Children News and Research

RSS

KHN’s ‘What the Health?’: How’s that open enrollment going?

Open enrollment for 2020 health coverage under the Affordable Care Act is halfway over. So far, sign-ups appear to be lagging behind last year’s, but not dramatically.

26 Nov 2019

LACV-infected cerebral organoids reveal how to protect neurons from virus-induced death

Scientists have determined that La Crosse virus, which can cause inflammation of the brain, or encephalitis, in children, affects brain cells differently depending on their developmental stage.

26 Nov 2019

Splicing factor enhances ability of triple negative breast cancers to grow and metastasize

If your DNA is a cookbook, a single gene is a recipe. But it's a flexible recipe that if edited one way can make a pie; edited another way can make a cake. And that difference can mean cancer, as a team of researchers who looked at those gene editors writes in the 26 November issue of Cell Reports.

26 Nov 2019

Study finds increase in overall rate of exposure to natural psychoactive substances

Natural substances with psychoactive effects have been used by people for religious, medicinal and recreational purposes for millennia.

26 Nov 2019

Children's deaths from choking on small objects drop by 75% in US

Children's deaths from choking on small objects dropped by 75 percent from 1968 to 2017, according to a report published in JAMA. Various choking hazard regulations enacted during the past 50 years may have played a role in the large decline in choking deaths, although the study design cannot establish a direct causal link. However, despite warning label legislation and other regulations, 184 children in the U.S. died from choking in 2017.

26 Nov 2019

Studying the genomes of hibernating mammals could improve understanding and treatment of obesity

A discovery about mammalian genomes and hibernation could aid understanding and treatment of obesity and metabolic disorders.

26 Nov 2019

Fertility treatments cause epigenetic changes in mouse embryos, study finds

Though epigenetic disorders - diseases caused by faulty gene expression - are still rare overall, babies born using fertility treatments have up to an 11-fold higher risk of inheriting them.

26 Nov 2019

New method to separate two variants of common herpes virus linked to multiple sclerosis

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet have developed a new method to separate between two different types of a common herpes virus that has been linked to multiple sclerosis.

26 Nov 2019

A young immigrant has mental illness, and that’s raising his risk of deportation

When José moved his family to the United States from Mexico nearly two decades ago, he had hopes of giving his children a better life.

26 Nov 2019

California’s working mothers get stronger support for workplace lactation

Katie Woody's firstborn, Oliver, struggled from birth to latch onto her breast, so she had little choice but to pump her milk and feed it to him from a bottle.

26 Nov 2019

Diabetes curriculum may help empower students to make healthy choices

For Lola McPherren, learning about diabetes is personal. The Juanita High School ninth-grader had a grandfather with diabetes. She recalled that he gave himself a shot of insulin before a meal, and that he also never really changed his diet to help control the disease. He died in February.

25 Nov 2019

Discovery may provide clues for treatment of autism and schizophrenia

Researchers at the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine have identified that a gene critical to clearing up unnecessary proteins plays a role in brain development and contributes to the development of autism spectrum disorders and schizophrenia.

25 Nov 2019

Obese teenagers at risk for brain damage, suggests new study

A new study being presented at the yearly conference of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) reports that MRI scanning of the brain shows signs of brain damage in obese adolescents – and that these signs could be the result of brain inflammation.

25 Nov 2019

Gut microbes can tamp down or boost the severity of norovirus infection

The highly contagious norovirus causes diarrhea and vomiting and is notorious for spreading rapidly through densely populated spaces, such as cruise ships, nursing homes, schools and day care centers. Each year, it is responsible for some 200,000 deaths, mostly in the developing world.

25 Nov 2019

Screen time could be starting in infancy, says NIH study

Children nowadays might be risking their developmental health by excessive exposure to screen time. The average time that children stare at the idiot box, or other monitors, including a computer or mobile device, was almost an hour a day at 12 months of age, increasing to over 150 minutes (2.5 hours) by the age of 3 years.

25 Nov 2019

Researchers discover cellular origins of pediatric brain tumors

A research team led by Dr. Claudia Kleinman, an investigator at the Lady Davis Institute at the Jewish General Hospital, together with Dr. Nada Jabado, of the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre, and Dr. Michael Taylor, of The Hospital for Sick Children, discovered that several types of highly aggressive and, ultimately, fatal pediatric brain tumors originate during brain development.

25 Nov 2019