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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.

Compensation Survey Link

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Social phobia is not just an extreme form of shyness in most teenagers, and it often requires referral and/or intervention from a pediatrician, according to recent research. In a recent study, 12% of teens who identified themselves as shy met the criteria for social phobia, and another 5% of those who did not consider themselves shy also met the diagnostic criteria. You may be surprised to discover how rare it is for adolescents with social phobia, even those with significant impairment, to receive treatment.

Evaluations for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) should begin in children at 4 years and continue until 18 years, which significantly expands the age range for recommended screening. Released at the American Academy of Pediatrics National Conference in Boston, Massachusetts, the clinical practice guidelines recommend behavioral interventions as the first-line treatment in preschool children. The guidelines also have some new suggestions related to methylphenidate treatment for children younger than 6 years.

ADHD Poll

The AAP has just released updated guidelines on ADHD that include the recommendation for medication therapy for selected preschoolers (as young as 4 years old).