farchest news
The No. 1 cause of death in children is trauma. There are an estimated 2,000 pediatric deaths from traumatic bleeding in the U.S. each year that are preventable with optimal care, yet there have been no large-scale clinical trials to guide the best way to resuscitate children with life-threatening bleeding from traumatic injury. Until now….
Puberty in both girls and boys with type 1 diabetes has shifted forward over the last two decades, according to research presented at the 61st Annual European Society for Paediatric Endocrinology Meeting in The Hague. Additionally, longer duration of diabetes, bigger waistlines, and lower blood sugar levels were associated with even earlier puberty onset. The…
Craniosynostosis, the premature fusion of the top of the skull in infants, is caused by an abnormal excess of a previously unknown type of bone-forming stem cell, according to a preclinical study led by researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine. Craniosynostosis arises from one of several possible gene mutations, and occurs in about one in 2,500…
The commonly-held belief that attempting to suppress negative thoughts is bad for our mental health could be wrong, a new study from scientists at the University of Cambridge suggests. Researchers at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit trained 120 volunteers worldwide to suppress thoughts about negative events that worried them and…
Jeffrey Raskin, MS, MD, a neurosurgeon at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, performed the first ever computer-guided radiofrequency ablation to decrease excessive muscle tone (called hypertonia) in a child with cerebral palsy. In hypertonia, muscles are constantly activated, which causes severe pain and deformity in the bones and joints, and profoundly…
Hyperdiploidy is a genetic condition observed in cancer cells, where the cells contain more chromosomes than usual. The condition is particularly prevalent in childhood B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (B-ALL), the most common form of pediatric cancer. To bring clarity to the field, researchers at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital worked to better define this type…
The Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development awarded $3.1 million to the University of Arkansas to study a spectrum of pediatric mitochondrial disorders caused by mutations in the mitochondria. These disorders often impact different organs requiring energy and can lead to mitochondria-induced multiple organ disorder syndromes, or MIMODS. Shilpa Iyer,…
You’re looking at a truck. You’re with a young child and he follows your gaze. He’s interested in the object you’re looking at without you pointing at it. This is called joint attention and it is one of the primary ways children learn to connect words with objects and acquire language. Lack of joint attention…
Expanding newborn screening (NBS) to include identifying genes associated with an increased risk for neurodevelopmental disorders (NDD) would cause more harm than good, according to an article published in Pediatrics. While some experts believe early identification of NDDs in the newborn period would provide an equitable way to flag and treat disabilities early, the authors…