Faculty Bibliography

"Like it or not, we are slightly fat, furless, bipedal primates who crave sugar, salt, fat, and starch," he writes, "but we are still adapted to eating a diverse diet of fibrous fruits and vegetables, nuts, seeds, tubers, and lean meat.We enjoy rest and relaxation, but our bodies are still those of endurance athletes evolved to walk many miles a day, often run, as well as dig, climb, and carry."

Recently, there has been a lot of focus on the idea of toxic stress, in which a young child's body and brain may be damaged by too much exposure to so-called stress hormones, like cortisol and norepinephrine. By 2010, reducing child poverty had become a goal across the British political spectrum, and child poverty had fallen to 10.6 percent of children below the absolute poverty line (similar to the measure used in the United States), down from 26.1 percent in 1999

"The parents get to know its value and carry it round when traveling," Dr. [Donald Woods Winnicott] wrote. "The mother lets it get dirty and even smelly, knowing that by washing it she introduces a break in continuity in the infant's experience." In Dr. Winnicott's view, the object, together with what he called a "good enough mother," helps the young child navigate the essential problem of separation. The transitional object "has to be created by the baby," Dr. [Steve Tuber] said. "A child has to pick the one that really becomes theirs." "Parents get upset because they think they're going to lose the transitional object, they think it collects germs, they think it looks babyish, which is a problem in American culture," said Barbara Howard, a developmental-behavioral pediatrician at Johns Hopkins. "The biggest problem is stigmatization. There is no ultimate age where it's bad, but you can get teased for it."

A study published this month in the journal Pediatrics looked at a huge group of children who each saw a doctor at least twice with headaches but had no head injury or trauma. Dr. Heidi Blume, a pediatric neurologist at Seattle Children's Hospital and lead author of the study, invoked a "SMART" mnemonic for helping children deal with their recurrent headaches

CML was a disease without a treatment, a slow-growing cancer of the white blood cells that could lurk for a long time in a person's bone marrow and eventually develop into a "blast crisis," in which abnormal white blood cells proliferate, wiping out the bone marrow and eventually killing the patient

Dr. Heidi Blume, a pediatric neurologist at Seattle Children's Hospital, invoked a "SMART" mnemonic for helping children deal with their headaches. S is for sleep, she said, and getting enough of it. M is for not skipping meals, including breakfast and drinking enough to be properly hydrated. A is for activity, because either too much or too little can lead to headaches, and R is for relaxation. T is for triggers to avoid, from cigarette smoke to particular foods to traveling in the car. Dr. Stephen Ashwal, chief of pediatric neurology at Loma Linda University School of Medicine, sees many adolescents with chronic daily headaches. Some have ended up on multiple medications. "I think massage therapy or acupunture can be very helpful," he said. "I don't think it's a good idea for kids to be on more than one or maybe two medications." "Many many kids will outgrow their bad headaches," said Dr. Daniel Bonthius, professor of pediatrics and neurology at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine. "Exactly why they got the headaches and exactly why they go away, modern medicine doesn't really understand."

"Parents are shocked that that's their child's diagnosis," said Dr. Kerry S. Caperell, an assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Louisville School of Medicine and lead author of the study. "There's a fairly large literature in adults in terms of the adverse affects of chronic constipation on quality of life," said Dr. Arnold Wald, a gastroenterologist and professor at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health who has written about constipation in both adults and children