Tag: Pediatrics

Everyone has a role to play: Reducing your child’s risk of developing food allergies

Jul 17, 2020• 2

By RUCHI GUPTA, MD, MPH

The average American elementary school class includes two students living with one or multiple food allergies. That’s nearly six million children in the United States alone. And these numbers are climbing. There was a staggering 377 percent increase in medical claims with diagnoses of anaphylactic food reactions between 2007 and 2016, two-thirds of these were children.

As parents, we want the absolute best for our children. For many years, guidance around food introduction was unclear. Parents were told that babies, and especially those considered at risk for food allergies, should avoid some allergy-causing foods such as peanuts until they were three years old.

But thanks to ongoing research from our nation’s top allergists and immunologists, we are beginning to learn more and more about food allergies, including what new and expecting parents can do to reduce the risk of their children developing food allergies. In fact, studies now show that introducing a variety of foods early is the best course of action and has been shown to reduce the occurrence of certain food allergies like peanuts for many children.

For instance, the partially FARE-funded Learning Early About Peanut Allergy (LEAP) study showed a remarkable 80 percent reduction in peanut food allergies in high-risk infants who were exposed to peanut foods at a young age. Shortly after LEAP, there was the Enquiring About Tolerance, or EAT, study. This project, led by top medical researchers at Kings College London, found significant reductions in allergies to both peanut and egg after introducing small amounts of the foods into infants’ diets. The LEAP-on study soon followed, and had the same children from the original LEAP study remove peanut from their diets for 12-months. The results showed that they maintained their tolerance to peanut, indicating early introduction to babies can result in long-lasting protection from peanut allergy.

Sexism in Healthcare Reporting

Feb 6, 2018• 12

By NIRAN AL-AGBA, MD

NBC should consider re-branding as the “anti-woman” network. Our culture needs to change so women feel valued and respected, comfortable and safe in the workplace, and are provided ample opportunities for leadership and growth. NBC actions show they care little about gender equality in the workplace, prioritizing the comfort of males over that of females. During a recent interview, former “Today Show” anchor Anne Curry asked a poignant question after “not being surprised by the allegations” against “golden boy” Matt Lauer. “What are we gonna do to make sure these women work and are not sidelined and prevented from contributing to the greater good?” My answer is we must continue to call attention when major networks push women aside.

Morgan Radford is an NBC correspondent who reported on parents who were concerned about their children playing football due to risks of long-term neurologic damage. She interviewed two physicians for her segment — a pediatrician by the name of Dyan Hes, MD and Lee Goldstein, MD, PhD, an internal medicine physician. One would think both physicians were interviewed as experts in their fields; however, at some networks there appears to be “a power imbalance where women are not valued as much as men” according to Anne Curry. Dr. Hes is a physician and a mother to a teenage son, whom she understandably, will not allow to play football. Dr. Goldstein is a researcher and recently completed a study about the risk of brain injury resulting from even mild head trauma.

Dad Has the Flu and There’s a Baby at Home

Mar 4, 2015• 13

By PHILIP LEDERER, MD

At 6:30 AM, I kissed my 14-week-old son Joe on the forehead and headed off to work at the hospital. By 3 PM I was back in bed with a hacking cough and a fever. I had influenza.

As a doctor training in infectious diseases, I knew that the flu can be dangerous in vulnerable populations like little babies. I had visions of Joe being admitted to the pediatric intensive care unit, as I swallowed a pill of oseltamivir (brand name “Tamiflu”) and shivered under the covers.

Should I also give my little boy Tamiflu to prevent him from getting sick? The answer should be clear to an infectious disease physician-in-training, right?

I felt competing instincts. Paternal: to “do something” to prevent Joe from getting the flu. Medical: “do nothing,” as the rampant overuse of antibiotics in children has had negative consequences and the same might be true for antivirals.

As I researched the question further, I learned that the decision to give prophylactic Tamiflu is anything but simple.

Close contacts of people with the flu (including babies) can receive Tamiflu if they are at high risk for influenza complications. One Greek study of 13 newborns found that the drug was safe but did not address its effectiveness. Moreover, the number of babies who would need to receive Tamiflu to prevent one serious case of influenza is unknown.

Why Texting Patients Works: The Health Belief Model

Jun 2, 2013• 7

By Rosa Arriaga

With the rise of cell phone usage, smart and otherwise, many health care providers, researchers and entrepreneurs alike have assumed that this ubiquitous technology can be used to improve health and wellbeing. Entrepreneurs have led the charge and so the common catch phrase “there’s an app for that” underscores the fact that nearly 17, 000 health related apps are available either for free or a small charge for Android or Apple users. Young people in the US are perhaps the best targets of our mhealth efforts because they are eager users of mobile technology. However two questions arise naturally: 1) does data show that these apps lead to improved outcomes? 2) is there a theory of how we might use cell phones to improve health outcomes?

In a series of studies, we found that simply responding to text messages over a 3-month period led to improved quality of life and pulmonary function in pediatric asthma patients. In both studies, the researchers randomly assigned 30 asthmatic children, 10 to 17 years old, into three groups – a control group that did not receive any SMS messages; a group that received text messages on alternate days and a group that received texts every day. The children that received messages everyday between two scheduled appointments had the improved psychological and physical outcomes. Thus, our data does indicate that cell phones can be used effectively to improve health outcomes.

Perhaps more compelling is that we may have evidence of a possible mechanism that can lead to improved outcomes. The Health Belief Model is a cognitive theory of behavior change that espouses the notion that a critical pillar of behavior modification is that the individual must make the connection between the severity of the symptoms and the disease itself. In the case of asthmatic patients, we found that many times they attributed their symptoms to other causes. For example, they would say that they couldn’t exercise in the afternoon because they had a heavy lunch or that they couldn’t sleep the night before because they had seen a movie that had made them anxious— rather than attributing these symptoms (inability to exercise or sleep) to their asthma. The Health Belief Model also places value on acquiring knowledge about the disease. Thus, we sent patients texts messages that either asked about symptoms they had experienced or about asthma myths. Thus, our studies also indicate that improving symptom awareness and knowledge about their disease led them to have better medication adherence which in turn led to improved health outcomes.

Inside the New Data on ADHD Diagnosis Rates

Apr 5, 2013

By Brendan Saloner

The New York Times had a cover story recently reporting on the estimated prevalence of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder from the 2011-2012 National Survey of Children’s Health (they don’t identify the survey by name).

The story is going to get a lot of people interested in what is happening to children — every new datapoint on ADHD is noteworthy because it allows journalists to reopen the black box on childhood behavioral health disorders, and to raise the perennial alarm bells about over-diagnosis of children.

All of the issues raised in the article are valid. Many children with very mild impairments are getting a diagnosis, and enterprising drug companies are increasing demand for their product by implying that ADHD medications are a cure for generalized social impairments.

But — and this is critical – we have little systematic population-level data to compare the reported prevalence of a diagnosis with underlying data on ADHD symptoms in children. Continue reading…

The Last Well Child

Nov 8, 2012• 9

By Lawrence Rosen, MD

Q: “What is a well person?”
A: “A well person is a patient who has not been completely worked up.”

As I enter the exam room, a smiling 10-year-old boy greets me. Pete, my last patient of a long day, is here for his annual well visit. I chat with him about his life — home, school, nutrition, exercise, sleep, etc. — and I’m struck by something. Pete is really well. He’s well-fed (but not too much), active and well-rested, and, most importantly, he’s happy. He has not been to see me in an entire year, and only comes in for preventive health counseling. I think back on my entire day… and on my whole week. Pete is different from every other child I have seen this week. He is, in fact, the only truly “well” child I have seen in a long, long time. And I wonder — is he the last?

I’ve begun this post with a short riff on Dr. Clifton Meador’s satirical masterpiece, “The Last Well Person,” published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1994. Meador profiles a 53-year-old man he imagines to be the last known truly “well” person in the U.S. in 1998. The patient is subjected to every known evaluation and found to be basically undiagnosable. I reflect on this story each day as I enter one examination room after another, visiting with patients (and their families) in my pediatric practice.

Sadly, the story of “Pete” is real. I no longer see many well kids even though I am a primary care pediatrician, dedicated to keeping kids healthy. Yes, I devote much of my time to counseling parents about lifestyle choices (e.g., nutrition, exercise, play, rest, sleep) to promote wellness and prevent disease. Still, each and every encounter must be “coded” with a numerical set of instructions based on diagnoses (associated with disease states) so that I can get reimbursed for the care I deliver. My ability to keep my office open (so that I can continue to try and help families keep their children healthy) is predicated on my skill in playing this diagnostic code game.

Your Doctor’s Brain

Jul 12, 2012• 4

By Rob Lamberts, MD

I have a split medical personality. On one hand, I am a pediatrician; I light up around babies and love to mess around with little kids. On the other hand, I am an Internist; I love complex problems and love talking to the elderly. But the one part of internal medicine which gives me perhaps the most joy is the opportunity to solve medical puzzles. Yes, pediatrics has puzzles in it too, but they are far more common in adults.

The term used for a medical puzzle-solver is diagnostician. It is always a great compliment to a physician to be called a great diagnostician. It means you are a good thinker, have a good store of facts, know how to organize your thoughts properly, and can see patterns in things you otherwise would never have found. It is the Sherlock Holmes, Lord Peter Whimsey, or Harry Dresden side of medicine. The diagnostician searches for clues, but especially searches where they are most often missed: right out in the open.

I am not sure anyone has called me a good diagnostician, but there are few things that give as much satisfaction in my job. It calls on my creativity, my memory, my mental organization, my ability to ask questions, my power of observation, and my ability to put all the disparate pieces together to form a cohesive whole. It’s not just coming up with an answer; it’s coming up with a plan.Continue reading…

Medical Research We Never Hear About: The Problem of Unpublished Studies

May 2, 2012• 5

By Claire McCarthy, MD

Every day, there is another medical study in the news. There’s another newspaper or TV story telling us that X can cure depression or make you thinner or cause autism or whatever. And since it’s a medical study, we usually think that it’s true. Why wouldn’t it be?

But what most people don’t realize, let alone really think about, is that there might be other studies that show that X does none of those things — and that some of those studies might never have been published.

Just this week, the journal Pediatrics released an article that perfectly demonstrates this problem. There have been a number of studies that have shown that a certain type of medication, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), can help stop the repetitive behaviors of autism, like hand-flapping or head-banging. If you were to do a search of the medical literature, as doctors and parents and patients often do, you’d think that using SSRIs is a good idea. But when researchers dug deeper, they found that there were just as many unpublished studies that showed that SSRIs didn’t help. If they had all been published (they were all good enough to be published), that same search of the medical literature would have shown that using SSRIs isn’t a good idea.

This is bad. We rely on studies to guide our decisions. What is going on?

The journals that publish articles certainly play a role. After all, it’s cooler to publish a study that has a grabby headline, that promises an answer or a cure. That’s much more likely to get readers than a study that says that something doesn’t do anything at all. But it turns out that the researchers themselves play a bigger role.