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TV for kids under 2 shows no cognitive benefit
Not all infant seizures require spinal taps
Can we detect autism in babies?
Antacids linked to asthma
Despite widespread popularity, educational TV programming for babies doesn't appear to have a significant effect on cognitive ability. A recent Children's Hospital Boston study of infants from birth to age 3 shows that TV viewing before the age of 2 doesn't improve a child's language or visual motor skills.
"Contrary to marketing claims and some parents' perception that television viewing is beneficial to children's brain development, no evidence of such benefit was found," says Marie Evans Schmidt, PhD, lead author of the study and a research associate in Children's Center on Media and Child Health. The findings reaffirm current guidelines from the American Academy of Pediatrics that recommend no TV viewing for children under age 2, and suggest that parent-child interactions, like talking, singing and playing, are far more influential in a child's cognitive development.
Watch Marie Evans Schmidt, PhD, talk about the study
Seizures in babies with fevers are frightening for parents, who often rush them to the emergency room. Frequently, the physician will do a spinal tap to rule out bacterial meningitis. Now, in the largest study to date, Amir Kimia, MD, and colleagues in Children's Emergency Department (ED) report that this uncomfortable procedure probably isn't necessary in well-appearing children with a first "simple" febrile seizure (generalized, lasting no more than 15 minutes and not recurring within 24 hours). Reviewing medical charts of 704 babies seen in Children's ED between 1995 and 2006, they found no cases of bacterial meningitis. Kimia hopes these findings will reassure parents and save babies from unnecessary, invasive testing.
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It's difficult to diagnose autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) in babies because many early signs, such as not responding to the sound of one's name, aren't reliable before the child is 12 to 18 months old. Charles Nelson, PhD, research director of Children's Division of Developmental Medicine, aims to move this diagnostic window back. "Our goal is to detect reliable risk markers for ASD in the first year of life, and ultimately use what we find to develop new methods for early screening and diagnosis," says Nelson. His group is studying brain and behavioral development in both high- and low-risk infants (high-risk infants are those with at least one older sibling with autism, whereas low-risk infants are those with no family history of the disorder). The team will follow the infants to 36 months old and see which children will be diagnosed with autism, and which measures best predict it.
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Children whose mothers took acid-suppressing drugs for heartburn during pregnancy may have up to a 1.5 times higher risk of asthma, finds a population-based study by Elizabeth Hait, MD, MPH, Edda Fiebiger, PhD, and Eleonora Dehlink, MD, PhD, of Children's Division of Gastroenterology/Nutrition. The researchers crunched national birth, hospital discharge and drug-prescription registers in Sweden, linking children with their mothers. Fiebiger, who researches the immune mechanisms of food allergies, speculates that if proteins aren't broken down completely by stomach acid, the immune system may recognize them as allergens.
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