Social media websites can help and harm kids
USA Today
Facebook and other social media websites can enrich children's lives, but they could also be hazardous to their mental and physical health, says a recent report from the American Academy of Pediatrics. In the group's first report on children and social media, it encourages pediatricians to talk to parents and children about kids' use of social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, video gaming sites, virtual worlds such as Club Penguin and Sims, blogs and video sharing sites such as YouTube.More

Deadline extended
NACHRI
The deadline to submit BOTH applications for the 2011 NACHRI C.A.R.E. (Champion of Analytics and Research Excellence) and proposals for the 2011 NACHRI Annual Leadership Conference has been extended, but only to THIS Friday, April 1. To submit your C.A.R.E. Award application, please visit www.childrenshospitals.net/careaward. To submit your ALC proposal, please visit www.childrenshospitals.net/leadership11. Remember, Friday, April 1 is the drop-deadline.More

New Nephrology Collaborative forming
NACHRI
Speaking of deadlines, the deadline to sign up to participate in the new NACHRI Quality Transformation Network Nephrology Collaborative is TODAY, Thursday, March 31. Participating teams come together for meetings twice a year; collect and submit monthly process and outcome data; participate on monthly webinars; and have access to the NACHRI Nephrology community and other web resources. The Collaborative teams will test and implement three care bundles designed to improve outcomes, one focused on the insertion procedure and two focused on enhancing care giver/patient education on care of the catheter at home. More

Case Mix U launches
NACHRI
What do you want to know...about Case Mix? The program team has just launched Case Mix University, designed to be a cumulative learning experience covering all aspects of the Case Mix Comparative Data program. The courses, which are arranged using the familiar college 100/200/300/400 level system, will be presented as webinars covering topics like methodologies, report generation, practical applications and more. The first webinar in the series, Case Mix 101: Intro to Case Mix, kicks off Tuesday, April 5. More

Death rates 'higher' among young adults than children
BBC News
Premature deaths are now more likely to occur in adolescence and early adulthood than in childhood, a new global report claims. The study in The Lancet looked at data from 50 countries - rich, middle-income and poor - over 50 years. It found that while mortality had fallen overall, rates were now relatively higher in teenagers and young adults, than in young children. Violence, suicide and road accidents are being blamed.More

FDA probes link between food dyes, kids' behavior
NPR
The Food and Drug Administration is meeting this week to examine whether artificial food dyes cause hyperactivity in children. Artificial food dyes are made from petroleum and approved for use by the FDA to enhance the color of processed foods. They've been around for decades and are found in everything from pudding to potato chips to soft drinks. More

No good evidence that folk remedies ease colic
HealthDay News via Bloomberg Businessweek
Fennel extract, herbal tea and sugar water relieved colic in some infants better than a placebo, according to a new study that reviewed clinical trials of alternative remedies for colic. But parents shouldn't get their hopes up too high. All of the trials reviewed had "major limitations," such as having too few patients, relying on parental reports of symptoms, or the study design (such as not being double-blinded).More

Study: Youth psychological problems persist
AFP via Google News
Children who had psychological problems have a greater likelihood of becoming adults who suffer money and relationship woes, said a British study published in the United States. The analysis in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences was based on information about a group of 17,634 children born in Britain in the first week of March 1958.More

Teens lose bone density after weight-loss surgery
Reuters via MSNBC
Teenagers who undergo gastric-bypass weight-loss surgery lose bone in the two years following the procedure, a new study shows. "The good news is they started out with bones that were far heavier than normal," said Dr. Thomas Inge, a researcher in the study and an associate professor of pediatrics and surgery at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center. "After that (bone) loss, they end up about normal for their age."More

Prenatal alcohol exposure linked to behavior problems in teens
HealthDay News via U.S. News and World Report
Teens whose mothers drank alcohol regularly throughout the first trimester of pregnancy have a threefold increased risk of developing severe behavior problems, a new study warns. Researchers analyzed data collected from 592 children and their mothers. The mothers were evaluated when four and seven months pregnant and shortly after childbirth and then, along with their children, when the children were 8 months old, 18 months old and 3, 6, 10, 14 and 16 years old.More

School battles students' bad diets
The New York Times
With 20 percent of the nation's children obese, the United States Department of Agriculture has proposed new standards for federally subsidized school meals that call for more balanced meals and, for the first time, a limit on calories. The current standard specifies only a minimum calorie count, which some schools meet by adding sweet foods.More

Safety agency fails to investigate crib bumper cases
Los Angeles Times
Since 2006, there have been at least 17 cases where the Consumer Product Safety Commission did not investigate a child's death, even though the agency had reports on file suggesting bumper pads played roles in the fatalities. The Tribune looked into some of the cases and found that medical examiners and coroners said bumper pads were involved in the suffocations.More

Study: Most US states unclear about storage, use of babies' blood samples
Science Daily
State laws and policies governing the storage and use of surplus blood samples taken from newborns as part of the routine health screening process range from explicit to non-existent, leaving many parents ill-informed about how their babies' left over blood might be used, according to a team led by a member of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics, in collaboration with researchers from the University of Utah. A report on their analysis is published March 28 in Pediatrics.More