News

Here’s a way to help your female teenagers avoid athletic injuries: During their sports physicals, tell them and their parents that coach-led neuromuscular warm-ups have been shown to reduce anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) and other leg injuries in teen girls who play soccer and basketball. Find out what a dramatic difference warm-ups made and how cost-effective they are.

Is lack of confidence keeping you from reporting possible child abuse? A new study suggests that could be the case. What other factors prevented pediatricians and other PCPs from reporting suspected child abuse?

Using a simple, nonfasting blood test to screen children for diabetes may be too good to be true. A new study found that hemoglobin A1c is not very effective for diagnosing diabetes in children and misses as many as 2 out of 3 cases. What tests did the researchers recommend instead?

Although current clinical guidelines call for daily low-dose inhaled corticosteroid treatment for preschoolers who have recurrent wheezing and are at risk for developing asthma, that may not be the best course of action. You might be surprised at how few times a year treatment was necessary for respiratory symptoms that had caused wheezing in the past.

With 10 cases this year of swine-origin influenza reported, mostly in children, the CDC is urging pediatricians to screen patients presenting with fever and respiratory symptoms for contact with swine. It also said you shouldn’t rely on commercially available diagnostic tests to tell the difference between swine flu and seasonal influenza A viruses. Here’s why.

A 22-month-old boy with failure to thrive presented with a 3-day history of rhinorrhea, fever, and abdominal pain associated with tube feeding. A PEG tube had been placed 2 months before this visit.

Pediatric Compensation 2011Is your compensation keeping pace with that of your fellow pediatricians? We surveyed practicing pediatricians all across the country about their compensation and overall health of their practices. See what they said, then join the conversation about how your practice is different.

• Abdominal Muscle Deficiency Syndrome • Branchio-Oto-Renal syndrome • Cerebral Gigantism • Cerebral Palsy • Chronic Granulomatous Disease • Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy • Eagle-Barrett Syndrome • Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (1) (2) • Fibrodysplasia Ossificans Progressiva • Fragile X Syndrome (1) (2) (3) • Hunter Syndrome • Iliac Horn Syndrome • Juvenile Hemochromatosis • Klippel-Trenaunay Syndrome • LEOPARD Syndrome • Mowat-Wilson Syndrome • Onycho-Osteodysplasia • Organic Acidemia • Prune Belly Syndrome • Russel Silver Syndrome • Sotos Syndrome • Triad Syndrome • Trisomy 13 • Turner-Keiser Syndrome • Williams Syndrome

Image Gently : Is overuse of CT scans harming our children? FDA's new role in tobacco control : Guidance to empower youth to say no There's an app for that : Best mobile medical applications for pediatricians Dermcase : Squiggly blue line on dorsal foot Puzzler : Newborn not having very swell time Updates : Acyclovir and HSV, Substance abuse screening, PPIs for suspected infant GERD, Glucocorticoids and preterm infants, community-acquired Pneumonia

Glucocorticoids may affect cerebellar development in preterm newborns and thus should be used with caution in this population, say researchers in a new study of glucocorticoid exposure in neonates.

Discover how FDA's new Center for Tobacco Products is helping parents and you keep kids away from tobacco and tobacco-related products.

A study in more than 200 boys and girls undermines the common belief that a lack of physical activity leads to childhood obesity.

With the ability to more accurately diagnose acute injuries in the emergency department, it is no wonder that the use of computed tomography scanning has increased over the past decades.

The author recalls the first time she ordered a CT scan in the mid-1970s.

The emergency department pages you about a 1-month-old girl recently transferred from an outside hospital for further evaluation of swelling over her posterior scalp.

Pediatricians have become avid users of smartphone and tablet technology in their personal and professional lives. With many more apps to come, find here our picks for the most useful of the current batch.

Investigators designed a study to enhance understanding of the cis-regulatory sequences of the ?-globin locus required for silencing or activation of fetal hemoglobin.

Proton pump inhibitors often are prescribed to treat infants with symptoms suspected as gastroesophageal reflux disease, but these acid-suppressing drugs are not safe for infants younger than 12 months.

Tooth eruption has been held responsible for irritability, increased salivation, sleep disturbance, fever, diarrhea, and loss of appetite.

A new American Academy of Pediatrics policy statement advocates that substance abuse education and screening be included as routine components of adolescent care.

The worried mother of a healthy 21-month-old girl asks you to evaluate a peculiar, squiggly blue line on the top of her daughter's right foot.

New clinical practice guidelines issued by the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society and the Infectious Diseases Society of America provide detailed recommendations for prevention, diagnosis, and management of community-acquired pneumonia in otherwise healthy infants and children in the outpatient or inpatient setting.

According to two trials, suppressive oral acyclovir therapy for 6 months improved neurodevelopment outcomes in infants surviving HSV disease with CNS involvement.

A 2-year-old girl has been followed for developmental delays and slow weight gain by her pediatrician and early childhood intervention therapists. The 17-year-old, first-time mother was also a runaway and had avoided early prenatal care. More details and questions for you, here.

Knowledge of a child’s birth weight can be a valuable tool when determining whether to screen for autism spectrum disorder. Patients who weigh less than 2,000 g at birth are 5 times more likely to have autism than the general population. How much does the autism incidence increase with a history of very low birth weight (less than 1,500 g)?

Children in the 85th percentile for body mass index (BMI) are at greatly elevated risk for high blood pressure and require regular monitoring as well as possible interventions, according to a new American Heart Association study. The study of 1,111 healthy Indiana school children found that the adiposity effect on blood pressure was minimal until patients reached the overweight category, when it increased 4-fold. Find out why researchers believe the hormone leptin may play a role in the relationship between weight and blood pressure.

Instead of too little, too late, in terms of medical care, are your patients getting too much, too soon? Pediatricians and other primary care physicians overtreat patients at a cost of $6.7 billion a year. Researchers at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, attributed the costs to performing unnecessary tests or prescribing unneeded medications. Can you guess in what areas pediatricians most contributed to the problem?

What if you could accurately assess risk for alcohol-related problems with just 2 straightforward questions? Here’s a new government-sponsored tool, developed in collaboration with the American Academy of Pediatrics, that has been shown to have the greatest accuracy in predicting current or future alcohol issues in young people.