Faculty Bibliography

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."

Since solid objects have fixed characteristics, it's relatively easy for a toddler to figure out what makes a cup, ball or chair. [...]children sitting in highchairs did learn better in the study

The tetanus-diphtheria-pertussis booster, given to adolescents and adults, protects against whooping cough, another relatively common infection among college students. [...]despite an excellent safety record, just half of eligible adolescent girls are immunized and many fewer boys receive this vaccine, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

"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."

With regard to infant feeding, the most notable recent turnabout involves allergies. [...]five years ago, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology told parents to manage the introduction of foods most likely to cause allergic reactions with particular care: to avoid cow's milk until a child was a year old, eggs until age 2, anything containing peanut until age 3

The American Academy of Pediatrics suggests breast-feeding exclusively for the first six months and continuing breast-feeding for at least a year. Other guidelines suggest that babies not be given solid foods until 4 to 6 months old, but last week the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a study showing that many parents aren't even waiting the four months. "It was thought that if you expose the baby to these foods early on in life, that tends to skew toward allergies and you become an allergic person," said Amal H. Assa'ad, professor of pediatrics at Cincinnati Children's Hospital. But epidemiologic studies did not back this up and some studies showed that banning those foods might have the opposite effect. "When we searched the literature very carefully, it was very difficult to find evidence for one thing or the other," said Dr. Assa'ad. "We're doing the best we can with the evidence that's there."

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

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