study linking playing with blocks with improved language acquisition in toddlers.
The Child Health Institute at the University of Washington released results Thursday from a six-month clinical trial showing middle- and lower-income children 1.5 to 2.5 years of age who engage in block play scored significantly higher on an internationally recognized scale measuring toddlers' language development. The team of researchers, led by pediatrician Dimitri Christakis, also found on any given day these children were more than 80 per cent less likely to watch television than children in the control group, who did not receive blocks.
Noting "an increasing number of media-based products are making unsubstantiated claims they can make children smarter, more literate, or more musical," the study takes direct aim at companies like Walt Disney's Baby Einstein Co., which markets a line of DVDs for newborns and toddlers. "It's a critical period in a young child's development, and everybody is trying to optimize that development," Christakis said in an interview. "Parents are inundated with messages that are totally unsubstantiated and totally ungrounded in cognitive theory. This study tried to demonstrate experimentally that there are particular toys that do help cognitive development. The burden should be on toy manufacturers to prove their claims."
The study included toddlers from 175 English-speaking homes. They were divided into two groups. The first group received two sets of building blocks, a pack of 80 blocks and a pack of specialty blocks that included people and cars. Their parents received suggestions of things to do with their child and blocks, such as sorting by colour and stacking them. The parents completed diaries over the six-month period to keep track of the frequency with which their children played with the blocks, engaged in other types of play and watched television.
Montreal-based MEGA Brands provided the blocks and funded the study; the company was not involved in its design or analysis of the data. "We want to make sure there's authentic research and supporting data about developmental play. The claims that are made on some of these products, it's too much," said Vic Bertrand, executive vice-president and chief operating officer for MEGA Brands.
Children in the control group did not receive blocks, although some already had them in their home. Fifty-seven per cent of children in the intervention group had block play reported in their diaries, compared to 12 per cent in the control group.
The key finding indicates playing with blocks leads to a statistically and clinically significant increase in language acquisition. The study found the children from middle- and lower-income families in the intervention group scored 15 percentage points higher on the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories, which measures toddlers' language development.
The study's television viewing results were also good news, said Christakis, whose previous research on watching TV in early childhood associated it with language and cognitive delay as well as attention problems. "I'm not anti-TV, I'm pro child development. Television can be a good thing if used appropriately. But at this age, there really is no benefit," said Christakis, co-author of Elephant in the Living Room: From Toddlers to Teens, What the Latest Science Tells us About the Effects of Television on Our Children's Development. His position is consistent with the American Academy of Pediatrics, which recommends no television for children under the age of two. (The Canadian Paediatrics Society does not make any recommendation related to age and television.)
Mary Frances MacLellan-Wright said she doesn't believe the marketing pitch by companies such as Baby Einstein and Brainy Baby, which claim their DVDs can stimulate cognitive development. And as a big fan of blocks for her three-year old son, Alistair, she finds the new study's results interesting.
But the Edmonton mother also introduced baby videos to her son when he was about nine months old. "It isn't helpful for kids, but it gives mothers a 30-minute break," said MacLellan-Wright. As a toddler, her son watched the occasional video -- slow moving and not over-stimulating. "It lets him just chill out. His day care is just so stimulating, he needs some down time. It's not going to change his life academically and it's not going to hurt him."
With the completion of the language acquisition study, MEGA Brands plans to commission a national study looking at block play, special reasoning and kids' attention spans.
Sarah Schmidt
10 November 2006
http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/story.html?id=781c65fe-845f-4398-acea-19b27271dbab&k=61780
Children showing hardening of arteries -U.S. study
Children with risk factors for heart disease, including high cholesterol and diabetes, are showing signs of narrowing and hardening of the arteries, conditions normally associated with adults, a study said on Sunday.
An increasing number of children suffer from these and other risk factors for cardiovascular disease, including obesity, but testing for future heart conditions is not standard practice, according to a report presented at the annual American Heart Association meeting in Chicago.
Testing should include regular blood lipid and glucose level testing, said the report's lead author, Sanaz Piran, a resident at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Earlier treatment could include more aggressive use of cholesterol-lowering drugs called statins, she said. "Atherosclerosis begins in childhood," Piran said. "We need to do this primary prevention early on to decrease cardiovascular events later in life."
Researchers found that children at risk already show signs of heart disease, including arterial wall thickness and decreased flexibility of blood vessels. Statins, the best-selling class of drugs in adults, include Pfizer Inc's Lipitor, Merck & Co's Mevacor and AstraZeneca Plc's Crestor.
The study culled data from studies that included 3,630 children, comparing the healthy versus those with cardiovascular risk factors. In 12 of 15 studies examined, children with risk factors were more likely to have increased thickness in the arterial walls, which could lead to heart attacks in adulthood, the report said.
The percentage of overweight young people in the United States has roughly tripled since 1980 to about 18 percent, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Kim Dixon
12 November 2006
Anorexics attribute meaning to their symptoms
For many patients with the eating disorder anorexia nervosa, their self-starvation has real meaning and purpose in their lives. "Therefore, treatments of anorectic behavior which disregard the meaning that the patients attribute to the illness are likely to end in relapses," lead investigator Dr. Ragnfrid H. Nordbo, of the Norwegian Institute of Public Health in Oslo, told Reuters Health. Nordbo and colleagues conducted a qualitative study of the perceptions of 18 women with anorexia nervosa. The subjects, who were between 20 and 34 years old, underwent focused, in-depth interviews. The study findings are published in the November issue of the International Journal of Eating Disorders. "Most anorectic patients regard their illness as meaningful," Nordbo said.
Specifically, the team identified eight core "constructs" that play central functions in the maintenance of anorexia nervosa. They are: security, avoidance, mental strength, self-confidence, identity, care, communication, and death. The security construct refers to anorexia as a way of providing structure, stability and organization, whereas the avoidance construct provides a way to evade negative and harmful emotions. The constructs of mental strength (inner strength), self-confidence (feeling acknowledged and worthy of compliments) and identity (achieving new identity) are inter-related and may fuel the anorexic behavior. Likewise, the care construct refers to anorexia as a way of eliciting care and attention from others. Evoking attention is a feature of the communication (communicating difficulties) construct as well.
The eighth construct -- death, a wish to starve to death -- is somewhat novel, the authors say, in that "systematic research has so far not described anorexia nervosa as an intended method of dying." The death construct "reemphasizes the severity of this type of eating disorder," the authors note. "Therapists who do not take these intentions into consideration are likely to elicit resistance and sooner or later fail in their treatment attempts, Nordbo's group writes. We therefore emphasize the importance of encouraging patients to express their personal values and to explain how their eating disorder both fulfills and compromises their values."
SOURCE: International Journal of Eating Disorders,
November 2006.
Universal free school breakfast has benefits and drawbacks
Research suggests that providing all elementary school children with free breakfast at school, regardless of family income, increases the likelihood that children will eat a nutritionally sound breakfast, which may help them with their school work. It does not, however, reduce breakfast skipping nor does it change the overall quality of children's diets. Moreover, students in schools offering free breakfast may also be more likely to eat two breakfasts, boosting their calorie intake for the day.
Mary Kay Crepinsek at Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and colleagues, evaluated the effects of offering universal free breakfast at school, regardless of income level, on students' breakfast consumption and their total food and nutrient intake. Students from schools in U.S. government's school breakfast program that provides free or reduced-priced breakfast for children from poor families served as controls.
A total of 4,358 children between second and sixth grader from 153 elementary schools in six school districts participated in the study which spanned three consecutive school years (2000-2001, 2001-2002, and 2002-2003). The study found that the likelihood of students eating a healthy breakfast was "somewhat higher" among students with universal free breakfast access (80 percent) compared with their control counterparts (76 percent).
Universal free school breakfast, Crepinsek told Reuters Health, "did not change the rate of skipping breakfast altogether, but shifted the source of breakfast from home to school -- for a small percentage of students this meant eating breakfast at both home and school." "Given that the average calorie intake of elementary school students in this study exceeded their energy requirements and the current epidemic of childhood obesity, this is one potential drawback of making universal free school breakfast available in elementary schools," Crepinsek said. Universal free school breakfast "slightly improved students' intake of milk and calcium at breakfast, but did not improve the overall quality of their diets," Crepinsek noted. The positive nutritional and cognitive benefits of eating breakfast are "well documented," Crepinsek's group notes in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association. "Students who cannot eat breakfast at home should have the opportunity to eat it at school."
Megan Rauscher
SOURCE: Journal American Dietetic Association,
November 2006.
B.C.'s youth officer releases report to help FAS youths reaching adulthood
Lanny is 17, has an IQ bordering on mental retardation and memory impairment so severe he basically functions without memory. Lanny's problems stem from fetal alcohol syndrome and his future as he approaches adulthood should be of great concern to the British Columbia government, says Child and Youth Officer Jane Morley.
Not long ago, it occurred to Morley that there were serious gaps in the adult service system faced by youths with the syndrome who were about to become adults. Most youth aren't expected to become completely independent of their families on their 19th birthday, Morley says in her lengthy report on the subject released Thursday.
So why should society expect youth in care, especially, youth with significant functional disabilities, to manage on their own? she asks. Morley examines the problem and how to help deal with it in the report, A Bridge to Adulthood: Maximizing the Independence of Youth in Care with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder.
The report, which contains six recommendations for the provincial government, is about youth in government care with FAS who at age 19 are not eligible for the adult services provided by Community Living B.C. - youth who left on their own. Community Living B.C. is a provincial Crown agency created to assist children and adults with developmental disabilities. But to be eligible for Community Living B.C. an individual must be diagnosed as having the developmental disability of mental retardation.
Morley profiled six youths, including Lanny, in her report; only one might be eligible for community living assistance under its current criteria.
The recommendations include:
- Expanding eligibility requirements of Community Living B.C. by recognizing low IQ functioning;
- Developing ways to assess FAS individuals to help design appropriate services;
- Developing a plan that would help these youths by involving several related ministries such as Children and Family Development and the regional health authorities;
- Providing funding through the appropriate ministry for more training of people who work with FAS individuals;
- Planning earlier in the FAS person's life so that a process is in place earlier to help as they become adults;
Developing a transition plan for ages 19-23, especially for those not eligible for Community Living B.C. "As a society, we have a responsibility to build a bridge to facilitate access to adulthood for the youth in government care who have FASD and cannot be expected to manage the transition to adulthood on their own." The report also notes that the syndrome is the leading cause of developmental disability among Canadian children. Although the incidence rates of the syndrome in B.C. is not known precisely, current estimates of the disorder among newborns range from between three and nine per 1,000 births.
9 November 2006
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=aa9ae0e3-96f1-418b-8771-5684bc96978e&k=93377
Chemical pollution 'harms children's brains'
Chemical pollution may have harmed the brains of millions of children around the world in what scientists are calling a "silent pandemic". The world is bathed in a soup of industrial chemicals which are damaging the intellectual potential of the next generation and may increase the incidence of conditions such as Parkinson's disease, they say. One in every six children has a developmental disability, such as autism, attention deficit disorder or cerebral palsy, the effects of which may be life-long.
The role of low-level pollutants, such as lead and mercury, on the growing brain has been recognised for decades and measures taken to reduce exposure to a minimum. But scientists from the Harvard School of Public Health, in Boston, say at least 202 chemicals are known to have the capacity to damage the brain and their effects at low levels of exposure are unknown. They say limits for exposure to chemicals should be set for pregnant women and young children, recognising the unique sensitivity of the developing brain, which is much more susceptible to the toxic effects of chemicals.
Philippe Grandjean, visiting professor at Harvard and lead author of the review, published in the online Lancet, said: "The human brain is a precious and vulnerable organ. Even limited damage may have serious consequences. It probably is going to be difficult [to set exposure limits] but this is a classical case where there really is a lot at stake. We are talking about the brain development of future generations. There will be an enormous cost of not regulating exposure."
Critics accused the scientists of scaremongering and said their claim of a silent pandemic was a "gross overstatement".
The 202 chemicals listed by the authors have been shown to cause serious accidents when ingested, or have been used in suicide attempts. They include chemicals used in household products, such as aluminium in saucepans and soft-drink cans, and acetone in nail-polish remover. The main exposure to the pollutants is through contamination of the environment during manufacture, when the chemicals seep into ground water, are carried in air or contaminate food. Commenting on the review, Professor Nigel Brown, dean of medicine at St George's School of Medicine, University of London, said: "This is a campaigning article. In their enthusiasm, the authors verge on scaremongering. [Their claim] of a silent pandemic is a gross overstatement. It is possible that there is a problem, we should be aware of this and we should study it but there is currently not a shred of evidence of a pandemic."
What chemical pollution can do
- Acrylamide Used in adhesives, printing ink and agricultural sprays. Can
cause drowsiness and hallucinations.
- Cyclohexane
Used to make nylon, paint and resin removers, and fungicides. Can
cause headaches and convulsions.
- Acetone
Used in nail-polish remover and to make plastics, fibres and
drugs. Breathing it over long periods can cause light-headedness and
confusion.
- Methanol
Used as a petrol additive and in spray paints. Can cause an effect
similar to drunkenness followed by severe stomach, leg and back pain.
- Trichloroethylene
Used in dry cleaning. Breathing it for long periods may cause
dizziness, poor co-ordination and difficulty concentrating.
- Aniline
Used to make pesticides, dyes and rubber. Breathing in small
amounts over several years may cause cancer.
- Styrene Used in making plastics. Breathing small amounts over long periods causes alterations in vision, hearing loss and slower reaction times
Source: Online Lancet
Jeremy Laurance
8 November 2006
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/health_medical/article1962438.ece
Head lice an unpleasant fact of life among school-aged children, families
There's absolutely nothing nice about lice. Take Alexander Stewart's word for it. The creepy critters took up residence on Stewart's scalp for about a month a couple of years back, when his east-end Toronto school struggled with an infestation of Pediculus humanus capitis - the fancy Latin name for the lowly human head louse.
As often happens, the lice "ping-ponged" among the students, with children who had been treated getting reinfested by friends still grappling with the problem. "Everyone in our class kept getting it and then we were giving it back and forth to each other, and that shampoo stuff didn't work at all, says Stewart, now 12. One of my friends had really long hair and had to cut it really short because of the lice."
Eventually Stewart's mother managed to get rid of the pesky bugs by conducting a virtual search and destroy campaign on the nits (eggs), nymphs (immature lice) and adult lice that were infesting his scalp. "When she was picking the lice out of my hair, I felt like a monkey getting groomed by a mother monkey," he recalls of that experience.
We may like to think of lice as a problem of yesteryear, of the days before hot running water, daily bathing and the horseless carriage. But it's no secret to parents of young children, elementary school teachers, principals and public health nurses that infestations of lice are as predictable as the turn of the seasons.
With the start of school in the fall, numbers of cases of lice begin to rise, particularly in day-care centres, kindergartens and elementary schools. The behaviour of little kids is perfect for moving lice from one head to the next.
Imagine story time. Heads touching, Alicia and Sarah share the wonders of a picture book. If one has head lice, that's not all they're sharing.
As an infestation comes to light, their parents will be sharing something else. Big headaches and anxiety.
In Jeannine Jennings' experience, parents - and particularly mothers - can have a very hard time dealing with the fact that little Max came home with head lice. "A lot of women take it very personally," says Jennings, who owns west-end Toronto franchises of a lice-removal business called The Lice Squad. (They think) their house is unkempt, they don't take care of their children. It's like a shame thing to them. A lot of women have like total nervous breakdowns."
They shouldn't, says Dr. Richard Mathias, a doctor and professor of medicine at the University of British Columbia who has made a specialty out of finding the best way to eradicate head lice. Mathias and others debunk the supposed link between head lice and poor hygiene, suggesting lice actually prefer clean hair. "It's not a sign of not looking after yourself or your kids or being negligent or any of those kinds of things. It's just not, Mathias says. What we generally find is that the happiest and healthiest head lice are found on clean heads. They like it. It's easy for them to get around. . . . And they do get around."
Older children and adults are by no means immune. But as we get older, we're less likely to touch heads with one other, giving us a sort of behavioural protection against louse invasion. Still, it's not uncommon for parents to pick up lice if their children bring them home. Jennings even admits she's "taken work home" on occasion.
So what should parents do when they get the dreaded
phone call or the letter from their child's school?
A trip to the drug store is likely the first
step, though there are services like Jennings' which will handle the
whole picky process for a price.
And eventually, a new blow dryer-like device called the LouseBuster may be an answer. University of Utah researchers reported this month in the journal Pediatrics on a device that kills lice and dries out their eggs during a half-hour treatment they suggest could be done in schools. But it's not yet on the market.
For those going the delousing shampoo route, the treatments are generally made with pyrethrins - a natural extract of chrysanthemums - or permethrin, a synthetic equivalent.
There's a common perception these shampoos don't work very well, or that the lice have become resistant to the chemicals in them. And it is true that some lice are resistant to the commercial shampoos, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.
But a treatment failure can as often be the result of improper application, ping-ponging in schools, or the fact that unhatched nits can come through the shampooing totally unscathed and will therefore go on to hatch and start a new cycle of infestation. "The cement that's used (by the female louse) to cement the egg onto the hair is insoluble, Mathias says. There's nothing you could use (to dissolve it) that wouldn't destroy the hair." People using the shampoos should follow the instructions carefully. Don't rewash the hair afterwards with regular shampoo and don't use cream rinse.
Based on studies he has conducted, Mathias recommends following up the first treatment with a second round about a week later. That will kill the new lice in the nymph stage - after they've hatched, but before they've laid new eggs. The CDC also suggests a second treatment may be needed. Their advice differs slightly on how much effort needs to go into environmental cleaning - washing sheets, clothes, caps and coats. "Head lice live only on the body. Treat the head. That's it. You don't have to do the rest of it," Mathias says.
The CDC says people don't need to blitz their homes, but it recommends washing sheets and washable clothing that an infested person used within two days prior to treatment and drycleaning others. Items that can't be washed or drycleaned should be stored in a sealed plastic bag for two weeks to ensure all lice are dead, the agency's website says. It also recommends thorough cleaning of brushes and combs, and suggests vacuuming floors and furniture - though it notes the risk of becoming infested by a louse that has fallen on a carpet is "very small."
Helen Branswell
7 November 2006
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=2aea8fbc-b8eb-41c6-915d-3c97ca016c7b&k=29951
TV is more attractive than the human face to children
Children are so obsessed with television that they prefer to look at a blank screen than a smiling human face, psychologists have found.
In a study of more than 200 children in Scotland, academics discovered that youngsters between six and eight responded to pictures of televisions in the same way alcoholics reacted to pictures of drink. Previous studies have shown that, from birth, people naturally look at faces before other objects. But the research from the University of Stirling and the University of Glasgow has shown that when a computer display with a picture of a face and a television set is flashed in front of them, many children look at the TV first.
In past experiments, when researchers have flashed up pictures of faces next to images of food, musical instruments, trees, plants and other everyday objects, they have always found that people focus on the face first. But in the study, Television at Face Value: Children's Behaviour in Attention Cueing Tasks, scientists were surprised to find the results were worryingly different.
Dr Markus Bindemann, a researcher at the University of Glasgow, said: "It is perhaps not surprising that it is televisions that can compete with faces for children's attention. You do have to worry about this because we learn social interaction - how to deal with people and how to read them - from looking at people's faces. But if you just stare at a box, you don't get that."
Oliver Coleman
7 November 2006
http://news.scotsman.com/scitech.cfm?id=1645742006
Study on sexual behavior in young people will help inform safer sex campaigns
An Article in this week's issue of The Lancet reveals the social and cultural factors that shape young people's sexual behaviour. The results could help make safer sex campaigns more effective, state the authors.
Cicely Marston (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, UK) and Eleanor King (Medical Research Council, UK) reviewed 268 qualitative studies on young people's (under 25's) sexual behaviour published between 1990 and 2004. Data from a number of countries, including the UK, Australia, Mexico, and South Africa, were included in the review.
They found that the factors that influence young people's sexual behaviour are strikingly similar worldwide. The researchers identified seven key themes from their analysis: five related to sexual behaviour in general and two to condom use in particular. For example, they found that young people assess whether they needed to use a condom with a potential partner on the basis of whether they thought they were 'clean' or 'unclean'. The researchers found they make this decision based on unreliable indicators such as how well they know their partner socially or their partner's appearance. The study also found that young people felt that carrying or buying condoms could imply sexual experience, which was undesirable for women and sometimes desirable for men.
Dr Marston concludes: "Our findings help explain why many HIV programmes have not been effective. Researchers have identified many reasons for young people not using condoms beyond the most obvious: 'ignorance' and 'barriers to access to contraception'. Therefore, programmes that merely provide information and condoms, without addressing the crucial social factors identified are only tackling part of the problem."
Source: The Lancet
6 November 2006
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=55768
Study shows why the young may shun condoms
Social and cultural factors, not just unavailability or ignorance, influence why young people do not use condoms, researchers said on Friday. Some sexually active under 25s associate condoms with a lack of trust, while others believe carrying them could imply sexual experience, which might be a plus for men but not necessarily for women.
In a review of more than 250 studies of young people's sexual behavior, researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine discovered striking similarities in what affects young sexual behavior in different countries. "This study summarizes key qualitative findings that help in understanding young people's sexual behavior and why they might have unsafe sex," said Dr Cicely Marston and Eleanor King in a study in The Lancet medical journal. They found that compared to men, women's sexual freedom was universally restricted. Penalties for transgression varied from verbal criticism to honor killings, in which a woman who is thought to have dishonored her family is killed.
The studies, carried out between 1990-2004, showed that young people assess a potential partner's disease risk, and the need for a condom, by their appearance and how well they know them socially. Men were expected to be highly sexually active and women were expected to be chaste, according to data from countries including Britain, Australia, Mexico and South America. "Our findings help explain why many HIV programs have not been effective," the researchers said. Programs that merely provide information and condoms, without addressing the crucial social factors identified are only tackling part of the problem," they added.
4 November 2006
SCHOOL REFUSAL
For some students, just the thought of going to class can cause anxiety
When school is terrifying
Kylie Peters walks confidently through St. Viator High School's halls, which buzz with a jangly adolescent energy. Talking with friends en route to physics class at the Arlington Heights, Ill., school, she makes the encounters look effortless. But for this bright, engaging 17-year-old, just being in school is something like planting a flag atop Mount Everest. "The first week was pretty scary, confessed the junior, who required medical assistance to start her first two years of high school. For a while I thought I'd have to go back to the hospital. But somehow, this time, I found the determination." Peters suffers from school refusal behavior, usually a symptom of a serious anxiety disorder. For these youngsters — about 5 percent of the student population, according to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry — the mere thought of entering a classroom is so distressing that they will do almost anything to escape.
As the United States searches for answers to its perplexing high-school dropout rate — which hovers at about 30 percent — attendance is just starting to be recognized as a more complex issue, sometimes requiring therapeutic rather than disciplinary action, experts say.
Skeptics might dismiss such conduct as a scam allowing children to languish on the couch playing video games and requiring no more specialized treatment than a swift kick in the pants. But clinicians say this is different from regular truancy. These youngsters aren't cutting class to do something fun; they suffer from debilitating anxiety. "It looks manipulative — but it's not, said Andrew Eisen of the Child Anxiety Disorders Clinic at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey. These are kids who promise to go tomorrow; they beg to be home-schooled — anything to stay home," said Dr. Tahseen Mohammed, a psychiatrist at Northwest Community Hospital in Arlington Heights, Ill., the only medical facility in the country to have a program specifically addressing the disorder.
The recent rash of deadly school shootings has exacerbated their problem, he said. "The news definitely has an impact. . . . It heightens kids' anxiety, making their symptoms even worse, Mohammed said. We're busier than usual."
In his program, the first few weeks of the academic year typically are quiet, but by October the 16 slots are full — with a waiting list. The majority of clients are referred by nearby high schools, but some have come from as far as Aurora, Ill. It is not unusual for students in the program to pile up 50 absences a year; one teen had not been in a class for two years.
"Kids are miserable, and parents are frustrated," said Maggie Hahn, the program's clinical coordinator. "No matter what parents say or do, it doesn't make any difference . . . and they don't know where to turn. 'School phobia' first started appearing in medical literature during the 1960s. By 1990, school refusal behavior became the preferred term.
Typically, it starts with physical complaints such as headaches, sore throats or stomach cramps. Children might seem fine on the weekend, but by Sunday night the ailments reappear, and the battles — the pleading, bribery and threats — start all over.
Left unchecked, such anxiety can trigger other problems, including school dropout, social isolation and delinquency. "This doesn't get better on its own, Mohammed said. There are short- and long-term implications — which is why it requires aggressive treatment, not punishment.
The condition might start in early childhood with excessive clinginess sparked by fears of abandonment or that "something bad" will happen while they are away, said Eisen, co-author of the new book "Helping Your Child Overcome Separation Anxiety or School Refusal."
However, the condition is more serious and hits hardest during early adolescence, when youngsters leave the nurturing elementary school environment, hormones are haywire and self-consciousness is at its peak.
For Peters, the oldest of six girls with a streak of perfectionism, anxiety enveloped her as she moved from grammar school — "where I had known everyone since kindergarten" — to St. Viator. In her freshman year the honor-roll student lasted one month before entering treatment at Northwest. I wanted to come — I really did, Peters said. But I found myself crying in every class almost every day. My friends wanted to help me, but no one knew what to say. My parents would threaten to take away the computer. The phone. But I didn't care. Nothing could make me go."
The change took its toll on the entire family, said her mother, Kitty. "I'd get angry. I'd scream. Eventually, I just had to tell myself that this isn't Kylie, but some outside thing. . . . I'd tell her, 'You can't let "it" win.' "
As a sophomore, Peters lasted a mere week before returning to the hospital program. "I wished I had cancer because people would feel sorry for me . . . and that's something everyone would understand," she said from the school's ministry office, where she likes to hang out instead of study hall. In Northwest's intensive, three-week program, people did understand. For the first time, Peters said, she was surrounded by a wide spectrum of peers — preps, goths, punks — who "got it."
Those who are aggressive or suicidal stay in an eight-bed unit in the hospital; the others are outpatients. During the first two weeks, teens put in an 8 a.m.-to-5 p.m. day. Two teachers keep them current on homework in a sunny classroom, where students' drawings line the walls. Individual and group therapy and instruction in relaxation techniques are designed to help them get out of the house and into the world. Three evenings a week, parents also join their offspring for mandatory family therapy. By the third week, the kids start to wean themselves off the program, spending their mornings at their school before returning to Northwest in the afternoon. The goal is to develop coping skills through gradual exposure to small, manageable challenges. "The coolest thing is when we have new kids who can't even imagine going back to school and they see these kids who have already been there all morning. It gives them hope," Hahn said.
Peters is one of the program's success stories, yet this year hasn't been a breeze. Some days, Peters would watch the clock on the wall tick so achingly slowly that she was convinced she could not make it through the next hour. But now she has the tools to deal with those feelings. "I hung on," she said proudly. This year, when she felt the walls closing in, she used coping skills — such as blowing out 10 imaginary candles, one at a time — to keep her thoughts from overwhelming her. She also credits medication along with the St. Viator staff for helping relieve the stress.
But like all emotional illnesses, anxiety disorders are a daily battle, something to be managed, not cured.
Northwest's own data provide a reminder that recovery is fragile: Of 45 students discharged from the program, half had six absences or less after 90 days while half had more — typically, when families start getting lax about bedtime and waking routines that help keep children on track.
So, for now, Peters is taking it one day at a time. "It's always going to be a struggle, she said. But I told myself that if I went to the hospital this year, I'd probably have to go next year . . . and the year after and every other time I faced something new."
Bonnie Miller Rubin
6 November 2006
http://www.statesman.com/life/content/life/stories/health/11/06/6schoolrefusal.html
Boys recover more quickly from anorexia
Anorexia nervosa runs a longer course in girls than in boys, research shows.
One year after undergoing treatment for anorexia, Dr. Michael Strober of the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and colleagues found that girls showed a higher level of continued preoccupation with weight and eating than did boys. And while none of the boys in the current study had relapsed into full-blown anorexia at one year after treatment, 8.2 percent of girls had.
The study is the first to look at gender differences in anorexia patients, the study team points out in the International Journal of Eating Disorders. Given that the disease is much more common among females, they note, some researchers have suggested that there may be gender differences in why it develops. To investigate, Strober and colleagues looked at 99 anorexia patients aged 13 to 17, 14 of whom were boys. Both boys and girls had similarly severe symptoms when they entered treatment, the researchers found, and were also equally likely to suffer from anxiety disorders and traits known to be associated with anorexia such as rigidity and perfectionism. However, girls showed greater concern with weight.
One year later, the researchers found, the girls reported more concern with weight, shape and eating than the boys, and were more likely to have fallen below their recommended maintenance weight. It's not clear, Strober and his colleagues write, whether the findings mean that girls will suffer more severe, persistent disease in the long-term than boys. Brain differences between the sexes could be responsible for the gender differences, they note, while it's also possible that societal and cultural forces that push an ideal of thinness may be targeted more intensely to females.
SOURCE: International Journal of Eating Disorders, November 2006.
U.S. needs "sexual literacy", ex-surgeon generals say
U.S. efforts to promote abstinence as a cornerstone of sexual education have not lowered levels of sexually transmitted diseases, two former U.S. surgeon generals said on Thursday.
Joycelyn Elders and David Satcher told a news conference in San Francisco that a broad effort was needed to promote the "sexual literacy" of Americans to counter unacceptable levels of sexually transmitted diseases and unplanned pregnancies, especially among teens and young adults. "The vows of abstinence break far more easily than latex condoms," said Elders, who was fired by President Bill Clinton after she suggested that schools teach children about masturbation. Satcher said it would be an "injustice" if sexual education did not go beyond encouraging abstinence. He took over as surgeon general after Elders, serving three years under Clinton and one year under President George W. Bush.
The news conference coincided with Satcher's launch of the Center for Excellence for Sexual Health at Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta.
Antidepressants lower kids' suicide risk, new research finds
The debate about how antidepressants might affect suicide risk in children and adolescents just got murkier. Spurred by reports of suicidality in pediatric antidepressant users, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration two years ago slapped a "black box" warning on popular selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) drugs such as Celexa, Paxil, Prozac and Zoloft, warning of the possible risk.
But now a new study has found that this class of drugs may actually reduce the risk of suicide in troubled children and adolescents. The finding has some experts worried that the "black box" warning will actually cause youth suicide rates to rise. "Rather than take the 'black box' warning and say children should be followed very carefully, many of us are concerned that physicians are going to say, 'It's not worth it,' said study author Robert Gibbons, a professor of biostatistics and psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago. If depressed kids are not receiving treatment, we may find that completed suicide rates may increase, he added. That's the big concern."
The study, which is published in the November issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry, "certainly doesn't make it clear that's what's happening, but what we do know is that there is an inverse association," Gibbons said. According to the study, in 2002 suicide was the fifth leading cause of death in children and adolescents aged 5 to 14. In the 10-to-14 age group, suicide was the third leading cause of death behind accidents and cancer.
Pediatric use of antidepressant medications, and especially SSRIs, has been the subject of extended controversy, however. In October 2004, the FDA directed manufacturers of SSRIs to put a special "black box" warning on the drugs' labeling. The warning would alert health -care providers to an increased risk of suicidality in children and teens using the medications. In July 2005, the FDA issued a public health advisory raising the possibility that the risk of suicidality also applied to adults taking SSRIs, after several studies pointed that way.