Children’s Health

Quick guidelines: Treating fever in infants!

Being a parent is scary, especially if you are someone who is new to this challenging role. And yes, it’s heart-rending to see your little ones in any kind of discomfort.

Quick guidelines Treating fever in infants!

High temperatures have been one such common thing that is seen in infants causing fear and confusion among parents. But there’s no need to panic even if your baby has temperatures because most fevers are harmless and caused by a mild infection.

Here are a few quick tips to treat when your baby has a fever:

  • If your baby is less than 3 months old and has temperature of 100.4 F and above, call the doctor even if the child looks comfortable and doesn’t have any other signs and symptoms.
  • Consult the doctor before treating your child with medicines.
  • Make your baby drink plenty of fluids.
  • Do not allow your child to take too much fruit or apple juice (mix them with one half of water).
  • In children, between 3-6 months of age, if the temperature reads 102 F, medication is not required unless your baby develops some kind of unusual behaviour.
  • Try giving your baby a lukewarm bath or sponge bath as it may help cool the fever. But, never give your baby cold/ice baths as these may worsen the condition.
  • For babies under 6 months, doctors recommend giving acetaminophen. However, if the child is of 6 months or older, either acetaminophen or ibuprofen is often recommended.
  • Never give aspirin to your child if he/she is younger than 18 years of age.
  • Encourage your baby to have some sleep.
  • Take your child to the doctor if he/she has fevers that come on and off for a week or more even if the temperature is not that high.

Source: Zee news

Parents respond to their infant’s babbling can speed child’s language

Pay attention, mom and dad, especially when your infant looks at you and babbles.

Study finds how parents respond to their infant's babbling can speed the child's language development

Parents may not understand a baby’s prattling, but by listening and responding, they let their infants know they can communicate which leads to children forming complex sounds and using language more quickly.

That’s according to a new study by the University of Iowa and Indiana University that found how parents respond to their children’s babbling can actually shape the way infants communicate and use vocalizations.

The findings challenge the belief that human communication is innate and can’t be influenced by parental feedback. Instead, the researchers argue, parents who consciously engage with their babbling infants can accelerate their children’s vocalizing and language learning.

“It’s not that we found responsiveness matters,” says Julie Gros-Louis, assistant professor of psychology at the UI and corresponding author on the study, published in the July/August edition of the journal Infancy. “It’s how a mother responds that matters.”

Researchers observed the interactions between 12 mothers and their 8-month-old infants during free play twice a month for 30 minutes over a six-month period. They noted how the mothers responded to their child’s positive vocalizations, such as babbling and cooing, especially when it was directed toward the mother. Current research in Gros-Louis’s lab has found similar levels of responsiveness of mothers and fathers to infants’ babbling.

What researchers discovered is infants whose mothers responded to what they thought their babies were saying, showed an increase in developmentally advanced, consonant-vowel vocalizations, which means the babbling has become sophisticated enough to sound more like words. The babies also began directing more of their babbling over time toward their mothers.

On the other hand, infants whose mothers did not try as much to understand them and instead directed their infants’ attention at times to something else did not show the same rate of growth in their language and communication skills.

Gros-Louis says the difference was mothers who engaged with their infants when they babbled let their children know they could communicate. Consequently, those babies turned more often to their mothers and babbled.

“The infants were using vocalizations in a communicative way, in a sense, because they learned they are communicative,” Gros-Louis says.

In a survey a month after the study ended, mothers who were most attentive to their infants’ babbling reported their children produced more words and gestures at age 15 months.

Gros-Louis was a postdoctoral fellow at Indiana when she, Andrew King, a senior scientist in psychology, and Meredith West, a psychology professor at Indiana, conducted the mother-infant study, titled “Maternal Responsiveness and the Development of Directed Vocalizing in Social Interactions.”

“Julie is showing that social stimulation shapes at a very early age what children attend to,” says King. “And if you can show the parent can shape what an infant attends to, there is the possibility to shape what the child is sensitive to. They are learning how to learn.”

The current study builds upon previous research by King and West, published in 2003 in the journal of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In that study, mothers were instructed to respond positively – such as smiling or touching—each time their infants looked at them and babbled. The results found the babies learned to vocalize advanced syllable-like sounds more readily than the typical infant.

Gros-Louis and her colleagues took that research a step further by observing the interactions of mothers and infants over a longer period of time and without instructing the mothers how to respond. Thus, they added a control group—the mothers who directed their babies’ attention elsewhere versus those who actively engaged when their infants looked at them and babbled.

Once again, the results showed infants whose mothers attended more closely to their babbling vocalized more complex sounds and develop language skills sooner.

Combined, the two studies could change how people think about human communicative development. However, additional research involving more participants is needed to validate the findings, the researchers said.

“The debate here is huge,” King says.

Source: medical xpress

10 Tips for Packing Healthy School Lunches

During the school year, perhaps the most important meal after a good breakfast for our kids is the mid-day lunch. While a healthy breakfast can help propel them through the morning, lunch helps them maintain focus and energy during the most challenging time of the day – the afternoon. This is when fatigue starts setting in and packing a high carbohydrate meal with processed foods will cause blood sugar levels to drop leading to sleepiness and inattention.

10 Tips for Packing Healthy School Lunches

When packing lunches for school, we all face challenges in making sure that what we give our kids is delicious, nutritious and will help get them through the hardest part of their day.

The nightly task of planning the next day’s school lunches can be an added stress at the end of an already long day filled with after school activities, homework, and dinner. It’s a tall order to prepare a meal that’s healthy, tastes great hours after you make it, and appeals to your children.

10 Tips for Packing Healthy School Lunches

Skip processed meats like sliced lunch meats, chicken nuggets, and hot dogs. Processed meats are a leading cause of cancer, especially colon cancer and the intake of processed meats is significantly higher in children as compared to adults. Read this editorial from Dr. Neal Barnard, published in Good Medicine:

  • Avoid meats treated with hormones or antibiotics and pack low fat options like turkey and chicken. Try other forms of protein like hummus, nut butters, and whole nuts.
  • Pack more fruits and vegetables. Avoid the Dirty Dozen – fruits and vegies with high pesticide residue and go for the Clean 15. Learn what to avoid and what to eat in the Environmental Working Group’s Shoppers Guide to Pesticides in Produce. Rotate items through the week to provide an interesting variety and prevent boredom.
  • Avoid foods with artificial food dyes and sweeteners. Many artificial food dyes are petroleum based products (think gasoline and tar L) and are linked to behavioral problems such as ADD/ADHD and mood swings as well as health problems like obesity, asthma and diabetes. Some kids can also have allergic reactions to these artificial food additives.
  • Instead of sodas, bottled water or juices, serve water and almond milk in reusable stainless steel bottles to avoid exposure to Bisphenol A, a harmful chemical substance that leaches into food and liquids it comes in contact with.
  • Even juices labeled 100% fruit juice area significant source of sugar, so substitute with water to keep them hydrated. Hydration is of vital importance for proper brain functioning as the human brain is approximately 80% water.
  • Remember when lunch boxes used to contain a thermos? They are a great way to pack healthy meals such as soup, chili and spaghetti with meat sauce.
  • Plan the week’s lunches the weekend before to have all the necessary ingredients on hand. This reduces the chance of your kids walking out the door with a less than optimal lunch.
  • Get recipes for healthy school lunches. A great reference book such as Lunch Lessons: Changing the Way We Feed Our Children by Ann Cooper and Lisa M. Holmes can help get the creative juices flowing.
  • Get your kids involved in the process of planning and packing lunches. By understanding their preferences, you increase the chance that they will consume their lunch rather than having it end up as waste in the cafeteria trash can.

SOurce: Javani

What Kids’ Drawings Say About Their Intelligence

The number of features a child draws into their sketch of a person may say a little something about their intelligence

A large and long-term new study shows the way a 4-year-old draws a person not only says something about their level of intelligence as a toddler but is also predictive of their intelligence 10 years down the line.

What Kids’ Drawings Say About Their Intelligence

A team of researchers at King’s College London had 7,752 pairs of identical and non-identical 4-year-old twins draw a picture of a child. Every sketch was rated on a scale from 0 to 12 based on the presence of features, like legs, arms, and facial features. The kids also underwent verbal and nonverbal intelligence measurement tests.

When the kids turned 14, the researchers once again tested their intelligence. They found that a higher score on their drawing was moderately associated with the child’s intelligence both at age four and at age 14. The researchers expected to see a connection at age 4, but for the results to have consistency a decade later was surprising.

The researchers also found that the drawings of identical twins were more similar than the drawings of non-identical twins, suggesting that a genetic link was involved in drawing, though its exact mechanism was unknown. For instance the kids could be predisposed (or trained) to pay attention to detail well or hold their pencil in a specific way, the researchers say.

“The correlation is moderate, so our findings are interesting but it does not mean that parents should worry if their child draws badly,” said study author Dr. Rosalind Arden, the lead author of the paper in a statement. “Drawing ability does not determine intelligence, there are countless factors, both genetic and environmental, which affect intelligence in later life.”

The study was published Tuesday in the journal Psychological Science

Source: TIME

Breastfeeding ‘cuts depression risk’, according to study

Breastfeeding can halve the risk of post-natal depression, according to a large study of 14,000 new mothers. However, there is a large increase in the risk of depression in women planning to breastfeed who are then unable to do so.

Breastfeeding can halve the risk of post-natal depression, according to a large study of 14,000 new mothers.

The study, published in the journal Maternal and Child Health, called for more support for women unable to breastfeed. A parenting charity said mental health was a “huge issue” for many mothers. The health benefits of breastfeeding to the baby are clear-cut and the World Health Organization recommends feeding a child nothing but breast milk for the first six months.

However, researchers at the University of Cambridge said the impact on the mother was not as clearly understood.

‘Highest risk’
One in 10 women will develop depression after the birth of their child. The researchers analysed data from 13,998 births in the south-west of England. It showed that, out of women who were planning to breastfeed, there was a 50% reduction in the risk of post-natal depression if they started breastfeeding.

But the risk of depression more than doubled among women who wanted to, but were not able to, breastfeed. Dr Maria Iacovou, one of the researchers, told the BBC: “Breastfeeding does appear to have a protective effect, but there’s the other side of the coin as well.

“Those who wanted to and didn’t end up breastfeeding had the highest risk of all the groups.” The benefit increased for each week of breastfeeding up to one month.

However, any longer term impact on post-natal depression could not be determined due to the small number of women in the study who were still breast feeding several months after the birth.

Action needed
Dr Iacovou said the health profession needed to pay attention. She added: “It is right to tell mothers it’s right to breastfeed, there’s so many benefits, but the thing we need to rethink is giving more support to those who did want to breastfeed and to recognise those who are unable to, are at substantially elevated risk and to make sure health visitors keep an eye on these women.”

Possible explanations for the beneficial effect include the release of feel-good hormones when milk is produced.Dr Iacovou added that social or psychological factors such as feelings of “failing as a mother” were also contributing.

She says the improving the health of the mother will also help the baby.

Rosemary Dodds, a senior policy adviser at parenting charity NCT, said: “Mothers often experience pressures after the birth such as pain, shortage of sleep and anxiety.

“Breastfeeding can help to relax mothers and reduce stress, so it might play a part in preventing mental health issues developing. “We welcome further research into this subject as perinatal mental health is a huge issue for many mothers. At least one in ten suffer with postnatal depression.”

Source: bbc news

 

Mother’s milk vital for premature babies

Incorporating human milk fat supplement into premature infants’ diets improves their growth outcomes in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), says a new study.

Mother's milk vital for premature babies

“For premature babies who weigh less than a kg, one of the problems is that their lungs and other organs are still developing when they are born,” said Amy Hair, an assistant professor at Baylor College of Medicine in the US.

“If the infant gains weight and increases in length at a good rate while in the NICU, this helps improve their (growth) outcomes,” Hair added. Previous research has shown that an exclusive human milk diet protects the intestines of premature infants and supports their growth.

This diet consists of mothers’ own breast milk or donor human milk, as well as a fortifier consisting of protein and minerals made from the donor milk. In this study, researchers sought a way to optimise growth in infants who weigh between 750 and 1,250 grams and need additional calories.

As infants are already receiving enough protein from the fortifier, another way to help them grow is by giving them fat. One of the byproducts of pasteurising donor milk is milk fat, also referred to as a cream supplement.

They found that infants in the cream group had better growth outcomes in terms of weight and length than infants in the control group. The study appeared in the Journal of Pediatrics

Source: zee news

Encouraging healthy diet among toddlers can help curb childhood obesity

A new study has revealed that promoting healthy eating habits from infancy can help prevent childhood obesity and the onset of chronic disease.

Encouraging healthy diet among toddlers

Rebecca Byrne from QUT, said that the toddler years are a critical age in the development of long-term food preferences, but this was also the age that autonomy, independence and food fussiness begins and childhood obesity in Australia has doubled since 1986, with about 21percent of children aged 2-3 years now classified as overweight or obese.

She further added that liking a nutrient-dense diet that incorporates all five food groups was important, as evidence suggested that food preferences develop at this early age and persist into adulthood and iron deficiency also remained an issue for toddlers in both developed and developing countries.

It was also revealed that most toddlers were consuming a diverse diet, the amount and type of meat or meat alternatives was poor. Almost all children were consuming foods we would consider completely unnecessary at this age, such as sweet biscuits.

The study is published in the issue of Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health.

Source: ani news

Young Kids Diagnosed with Depression Can’t Shake It Later, Study Says

New research shows it’s hard for young children to get past depression. Children diagnosed with depression in preschool are likely to continue to be depressed throughout adolescence, according to a new study.

Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis tracked 246 children ages 3-5 to ages 9-12 and found that depressed preschoolers are 2.5 times more likely to suffer from the condition in elementary and middle school, according to the study published in the July issue of The American Journal of Psychiatry.

Young Kids Diagnosed with Depression Can’t Shake It Later, Study Says

At the beginning of the study, 74 of the children were diagnosed with depression. Six years later, 79 of the children from the larger group had clinical depression, and 51% of the 74 children originally diagnosed were still depressed. By contrast, only 25% of the 172 children who were initially not depressed went on to develop depression during elementary and middle school.

“It’s the same old bad news about depression; it is a chronic and recurrent disorder,” child psychiatrist Joan L. Luby, who directs Washington University’s Early Emotional Development Program, said in a statement. “But the good news is that if we can identify depression early, perhaps we have a window of opportunity to treat it more effectively and potentially change the trajectory of the illness so that it is less likely to be chronic and recurring.”

The researchers also identified some of the factors that put children at a higher risk of becoming depressed: Children with depressed mothers were more likely to become depressed themselves, and children who were diagnosed with a conduct disorder in preschool were more likely to become depressed by middle school (though significant maternal support mitigated the latter risk). But neither of these factors mattered as much as an early depression diagnosis.

Source: TIME

Parents admit to dosing errors when giving kids medication

Common household spoons are often used when parents give kids a dose of medication, but a new study suggests there’s a real danger to estimating amounts of prescription, or over the counter products.

Dr. Michael Rieder is chair of the drug therapy committee forthe Canadian Pediatric Society and director of pediatric pharmacology at the Children’s Hospital in London at the University of Western Ontario.Parents admit to dosing errors when giving kids medication

“The volume in that teaspoon ranges from 3.5 to 7.5 millilitres probably,” he said. “If you’re making a banana cream pie, that might not be a big deal, but if you’re treating with a medication it might be quite a big deal.”

A recent study done out of two medical centres in New York has found that parents frequently make dosing errors when giving medication to children. In fact, more than 40 per cent of the 287 parents interviewed for the research didn’t measure it correctly. And one out of six of those parents used spoons out of their kitchen drawer.

“In the United States, where the study was done, it shows if you use millilitres, which is not a commonly used measurement, it actually reduces dosing errors,” Rieder explained.

“In countries like Canada, where the metric system is well established, it suggests that maybe we should stop talking about teaspoons and tablespoons and go straight to millilitres as a way to reduce the potential for dosing errors for commonly used medicine in children.”

Rieder says prescribing medications in millilitres rather than teaspoons forces caregivers to be more precise.

“Drugs are safe and effective within certain doses. Usually if you don’t give enough they don’t work, if you give too much they can be toxic. So it addresses a really important issue of dosing errors,” he said.

For parents, the need for over-the-counter medications often arises at night, in low light, when parents have been woken up or been up late with a sick kid. But they’re not the only ones making these mistakes.

Rieder says a study in pediatric emergency medicine done a few years ago found the highest rate of dosing errors happened when the fewest number of patients were there.

“When is that? It’s three in the morning,” he said. “So if you look at emergency personnel, trained medical personnel, their error rate is highest in the wee small hours of the morning when people are tired. So it shouldn’t really surprise anybody parents have those same circumstances.”

Rieder says the consequences of giving too much medication depends on the drug in question. Anti-seizure medications, for example, don’t have much of a margin for error. And though using a spoon one night for a single dose of a painkiller likely isn’t a huge issue, parents need to be aware of a cumulative effect.

“There’s a disturbing thing with drugs like Tylenol, acetaminophen,” Rieder said. “There’s a couple disturbing papers which suggested that a relatively small overdose, over a period of several days can result in liver damage. If you think about a child who’s got a viral infection, some children are better in 24 hours, but often, especially during flu season, they’re often sick for three, four days. So under those circumstances, there’s a certain number of children that get toxicity from small but sustained doses.”

Rieder says companies in Europe are looking at alternatives, like mini capsules and formulations that melt on the tongue and require no measuring.

Manufacturers also do their part, bundling droppers into infant products. But since many of the medications are bought off the shelf without any interaction with a medical professional, it really comes down to parents being willing to take that extra step, and put away the spoon.

“A teaspoon is an intangible amount. Five millilitres is a very real number,” he said.

Various pediatric groups and health-care product associations in the U.S. are starting to recommend prescriptions and package instructions be written in millilitres to ensure clarity.

Source: cbc news

Childhood UTI May Bring Lasting Harm to Kidneys

Childhood UTI May Bring Lasting Harm to Kidneys

Urinary tract infections are the most common serious bacterial infections in young children, and almost one of every eight kids who gets one will end up with scarring on the kidneys and an increased risk of kidney failure later in life.

Identifying those kids early is critical, and researchers now report that a combination of three factors — high fever, detection of kidney abnormalities via ultrasound and identification of the type of bacteria involved — spots such patients as accurately as a very unpleasant catheter-based test does.

“We found that you more or less can predict the children who are at higher risk by looking at three different things when they come in,” said study author Dr. Nader Shaikh, an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh and a pediatrician at the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh.

In the past, doctors used a combination catheter/X-ray to detect children at greater risk for kidney scarring.

The test required using a catheter to fill a child’s bladder with a special dye. Doctors then asked the child to urinate while being X-rayed, so they could see whether urine flow indicated a kidney problem.

Doctors used the X-ray test often in the 1960s and 1970s, but in recent years they have been moving away from it, said Dr. Kenneth Roberts, a pediatrician in Greensboro, N.C., who wrote an editorial accompanying the new study.

“It’s very uncomfortable, very distressing and entails a good amount of radiation,” Roberts said. “It is not only not worth putting all children through that procedure, but with this study we now have information that shows it’s simply not justified.”

To see whether there is a better option for finding kids at greater risk of kidney scarring, Shaikh and his colleagues reviewed existing data from previous studies involving 1,280 children aged 18 and younger.

About 15 percent of these children suffered kidney scarring from a urinary tract infection. The researchers found that three factors were strongly associated with scarring:

  • Fever of at least 102 degrees.
  • Infection with a bacteria other than E. coli.
  • Ultrasound readings that detected an abnormality in the kidney.
  • A model based on these factors predicted nearly 45 percent of children who ended up developing kidney scars, a rate only 3 percent to 5 percent less effective than models involving blood tests or the catheter/X-ray examination, the researchers reported.

The findings were published online Aug. 4 in the journal JAMA Pediatrics.

The test’s real power comes in its ability to rule out children at risk, Shaikh noted.

“The prediction is not perfect,” he said. “For more or less, we can say these 80 percent of kids aren’t going to scar, we don’t have to worry about them.”

Doctors can step up observation of kids at greater risk for kidney scarring. “The main focus should be to prevent subsequent infections for those children,” Shaikh said. “Every time you get a [urinary tract infection], you get a chance of scarring again.”

Source: web md