Children's health
03 Aug 2006
Spinal cord stimulation a promising treatment for chronic pain disorders
A recent report published in the Journal of Neurosurgery: Spine reviewed 20 years worth of data investigating the safety and effectiveness of spinal cord simulation (SCS) for the treatment of chronic pain. This treatment sends electrical pulses into the spinal cord to cause paraesthesia in painful body parts. The author…
Blood
02 Aug 2006
Anaemic children with cancer benefit from Erythropoietin
Children with cancer who develop anaemia during chemotherapy can benefit from a weekly dose of erythropoietin (EPO), according to researchers at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. The drug reduces the need for red blood cell transfusions and improves quality of life in children whose anaemia is corrected by this treatment,…
Children's health
02 Aug 2006
Fatherhood boosts male brains
Fatherhood could be good for your brain, at least if you’re a monkey. It’s already known that male primates, including men, experience dramatic hormone changes when they become fathers. Yevgenia Kozorovitskiy and her colleagues from Princeton University realised that certain parts of the brain contain receptors for these hormones.
Children's health
02 Aug 2006
Being Overweight As a Teen Associated With Premature Death in Adulthood
Children and adolescents in the U.S. and around the world are becoming more overweight. A new study from the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) has found that there may be serious consequences to that trend. Researchers found that being overweight at age 18 is associated with an increased risk…
Blood
02 Aug 2006
Scientists isolate leukemia stem cells in a model of human leukemia
Researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Children’s Hospital Boston and their colleagues have isolated rare cancer stem cells that cause leukemia in a mouse model of the human disease. The leukemia stem cells isolated proved to be surprisingly different from normal blood stem cells-a finding that may be good news…
Children's health
01 Aug 2006
New hope for preterm babies
A new machine-the only one of its kind in Australia-is helping scientists better monitor the health of pre-term babies. Scientists at the Monash Institute of Medical Research are carrying out studies to understand the relationship between blood pressure and the amount of oxygen in a preterm baby’s brain.”Many preterm…
Children's health
27 Jul 2006
How people with autism miss the big picture
“A picture is worth a thousand words” may sum up how people with autism see the world. Brains scans of people with the condition show that they place excessive reliance on the parietal cortex, which analyses images, even when interpreting sentences free of any imagery. In other people, the…
Children's health
27 Jul 2006
Chronic Conditions More Likely in Young Children in Foster Care
Children in foster care are more likely to have chronic conditions if they are young and live in a small family, not because they are poor, less educated or African American, as has been hypothesised. A University of Rochester study in this month’s Journal of Health Care for the…
Children's health
27 Jul 2006
Digital Cameras and Internet Ease the Pain of Oral Disease
Dental researchers are combining the ease of digital photography with the internet to develop a new and inexpensive way to screen for a common childhood oral disease that predominantly plagues America’s inner city toddlers-early childhood dental caries (ECC), or as it is commonly called, ‘baby bottle tooth decay’. The cavities…
