Children’s Health

The essential role of long-term foster carers in helping to transform the lives of vulnerable children in care is highlighted in a new study published today. Government data shows that 40% of children in foster care are in long-term foster care – over 20,000 children at the time of the study in 2019. The research

When a child has a fever, their body can ache, they are restless and they just don’t feel well. While a fever is a part of our natural response to infection, the fever itself can lead to complications. One rare complication is a febrile seizure. A febrile seizure is when your child (ages 6 months

Vanderbilt Kennedy Center (VKC) researchers, as part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring (ADDM) network, report an increase in the number of children in Tennessee with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The researchers published their findings in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report series on Dec. 2.

A bacterium common in the mouse gut microbiome can charge up the immune system to fight cancer cells in the colon, researchers from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine report today in the journal Immunity. The study showed that bacterium Helicobacter hepaticus boosted adaptive immune response and prompted selective activation of Helper T cells

Babies born to women with anemia during pregnancy have an increased risk of childhood anemia, according to a study carried out in rural India. Anemia, characterized by less than normal concentration of hemoglobin (Hb) in the blood, is an important public health challenge with a prevalence rate of 47 per cent among non-pregnant women and

Autism prevalence among 8-year-old Utah children has risen by nearly 30% in less than a decade, according to a study of 11 communities nationwide, including Salt Lake City and surrounding counties, led by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Autism prevalence among 8-year-olds in the state rose from 1 in 58 children in

Many countries have implemented various nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) such as social distancing mandates and lockdowns in response to the coronavirus disease 19 (COVID-19) pandemic. Although these measures reduced stress on the healthcare system in the absence of vaccines, they were associated with major socioeconomic costs. This led to a revival of the debate on whether

In pediatric and young adult patients with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) treated with tisagenlecleucel (Kymriah), DNA sequencing-based detection of residual disease between three and 12 months accurately identified all patients who would eventually relapse, while other methods were less predictive. Journal in Which the Study was Published: Blood Cancer Discovery, a journal of the American

This first-in-human study of golodirsen showed its long-term safety and biologic activity in patients with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (DMD). The approved exon-skipping therapy is designed to enable the production of functional dystrophin proteins, as described in the peer-reviewed journal Nucleic Acid Therapeutics. Golodirsen was tested in ambulatory patients with exon 53 skip amenable DMD. They

“Put down your phone” is a common parental phrase, the modern-day equivalent of “turn off the TV.” That’s because parents have long thought that staring at a screen for too long will have a detrimental effect. However, parental concerns about media use appeared to take a backseat in 2020, when COVID-19 forced parents to make

As the COVID-19 pandemic nears the two-year mark, Northwestern Medicine scientists continue to tackle every facet of the disease, from investigating coronavirus vaccines’ potential for providing immunity against similar coronaviruses to developing novel rapid antigen-based tests and examining disparities in COVID-19 case and mortality rates in Chicago. Coronavirus vaccines may provide cross-protective immunity Northwestern Medicine

During the first 9 months of the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers did not find a significant difference in the number of new cancer diagnoses in Canadian children compared with before the pandemic, according to a study published in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal) https://www.cmaj.ca/lookup/doi/10.1503/cmaj.210659. “Our findings suggest that among children in Canada, cancer diagnosis was not

Saliva samples are easy to obtain and useful for measuring antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 in children, which could facilitate epidemiological surveillance in school settings. The study, a collaboration between the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), an institution supported by “la Caixa” Foundation, and the Hospital Sant Joan de Déu (HSJD), followed over 1,500 children who

A team of UK-based scientists has recently evaluated the effectiveness of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccines in preventing household transmission of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in England. Their findings indicate that the vaccines effectively reduce transmission of SARS-CoV-2 alpha and delta variants from breakthrough infections in the household setting, despite having reduced

Multisystem inflammatory syndrome (MIS) is a new systemic inflammatory acute onset disease that mainly affects children (MIS-C) and, at a lesser frequency, adults. The disease usually occurs in children 3-6 weeks after acute severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection. Study: Autoantibody Release in Children after Corona Virus mRNA Vaccination: A Risk Factor of

Researchers at Yale University analyzing specialized MRI exams found significant changes in the microstructure of the brain’s white matter in adolescents and young adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) compared to a control group, according to research being presented next week at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA). The changes

Quarraisha Abdool Karim has spent the past three decades studying HIV and AIDS. She has become one of the world’s leading epidemiologists and made major contributions to the global understanding of how HIV affects young women. As associate scientific director of the Centre for the AIDS Programme of Research in South Africa (CAPRISA), Abdool Karim

The perception of gender in children’s voices is of special interest to researchers, because voices of young boys and girls are very similar before the age of puberty. Adult male and female voices are often quite different acoustically, making gender identification fairly easy. Gender perception is much more complicated in children because gender differences in

Earlier this year, the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) approved COVID-19 vaccines for 12 to 15 years and people over the age of 16. While adolescents have been less at risk for severe COVID-19 illness, new variants such as Delta have caused a surge in infections in this age group. New research from the

Cynthia Rogers, MD, visits a baby in the Newborn Intensive Care Unit at St. Louis Children’s Hospital. Rogers is helping lead a national study aimed at understanding how prenatal factors and early life experiences influence brain development and behavior in infants and young children. Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis are