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Parents welcome discussing drinking habits with their child's doctor
Reuniting children and parents after a disaster
New test could help identify serious infections in babies
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Pediatricians may be able to provide an additional service to the children they treat by asking their parents about their alcohol use. According to a study conducted by Children's Hospital Boston's Center for Adolescent Substance Abuse Research (CeASAR), parents are open to alcohol screening during their child's pediatric visit and to discussing their own drinking habits with their child's pediatrician. "Pediatricians, with their frequent interactions with parents, and close relationships with both children and families, have a unique opportunity to screen parents for alcohol use and refer them for treatment," says Celeste Wilson, MD, lead author and researcher in CeASAR. According to research, children of alcoholics are at increased risk for behavioral, cognitive and mental health problems. Furthermore, children of alcoholics are three to four times more likely to have their own alcohol problems later in life. "Given the negative consequences of growing up with an alcoholic parent, it is critical to identify and provide a pathway to assessment and treatment," says Wilson.
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More than 5,000 children were separated from their families during Hurricane Katrina, some for up to 18 months. To avoid such circumstances in future disasters, a team of Children's staff are creating REUNITE, an automated system to help parents identify missing children from photos. The idea is that during an emergency, every child who comes to an emergency room (ER) would have a digital photo taken; computer software would then automatically catalogue the child's physical features. Instead of searching in every individual ER for their missing child, families could go to one ER, give a description and view a database of children meeting that profile. The team hopes to have a prototype for testing this fall.
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A simple blood test may help detect serious bacterial infections (SBIs) like urinary tract infections (UTI) and bloodstream infections in young infants who come to emergency rooms (ERs) with unexplained fevers, and thereby avoid unnecessary testing and treatment. A recent study, led by Richard Bachur, MD, of Children's Division of Emergency Medicine, shows that a diagnostic marker called procalcitonin can identify infants at high risk for SBIs, while helping rule out these infections in the rest. "We hope to identify those infants that are at very low risk of serious infection and tailor their evaluation so as to minimize invasive testing and exposure to unnecessary antibiotics," says Bachur. In the United States, infant fever accounts for the vast majority of pediatric visits to the ER, up to 20 percent of which have no identifiable cause. While most turn out to be minor illnesses, a proportion of infants have SBIs such as bacteremia, meningitis, pneumonia or UTIs.
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