Car seat benefits, Perfectionism can discourage, Depression and conflict make for higher suicide risks, Autism generates abnormal brain growth & Correlation between epilepsy and autism
Kids of All Weights Benefit From Car Seats
Child safety and booster seats protect children of all weights, including those on the heavy side. That’s the finding of a new study that looked at nearly 1,000 children, aged 1 to 8 years, who were involved in crashes.
“Nearly 32 percent of children in the US are categorized as overweight or obese, and motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death and injury for all children, we wanted to better understand how these two threats to children’s health interact,” said lead author Dr. Mark Zonfrillo.
“This research should reassure parents that their only concern when it comes to car seat safety should be to follow the most recent guidelines set by the American Academy of Pediatrics,” he added. Those guidelines, revised earlier this year, outline the use of car safety and booster seats based on a child’s height, weight and age.
“A good time to re-evaluate child safety seat is during your child’s routine medical visits. Compare your child’s weight and height measurements to the manufacturer’s ranges on the seat’s labels or instructions,” Zonfrillo recommended. “There’s no ‘one-size-fits-all.’ If your older child moved to a booster seat at age 5, don’t necessarily assume it will be the same for his or her younger siblings.”
Perfectionism Can Discourage Parents
First-time mothers and fathers have a tougher time adapting to their new roles if they believe society expects them to be perfect parents. Researchers looked at 182 couples who became parents between 2008 and 2010, and found that mothers had less confidence in their parenting abilities and fathers felt more stress when they were more worried about what others thought of their parenting skills.
Self-imposed pressure to be perfect was somewhat better for parents, especially fathers. This may be because the fathers in the study were highly involved in parenting and were motivated by high self-imposed standards. Or it may be because fathers still don’t carry the same burden for child care as mothers.
“Trying to be the perfect parent is a mixed bag,” study author Meghan Lee, said in a news release. “If you think you have to be perfect because of outside pressure, it really hurts adjustment. If you put these demands on yourself, it may have some benefits early on, but it is not universally good,” she added.
Depression, Conflict Raise Suicide Risk for New Moms
Major depression and conflicts with intimate partners increase the risk of suicide among pregnant women and new mothers, a new study indicates.
Dr. Katherine Gold and her colleagues analyzed 2,083 suicides among women aged 15 to 54 that were recorded over five years in the U.S. More than half of the women who killed themselves had a known mental health diagnosis or were in a depressed mood prior to their suicide. “Previous research has shown that depressive disorders affect 14 to 23 percent of pregnant and postpartum women and anxiety disorders affect 10 to 12 percent.”
The study also found that new mothers who committed suicide were more likely to be depressed in the two weeks before they killed themselves. Hispanic women were far more likely to commit suicide while pregnant (10 percent) compared to when they were not pregnant (4 percent).
“As a society, we tend to avoid talking about suicide,” Gold said. “But it’s important to try to understand and talk about risk factors if we are going to address suicide from a public health perspective.”
Some Boys with Autism Have Larger Brains
Abnormal brain growth starting at four months of age occurs in a type of autism in which toddlers lose language and social skills they once had, according to a US study. The brains of boys with regressive autism grew six percent larger than typically developing children and toddlers who showed signs of autism early in life, a form called early onset autism. The research, involving 180 subjects and described as the “largest study of brain development in preschoolers with autism to date,” also found no evidence of a brain growth spurt in girls with autism.
“This adds to the growing evidence that there are multiple biological subtypes of autism, with different neurobiological underpinnings,” said co-author David Amaral, research director of the MIND Institute at University of California, Davis. As many as one in 100 children is diagnosed with autism, though its cause remains a mystery. The disorder is more common in boys than girls by a factor of four to one. Previous studies have suggested that clinical signs of autism tend to coincide with a period of abnormal brain and head growth that becomes apparent between the ninth and 18th month of life.
Kids With Epilepsy Should Get Screened for Autism
Children seen in epilepsy clinics should be screened for development delay and autism because the conditions often occur together, new research suggests.
Researchers at Children’s Memorial Hospital in Chicago asked parents of children under age 5 who had epilepsy to fill out screening questionnaires. The results showed that 75 percent of children also had a developmental delay, while 41 percent had autism.
The results “support routine screening of both new onset and established cases of pediatric epilepsy,” according to the researchers in a news release.
The study slated to be presented at the American Epilepsy Society annual meeting in Baltimore. Because this study was presented at a medical meeting, the data and conclusions should be viewed as preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.
Sources: www.healthnews.com, www.webmd.com, news.yahoo.com