Faculty Bibliography

In 2009, the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council issued a report, "Depression in Parents, Parenting, and Children," that summarized a large and growing body of research on the ways that parental depression can affect how people take care of their children, and how those children fare. "Untreated, unrecognized parental depression can lead to negative consequences for kids," he said, ranging from poor school performance to increased visits to the emergency room to poorer peer relationships and adolescent depression. [...]there is plenty of evidence that when depressed parents get treatment and help with their parenting, families are much better off

Perri Klass discusses the Betsy-Tacy children's book series

Antibiotics represent a huge gift in the struggle against infant and child mortality, a triumph (or actually, many triumphs) of human ingenuity and science over disease and death, since the antibiotic era began back in the fourth and fifth decades of the 20th century

A recent book review by Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker compared American children unfavorably with the self-reliant and competent children of a tribe in the Peruvian Amazon; she discussed "the notion that we may be raising a generation of kids who can't, or at least won't, tie their own shoes." Dr. Mark Bertin, a developmental behavioral pediatrician in Pleasantville, N.Y., affiliated with New York Medical College, sees a wide range of children with behavioral problems, teasing apart contributions of neurological wiring, temperament and family style

In the first book of "The Odyssey," Homer described Odysseus as "straining for no more than a glimpse of hearth-smoke drifting up from his own land." Millenniums later, during the Civil War, homesickness (or "nostalgia") was viewed as an affliction so serious that it could kill stricken soldiers. The third inducement to homesickness may be a surprise: parents' expressing their own anxiety over a separation, or as Dr. [Christopher Thurber] described them, "parents who express ambivalence; well-intentioned, loving parents who say, 'Have a wonderful time at camp, I don't know what I'll do without you."' "People make that mistake all the time," Dr. [Edward Walton] said. "Every kid is going to ask, 'What if I feel homesick?' With a pickup deal, the subtext is, 'I have so little confidence in your ability to cope with this normal feeling."'

In a study of the ways college students describe sadness in status updates on their Facebook profiles, she showed that some such expressions were associated with depression in students who completed clinical screening tests. Since freshman year is a high-risk time for depression, many college resident advisers already try to use Facebook to monitor students, Dr. Moreno said.

[...] one recommendation in particular has been the subject of much controversy within the pediatric profession: that pediatricians screen all children for cholesterol by doing a blood test in 9- to 11-year-olds. [...] only children considered at high risk for cholesterol problems were to be routinely screened.

In a 2011 article in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine, researchers showed that adults hospitalized with heart attacks who had more blood drawn were more likely to develop anemia while in the hospital. Dr. Mikhail Kosiborod, one of the authors of the study, a cardiologist at St. Luke's Mid America Heart Institute in Kansas City, Mo., told me that the result surprised some physicians; the average volume of blood lost did not seem substantial enough to cause anemia in healthy adults.

Rebecca Johnson, director of the Research Center for Human-Animal Interaction at the University of Missouri, has begun a randomized clinical trial, financed by the National Institutes of Health, of children undergoing forensic interviews for child abuse; some are given a service dog during their interviews, and physiological indicators of stress are measured. A recent review article that examined a large number of studies found evidence that in children with no family history of allergy, those exposed to dogs in the perinatal period may be less likely to develop allergies.

Moreno's research approaches social media as a window, an opportunity to understand and improve physical and mental health. Since the freshman year is a high-risk time for depression, many college resident advisers already try to use Facebook to monitor students, Moreno said.