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A recent Children's Hospital Boston study revealed that exclusive breastfeeding without vitamin D supplementation in infants and inadequate milk consumption in toddlers can lead to vitamin D deficiency, sometimes resulting in bone loss and bone changes consistent with rickets (softening of the bones that can lead to fractures, stunted growth or deformities like curvature of the spine). Catherine Gordon, MD, MSc, director of the Bone Health Program, found that 40 percent of the 365 infants and toddlers who visited the hospital's general pediatric clinic had below ideal vitamin D levels for optimum bone health and 12 percent were deficient.
Minocycline, one of the most commonly prescribed acne treatments, can occasionally cause
serious autoimmune problems, found a recent study. Fatma Dedeoglu, MD, and colleagues in Children's Program in Rheumatology, reviewed the cases of 27 children with minocycline-induced autoimmunity; all of them presented with symptoms such as fever, weight loss and malaise. Twenty-two had polyarthralgia (pain in two or more joints) and 17 had polyarthritis
(arthritis in five or more joints), mostly affecting hands and feet. Fourteen patients' symptoms went away quickly when minocycline was stopped, and the symptoms of another six resolved within 12 months, but seven developed chronic autoimmune disease, primarily arthritis. The researchers stressed that the complication is fairly rare, but that pediatricians should be on the lookout for symptoms and stop the drug immediately if they appear.
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Cleaning frequently touched classroom surfaces with disinfecting wipes and using alcohol-based hand sanitizers in classrooms could help eliminate millions of lost school days each year, according to a recent Children's study. The bacteria and viruses that cause gastrointestinal (GI) illnesses can survive on surfaces in the environment for hours to days at a time. Those schools that followed a simple infection control regimen had absentee rates related to GI illness that were 9 percent lower than those that didn't disinfect properly.
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After analyzing data from nearly 2,800 high school girls, researchers at Children's have found that girls who induce vomiting as a means to control their weight even occasionally (just one to three times a month) are more likely to have irregular menstrual cycles than girls who don't report such vomiting. Bryn Austin, ScD, in the Division of Adolescent and Young Adult Medicine, explains that even if their weight is normal, the bulimia may be disrupting their hormonal balance, which is directly linked with bone growth, and could be setting themselves up for low bone density, stress fractures and osteoporosis.
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