Ah, College - A Time to Steal and Break Stuff

Here's something for the empty nesters (or soon to be): A new study has named college attendance as a risk factor for bad behavior. Sociologists examined survey data for thousands of adolescents and young adults and found that male college students are more likely to commit property crimes than their non-college peers. And--brace yourself for a shock--drinking levels are higher for college men too. (For some reason the article didn't address the ladies of higher learning.) The money quote by the lead researcher: “College attendance is commonly associated with self-improvement and upward mobility. Yet this research suggests that college may actually encourage, rather than deter, social deviance and risk-taking.'’
I'm hoping to engage in a little social deviance and risk-taking myself during my impending summer vacation, so I'll be checked out from the blog for a week.

Daycared Kids Gain More Weight

Sorry, working parents (and yes, I'm one of them): A recent study of thousands of kids says that infants cared for by caregivers other than their parents tend to gain more weight than children cared for by parents. The kids under care are also less likely to be breastfed and more likely to start eating solid foods early. No surprise on that point--as many a working mom can attest, pumping breast milk on the job requires some serious dedication.

Government and Nonprofits Team Up on Allergy Research

This is a quickie, since I'm about to crash hard tonight: Government agencies and advocacy groups are dedicating millions of dollars total to a new research initiative on food allergies. Check it out and cheer.

Congress to Ban Toxins in Toys

Big news from Washington today: Congressional negotiators have agreed to ban a brand of toxins called phthalates from toys and other children's products. This is good news for parents who worry that ingestion of such toxins could cause health problems for their little ones. It's the latest in a trend: perpetually ahead-of-the-curve California instituted a ban last year, as have the European Union and a dozen other countries, and this year Wal-Mart, Toys R Us and Babies R Us said they wouldn't carry phthalate products starting in 2009. The ban is part of a larger measure to reform the Consumer Product Safety Commission. (The bill would also prohibit lead in children's products, which can cause health problems as well.) This is a big deal because phthalates are everywhere. Companies like them because they make plastics softer and more durable. President Bush opposes the move by Congress; one of his backers said that "banning a product before a conclusive, scientific determination is reached is short-sighted and may result in the introduction of unregulated substitute chemicals that harm children's health." It's true that rodents have been the subjects of much of the research linking phthalates to health problems, but there have been human studies too, including one finding that male babies born to women with high phthalate levels in their blood exhibited changes related to reproductive problems.

Autism Update

Earlier this month saw a new study on the underlying factors of autism. This one points to faulty DNA that disrupts genes important to brain development. The researchers primarily examined families whose parents are also cousins; apparently "marriage between first cousins increases the prevalence of neurological birth defects by about 100 percent." (If you happen to need one more reason not to marry your cousin, well, you're welcome.)

Math Class: Not Tough After All

Good news for parents of daughters: Though boys seem to have the image edge when it comes to performance in math and science, the reality, according to a new study that's the largest of its kind, is that girls in every age group are measuring up to boys in math. Take that, Teen Talk Barbie!

Teen Sex Shrinks as Family Time Goes Up

This sounds like a win-win: Spend more quality time with your teens--by, say, eating family dinners, having family fun time or "doing something religious" together--and your teens will have less sex, less sexual partners, and less unprotected sex. This is the conclusion from a three-year survey of thousands of adolescents. Comparing siblings proved especially useful in trying to tease out potential influences of teen behavior.

How to Hook Young Smokers: Just Add Menthol

Okay, this is just disturbing:
"Tobacco companies deliberately changed the menthol levels in cigarettes depending upon whom they were marketing them to — lower levels for young smokers who preferred the milder brands and higher levels to 'lock in lifelong adult smokers,' researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health concluded.
"The researchers reviewed industry documents dating back decades on product development and on strategic plans for menthol products."
Apparently younger smokers buy a lot of menthol, as first-time smokers are less likely to reject a cigarette with that flavor. Companies market accordingly. One even uses the acronym YAS, for younger adult smokers, which, let's face it, really means teens.

TV Noise Disrupts Kids' Play

Pediatricians have long discouraged television for children under 2, but a new study says that even the background noise of adult television shows--shows parents may think their kids aren't noticing--can actually disrupt a child's play. During the experiment, children played with toys in a lab, with the television on for half of the time. Though the kids didn't pay much attention to the boob tube, when it was on (showing "Jeopardy!") they played with toys for shorter periods of time. The disruptive effects were "real but small." This is interesting, but it's still not clear to me why it is so alarming. Is it one more reason to turn off the TV? Sure. But "an environmental hazard"? That seems a bit of an exaggeration. Call me when the television starts emitting BPA.

Are We In a Baby Boom?

The National Center for Health Statistics just reported that last year broke the record for baby births in the United States: 4,315,000. Says one expert: "It's a particularly interesting record because the year it beats is 1957, which was the height of the baby boom." But conditions now are vastly different from those 50 years ago, during the prosperity of post-World War II. The average woman is now having two children, not four (but we've got double the population) and she is more likely to be 40-plus and/or unmarried. Immigrants as a group are the most significant contributors to the uptick in births. Is it really a new baby boom, or just a fluke? Demographers say it's too soon to tell.

As Hormones Rise, Exercise Dies

Among the MANY rude changes that puberty brought for me was a loss of the desire to run around outside all day. Rather than beg to stay up past my bedtime, I began to embrace sleep. And that, according to a new study, is completely normal. Scientists surveyed about 1,000 children and found that nine-year-olds spent three hours running around on average. By the time kids hit 15, their physical activity had dipped closer to 30 minutes. Big change for just six years! Researchers speculated that schools had much to do with the shift, saying that children lose recess as they get older and sports teams become more exclusive. And here I thought it had to do with too much brooding.

Tonight, An Assortment

Why settle for one when you can get three? This tight piece discusses the rise in C-sections, cholesterol in children, and when it is safe for young ones to fly.

Allergies in the Family? Consider Passing on the Peanut Butter

A new study says that regular consumption of nuts during pregnancy raises the odds of having an asthmatic child by almost 50 percent! Yet another reason I wish I had refrained. Still, it's too soon to recommend a full-on nut ban. Says one researcher: "The associations we found are pretty strong, only we are the first to find these effects, so they need to be confirmed by other studies before recommending the avoidance of peanuts and nuts during pregnancy."

Kids Today

A federal government working group has put out its annual report card about the well-being of America's children. The good: higher math and reading scores, less childhood deaths from injuries, and a lower percentage of smokers. The bad: A higher birth rate for adolescent girls and a higher number of low birthweight infants (whose small size puts them at risk for health problems).

Why We're Addicted to Baby Smiles

Most moms just can't get enough of seeing their babies smile--and now there's a new study to back it up. When a team of scientists monitored the brains of 28 new mothers, they found that a specific part of the brain became active when the moms saw images of their happy babies. That specific brain area is associated with the hormone dopamine, which is associated with feelings of reward and can also be triggered by certain drugs. Essentially, said one author, "all good mothers are addicted to their newborn babies." The purpose this serves is that mothers "will do things above and beyond the call of duty" to care for their children.

Government Scientists Discuss Studying a Controversial Autism Treatment

Here's an interesting article about chelation (pronounced kee-LAY'-shun), a controversial treatment that removes heavy metals from the body. Some parents, perhaps several thousands, are employing chelation on their autistic children, mainly as a response to the idea that mercury in vaccines caused the autism. (Scientists largely disavow this idea.) A significant number of these parents swear by the treatment, though it can have nasty side effects and has even caused at least one death. A federal scientist has proposed a study on chelation that involves administering it to a group of autistic children and comparing the results to a group that does not receive the treatment. Unsurprisingly, the study has been held up for safety concerns. Still, the head of the federal National Institute of Mental Health wants to move on it because he says parents need answers more quickly than traditional scientific research is providing. Another expert says giving children chelation is unethical, but the government can justify the study because so many parents are doing it and therefore "it's incumbent on the scientific community to evaluate it."

Scientists Link SIDS to Chemical in Brain

A research paper has linked SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome) to serotonin, a chemical in the brain that affects mood and regulates body temperature, breathing and heart rate. A team of scientists wanted to examine serotonin's role in aggression and anxiety, so they genetically engineered mice to overproduce serotonin. But the researchers noted, in what one called a "chance discovery," that most of the mice died young after their bodies failed to regulate temperature and heart rate. This looked a lot like SIDS. It isn't the first research to show a link to serotonin--another team that looked at autopsies of children who died of SIDS revealed that the infants had abnormal serotonin-producing cells in their brains. This knowledge could ultimately lead to better screening for babies at greatest risk of SIDS.

Gentlemen, Start Your Engines...

Because it turns out that biological clocks aren't just for the ladies. New evidence points to a decline in fertility when men reach their mid-30s. Researchers in France tracked more than 12,000 couples under treatment for infertility over a period of five years. They found that women's chances of getting pregnant dropped after they hit 35, but that was expected. More surprising was the finding that men lost some of their baby-spawning mojo around the same time. This is becoming a theme.

The Poor, Poor Babies of "Baby Borrowers"

A doctors' professional society, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, released a statement last week admonishing NBC for airing "The Baby Borrowers," a series that follows teenage couples as they spend three days caring for someone else's infant. The AACAP thinks the experience is dangerous to the babies, noting that "teenagers may be more likely than adult strangers to abuse or neglect infants and toddlers" and that the three-day separation from parents may cause the little ones major distress and anxiety. Hello, overreaction!
Full disclosure: I am a pretty laid-back parent. And I've never seen this show, nor do I plan to watch. But raise your hand if you've ever had or employed a perfectly competent teenage babysitter. I'm imagining a lot of hands. Now how many parents have taken a weekend trip sans kids? That's the length of time we're talking about here. In this case, the show apparently employed nannies to supervise the teen caregivers, as well as an on-set psychologist, while the parents got to watch their kids from next door.
I'm not a reality show apologist. And the idea that this show will serve as a teen pregnancy deterrent is highly questionable. But I'm not worried about these babies' safety. Exploitation is another story: Why doesn't the AACAP address the dangers of child stardom?

Test Tube Babies May Be Easier to Predict

Happy Independence Day to all, with a special shout-out to couples undergoing in vitro fertilization. Thousands of child-seeking couples every month are faced with the difficult decision to give up or continue on IVF, which can be a challenging and expensive procedure. Now a team of scientists hopes to make that choice easier: They have analyzed dozens of factors that fertility specialists consider and boiled them down to four powerful predictors of IVF success. Those predictors are the number of embryos produced during a cycle, the number of embryos that survive long enough to divide into eight cells, the percentage of embryos that stop dividing, and a woman's level of the hormone used in IVF. Together these four factors are 70 percent accurate in predicting pregnancy--great news for prospective parents undergoing IVF cycles.

To Know Autism, Vaccine Researcher Looks No Further Than Home

This week's must-read is a profile of a prominent vaccine researcher who just happens to be the parent of an autistic child. Not only does Peter Hotez deal every day with the challenges of raising an autistic teen, but he must deal with public doubt about the very nature of his work. "[Autism] is not something that can be caused by a toxin after birth," he says. "This is a deeply patterned mis-wiring in the brain, and this is not how a toxin works. It can only be a genetic condition that affects the whole neurobiology of development." He raises the questions: Why has the public seized onto the idea of an autism/vaccine link, when there are so many serious--and seriously ignored--diseases? Why doesn't insurance often provide adequate coverage for mental health problems? And will lawmakers do more to help families with autistic children cope, such as, for example, promoting opportunities for respite care, which provides short-term assistance to exhausted parents who just need to catch their breath?