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When preparing a nursery, most parents buy bumper pads to soften the sides of the crib and to add a decorative touch. Traditional thinking has been that bumpers protect infants' heads from the hard sides of the crib and prevent arms and legs from becoming stuck between crib rails. The AAP recommends that if bumpers are used, they should be thin and firm.1 They advise parents to avoid pillow-like bumpersand to remove them when the child is pulling to stand.2 However, a study recently published in The Journal of Pediatrics may lead us to rethink what we tell parents about the dangers of decorative bedding.

As attendees crowded the Exhibit Hall during the AAP Meeting, Contemporary Pediatrics captured the crowd.

Sudden cardiac death (SCD) should not be a surprise. The young athlete who drops dead during a game and the teen who is found dead in bed one morning seldom die without warning signs. The problem is the physicians, coaches, and parents who fail to recognize the warnings.

Most patients, and certainly most insurance companies, do not think of the pediatrician's office as a medical home of mental health. That has to change, said Jane M. Foy, MD, chair of AAP's Task Force on Mental Health.

The most effective method of combating substance abuse, the director of the NIH's National Institute of Drug Abuse said--echoing a phrase heard often at the convention - is early prevention.

Thirty to forty percent of children who are diagnosed and receive therapy for autism-spectrum disorders can recover, according to Chris P. Johnson, MD, of the University of Texas Health Science Center and San Antonio.

Wheezing in infants is a significant concern for parents. Not only is their child in distress, but they worry about asthma.

Researchers have found a simple method to reduce teen suicide: Reduce access to firearms.

Adverse childhood experiences (ACE) can have a wretchedly direct relationship to lifelong troubles in adulthood, troubles that can be best fixed in childhood. That's one of the result of the ACE study, according to one of its principal investigators, Vincent Felitti, MD, professor at UC San Diego. From a sample of over seventeen thousand adults, the ACE study team asked about the prevalence of ten traumatic childhood events in three categories: abuse, neglect, and household dysfunction. Specific experiences includes loss of a parent, physical abuse, and mental abuse.

Most physicians feel that while others may be swayed by pharmaceutical marketing, they are bastions of incorruptibility. This is not the case, argued Douglas Diekema, MD, at Monday's plenary session of the AAP's National Convention and Exposition.

The families of pediatric patients who receive a diabetes diagnosis often have a million questions for their physician about the disease. Pediatricians, in turn, have a million questions for the journals, studies, and experts in the field.

Extreme sports are a moving target - and so are the kids who play them.

Intimate partner violence is a major problem affecting children. About one in every four households is exposed to domestic violence, and as many as 10 million children witness domestic violence every year.

Children and adolescents have not escaped the epidemic of obesity that is sweeping the country. Between 1963 and 1970, about 4% of children ages 6 to 11 and 12 to 19 were obese, noted Irene Fennoy, MD, MPH, pediatric endocrinologist at Columbia University Medical Center in New York. By 2004, 19% of 6- to 11-year-olds and 17% of 12- to 19-year-olds were overweight. So were 14% of children aged 2 to 5, a group that barely registered in 1963.

"The commitment of quality is crucial," American Board of Pediatrics (ABP) President James A. Stockman III said, of its new initiative changing the way pediatricians recertify. "We can't trip over all the other certification bodies, which are all doing the same thing.

To this day, a child scoring in the 85th to 95th percentile of weight is "at risk of overweight." To parents, this may not sounds like a serious concern. It is. Nancy Krebs, MD, of the University of Colorado School of Medicine, Children's Hospital, Denver, hosted a talk at Sunday's plenary session about the new wording that would soon be adopted to describe overweight children.

It's not just patients who confuse the similar-sounding words caries and cavities, according to Dr. James J. Crall, DDS, at Sunday's NCE plenary session. He had had dental students of his call a cavity a carie.

The seizures that define epilepsy often aren't as bad to a child's overall health as the social debilitation that can come part and parcel with it, according to Colin M Roberts, MD, pediatric neurologist at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, Ore.

Robert D. Sege, MD, PhD gave his colleagues life-saving information Saturday on guidance and resources pediatricians can use in keeping their patients safe from violence. Sege, an associate professor of pediatrics at Tufts-New England Medical Center's Institute for Medical Research and Health Policy Studies, explained the background and basics of implementing AAP's Connected Kids: Safe, Strong, Secure project. Connected Kids was developed by VIPP - The Violence Intervention and Prevention Program.

There is no easy answer for parents whose child may have been exposed to HIV. Decisions to subject both child and parents to a 28-day course of prophylaxis must be made quickly, and most likely with incomplete information.

The consequences of drug abuse during pregnancy do not stop at birth. A growing body of evidence shows that prenatal exposure to alcohol, cocaine, tobacco, and other drugs of abuse can have lifelong consequences.

Patients and their families are usually thrilled to hear than a child's needed surgery can be done using minimally invasive means, said Hanmin Lee, MD, Associate professor of pediatric surgery at the UCSF Children's Hospital.

Stem cells offer real solutions for those who often have no better options, according to one of the country's leading researchers in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine.

"What is an economist doing here?" James J. Heckman, winner of the John Bates Clark Medal and the Nobel Prize in Economics, asked to the AAP's opening plenary audience in his keynote address. The answer, it turned out, was to reinforce a core belief with hard data.

Jay E. Berkelhamer, MD, the outgoing president of the AAP (American Association of Pediatrics), gave his introductory talks of the Saturday plenary session after a performance of a boys' choir. His message of the critical need to better child health care was also preached to a choir, one of like-minded health care providers.

"We are all too familiar with methamphetamine abuse as a psychosocial or criminal problem. It is easy to forget that the health aspects are at least as important in the population that we serve."

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued a warning not to consume apple-flavored Baby's Bliss Gripe Water bearing the code 26952V, expiration date October 2008 (shown as 10/08 on the label), and distributed by MOM Enterprises, Inc. of San Rafael, Calif.

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) has awarded 15 grants of approximately $28 million to help at-risk children and adolescents suffering from traumatic experiences. The grants are a part of the National Child Traumatic Stress Initiative, a nationwide cooperative network of organizations that have the capabilities to address trauma-related illness.

A joint meeting of the FDA's Nonprescription Drugs Advisory Committee and Pediatric Advisory Committee was held to review "the safety and efficacy of over-the-counter (OTC) cough and cold products marketed for pediatric use."

An article in the October 17 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA. 2007:298;1772), reports on a small study done by clinicians who found the emergence of a strain of S pneumoniae (serotype 19A) that is resistant to all of the antibiotics approved for children, due to extensive use of the pneumococcal 7-valent conjugate vaccine (PCV7). This bacterial strain causes acute otitis media (AOM) in the pediatric population.