Study: Key holes appear in books giving parents advice about raising adolescent
CHAPEL HILL -- Books offering advice to parents about teens are less likely to contain injury prevention messages than those that give advice on parenting smaller children, according to a new University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill study. Notably absent from most such books were discussions about preventing automobile accidents among adolescents.
The UNC Injury Prevention Research Center investigation, which appears in the November issue of the journal Pediatrics, involved reviewing the 46 best-selling advice books for parents. Included were 41 with messages related to younger children and 19 with information about teens. Some books covered both age groups.
Prevention of automobile mishaps and burns were the most commonly addressed injury prevention topics in the books focused on younger children, while gun safety was the leading topic in books about adolescents, researchers found. Although injury prevention messages for parents of teens emphasized gun injuries, which was important, too little attention was given to avoiding motor vehicle crashes, the leading cause of injury to that age group.
Most books analyzed showed important gaps in safety messages and were not consistent with standards set by the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association and other groups, investigators said.
Study finds low birth weight rates vary widely across US
Research may hold key to reduce national rate and improve neonatal health
HANOVER, NH – Low birth weight, an important risk factor of infant mortality and childhood developmental disorders, varies more than 3-fold in regions across the U.S., according to national research conducted at Dartmouth Medical School. The study offers promise for health care experts in an area of prenatal health where progress has been elusive.
Published in the November 7 issue of Pediatrics, the study is the first to investigate regional low birth weight rates on a national scale, and identifies regions that have significantly low or high low birth weight rates. The authors, based at the Center for the Evaluative Clinical Sciences at Dartmouth Medical School, concluded that birthplace is as important for neonatal outcomes as the race or prenatal health of the mother.
A low birth weight baby is defined as a newborn weighing less than 5.5 pounds. Although researchers have long known that low birth weight can be influenced by many factors including the biological interaction of the mother and the fetus, the parent's socioeconomic status, and medical care, these factors are little understood and public health initiatives aimed at reducing the incidence of low birth weight have been largely unsuccessful. National rates of low birth weight have actually increased over the past decade, a trend that has both economic and health consequences.
Adolescents who watch smoking in movies are more likely to try smoking
First national study encourages changes by the movie industry
HANOVER, NH – The first national study to look at the connection between smoking in movies and smoking initiation among adolescents shows that exposure to smoking in popular films is a primary risk factor in determining whether young people will start smoking.
The study by researchers from Dartmouth Medical School (DMS) and Norris Cotton Cancer Center (NCCC) appears in the November 7 issues of the journal, Pediatrics. The research, supported by the National Cancer Institute, suggests that exposure to movie smoking accounts for smoking initiation among over one-third of U.S. adolescents. It concludes that limiting exposure of young adolescents to movie smoking could have important public health implications.
"We found that as the amount of exposure to smoking in movies increased, the rate of smoking also increased." said lead author Dr. James Sargent, professor of pediatrics at DMS and director of the Cancer Control Research Program at NCCC. "Part of the reason that exposure to movie smoking has such a considerable impact on adolescent smoking is because it is a very strong social influence on kids ages 10-14," he said. "Because movie exposure to smoking is so pervasive, its impact on this age group outweighs whether peers or parents smoke or whether the child is involved other activities, like sports." In the study, 6,522 US adolescents aged 10-14 were asked to identify films they had seen from a list of 50 randomly selected titles out of a database of films released in the U.S. from 1998 – 2000. Researchers found examples of movie smoking in 74 percent of the 532 movies in the database. Based on the movies each participant had seen and the amount of smoking in each movie, the adolescents were split into four levels of exposure to movie smoking. Researchers then examined risk for adolescent smoking, comparing adolescents in the higher movie smoking categories with the lowest category and controlling factors known to be linked with adolescent smoking, like peer and parent smoking. Even after considering all other factors known to influence the smoking risk, DMS researchers found that adolescents with the highest exposure to movie smoking were 2.6 times more likely to take up smoking compared to those with the lowest exposure. All else being equal, the researchers found that of 100 adolescents that tried smoking, 38 did so because of their exposure to smoking in movies.
The study confirms the results of a regionalized study by the researchers that focused on adolescents in Northern New England, published December 15 in the British Medical Journal. The data in that research showed that exposure to smoking in movies had a similar impact on first-time cigarette smoking, but the children interviewed for that study were predominantly Caucasians living in mostly rural areas, and so the results could not be applied to the rest of the country.
Workers on daily probiotics less likely to take time off sick
Workers who take probiotics daily are less likely to be off work with common illnesses, such as colds and gastroenteritis, than workers who don't. An exploratory study published today in the open access journal Environmental Health shows that workers who took a daily dose of the probiotic bacteria Lactobacillus reuteri were 2.5 times less likely to take sick leave than workers who took a placebo.
Py Tubelius, from Tetra Pak Occupational Health and Safety AB, and colleagues from BioGaia AB, in Lund, Sweden, conducted a study to assess the health benefits for adults of taking L. reuteri on a daily basis. A group of 181 staff (128 day workers and 53 shift workers) at the Tetra Pak factory in Lund agreed to take part in the study. The workers were randomly assigned at the start of the study, to receive a drink with or without L. reuteri, every day for a period of 80 days.
Twenty-three of the 87 workers in the group that took a placebo reported taking sick days during the 80 day-long study. In contrast, only 10 of the 94 workers that took L. reuteri reported taking any sick days during the study. The effect of L. reuteri was most significant in shift workers: none of the 26 shift workers in the reuteri group reported taking any sick leave, compared to nine out of 27 shift workers in the placebo group.
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