Teaching teens coping skills to deal with the chronic pain of fibromyalgia may provide them some relief, a small study suggests.

When researchers divided 114 teenagers with the condition into two groups — one that received behavioral therapy for six months and one that just got information about the condition — the behavioral therapy group emerged with much lower levels of disability at the end of the study.

“This is the first major breakthrough in understanding how best to treat fibromyalgia in teenagers,” said study co-author Dr. Susmita Kashikar-Zuck, a pediatric psychologist at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center.

“Because of their pain, these teens have trouble going to school, going out with friends, participating in social activities — things important to teenagers,” she said.

People with fibromyalgia suffer from intense pain all over their bodies. They may feel tired all the time, have trouble sleeping, become anxious or depressed and suffer from other conditions such as irritable bowel and arthritis.

About five million adult Americans have the condition, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Find out more from Reuters.

Chickenpox vaccine has dramatically cut deaths from the disease, especially in children, says a new government study proclaiming an important public health victory.

Researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that chickenpox deaths fell from an average of 105 per year to 14 after the vaccine had been available for a dozen years.

Deaths declined in all age groups, but the drop was most significant among children.

“To see the near elimination of chickenpox deaths in this country is very exciting,” said Jane Seward, a CDC official who co-authored the paper. She has been involved in the agency’s chickenpox vaccine program for 15 years.

The report was released online today by the journal Pediatrics.

Chickenpox is caused by a virus and is highly contagious. Symptoms include an itchy skin rash and fever. Most kids suffer no more than that, but some suffer complications such as skin infections, swelling of the brain and pneumonia. Severe cases are more common among adolescents and adults who get it for the first time. Also, the virus — called varicella — can reactivate in people later in life and cause a painful illness called shingles.

While rarely fatal, chickenpox was very common before the vaccine — nearly one in 10 pre-adolescent children would get it in a year, said Dr. Eugene Shapiro, a Yale University expert in infectious disease.

For the rest of the story, read Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

Parents often worry when their toddlers are slow to start talking, but a long-term study has found that these children have no more emotional or behavioral problems than others by age 5 — as long as they are otherwise developing normally.

The study, published online on Monday in the journal Pediatrics, followed children who were part of the Western Australian Pregnancy Cohort Study, including 1,245 children whose speech was not delayed — they were using at least 50 words and could string two or three words together in a phrase — and 142 who had not reached this milestone.

For the rest of the story, read The New York Times

The number of children going to the emergency room for concussions they suffered while playing competitive sports has more than doubled in recent years, which some say may be due in part to a growing awareness of the brain injury.

A study published Monday in the journal Pediatrics found that, although most of the increase in hospital visits came from high school athletes, 40 percent of sports-related pediatric concussion patients seen in the ERs were between the ages of 8 and 13. The study was conducted by four physicians affiliated with the Brown University Medical School.

The findings prompted the American Academy of Pediatrics to issue an updated clinical report about concussion care in children and adolescents. A concussion is caused by a blow to the head or upper body that causes the brain to shake inside the skull. Symptoms may include disorientation, confusion, dizziness, amnesia and uncoordinated hand-eye movements.

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Is it really possible to diagnose such a grown-up affliction in such a young child? And is diagnosing clinical depression in a preschooler a good idea, or are children that young too immature, too changeable, too temperamental to be laden with such a momentous label? Preschool depression may be a legitimate ailment, one that could gain traction with parents in the way that attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (A.D.H.D.) and oppositional defiant disorder (O.D.D.) — afflictions few people heard of 30 years ago — have entered the what-to-worry-about lexicon. But when the rate of development among children varies so widely and burgeoning personalities are still in flux, how can we know at what point a child crosses the line from altogether unremarkable to somewhat different to clinically disordered? Just how early can depression begin?

The answer, according to recent research, seems to be earlier than expected. Today a number of child psychiatrists and developmental psychologists say depression can surface in children as young as 2 or 3. “The idea is very threatening,” says Joan Luby, a professor of child psychiatry at Washington University School of Medicine, who gave Kiran his diagnosis and whose research on preschool depression has often met with resistance. “In my 20 years of research, it’s been slowly eroding,” Luby says of that resistance. “But some hard-core scientists still brush the idea off as mushy or psychobabble, and laypeople think the idea is ridiculous.”

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Good Shepherd Rehabilitation Network of Allentown will manage rehabilitation services for patients from Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia under a new agreement between the hospitals, officials said.

The services include inpatient rehabilitation at CHOP’s Children’s Seashore House in Philadelphia, rehabilitation services provided to other CHOP inpatients, and outpatient rehabilitation in the CHOP care network.

The collaboration, which begins this month, ”will combine the organizations’ strengths to build world-class rehabilitation programs that will benefit our patients,” said Thomas Dole, vice president of outpatient and clinical services at CHOP. ”This agreement draws upon the talents of our world-renowned medical and rehabilitation staff and Good Shepherd’s expertise in the management and operation of rehabilitation services.”

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Punishing your toddler with a few swats on the rear may come back to bite you, a new report suggests.

Health

According to the study, kids who were spanked often were twice as likely as those who weren’t spanked to develop aggressive behaviors such as getting into fights, destroying things or being mean to others.

Earlier research had produced similar results, but most had not taken into account how aggressive kids were to begin with, and other factors could have biased the results.

Although the new study doesn’t prove that corporal punishment causes aggression by itself, it shows that the link remains even after excluding a broad range of possible explanations.

“That is really a key point that sets the study apart,” said Catherine A. Taylor, of Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine in New Orleans, who led the research, published in the journal Pediatrics.

“Causality is extremely difficult to prove,” Taylor told Reuters Health. Still, she added, “the evidence is at a point where we want to encourage parents to use techniques other than spanking that can actually lower children’s risk for being more aggressive.”

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Governor Edward G. Rendell today announced Pennsylvania will use nearly $10 million in federal grant funds to improve the quality of health care for children while reducing the cost of services through the use of pediatric electronic health records.

“For many children, clinical information collected may not be readily transferable across the continuum of care, especially as they move between different health care settings and social agencies,” said Governor Rendell. “The effective use of electronic health records makes the transfer of this vital information possible and improves the quality and coordination of their care.”The grant funds will allow the departments of Insurance and Public Welfare to create QUICKSTEPS – Quality Improvement and Care for Kids through Electronic Programs. Over the course of the five-year grant, QUICKSTEPS will improve health outcomes for almost one million children in the Medical Assistance and CHIP programs through the use of pediatric electronic health records that have pre-visit screening capabilities and a referral linkage system.In developing QUICKSTEPS, the departments will partner with seven health systems essential to Medical Assistance and CHIP, including:• Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia
• Geisinger Health System
• St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children
• Penn State Hershey Medical Center
• PinnacleHealth System
• Pocono Health System
• West Penn Allegheny Health SystemOver the next five years, these health systems will implement testing and reporting on pediatric core measures of quality, promote the use of health information technology in children’s health care delivery while demonstrating the impact of the pediatric electronic health record.”Our collective work will help to establish an integrated system of quality health care for children receiving services through CHIP and Medical Assistance,” said Governor Rendell. “These new pediatric health records have the potential to quickly transform the delivery of health care through improved communication between health care providers, organization and patients by making care more accessible, efficient and cost-effective.”The federal grant is provided by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services through the Children’s Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act, or CHIPRA.For more information on Pennsylvania’s use of electronic health records in the Medical Assistance and CHIP programs, visit www.dpw.state.pa.us or www.insurance.pa.gov.

Getting students to exercise more might not just address obesity issues but also improve their grades with a U.S. study finding physically fit students tend to score higher in tests than their less fit peers.

Test scores dropped more than one point for each extra minute it took middle and high school students to complete a one mile run/walk fitness test, according to Dr. William J. McCarthy and colleagues at the University of California in Los Angeles.

Schools and parents seeking to optimize their students’ academic performance should take heed, McCarthy noted in an email to Reuters Health.

For optimal brain function “it’s good to be both aerobically fit and to have a healthy body shape.”

McCarthy and colleagues compared physical fitness and body weight measures with scores on California’s standardized math, reading, and language tests among 749 fifth-graders, 761 seventh-graders, and 479 ninth-graders who attended schools in Southern California between 2002 and 2003.

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The first sign may be that your bright child is having trouble reading, or organizing school assignments, or concentrating on homework. Your child may be frustrated with school, and you may find yourself frustrated with what looks like a lack of effort. And a teacher may also notice that something is amiss.

If you suspect that your child has a learning disability, and you’ve ruled out distractions like bad chemistry with the teacher or a social issue, your best recourse is to have the child tested.

The cost of getting a thorough assessment by a trained professional can be steep, often as much as $5,000. But that financial burden is not necessarily yours to bear: under federal law your local school district is obligated to assess your child free of charge, even if he or she attends a private school. That said, if you go through the process with a school district, it might take a bit more effort than hiring a professional. Below, we discuss both options.

First, though, some context. By some estimates, about one in seven Americans has a learning disability, a neurological disorder that can make a basic task like reading, writing or organizing information more difficult than usual. Disabilities cannot be cured, but if identified early they can often be ameliorated. Parents, teachers and specialists can help children develop strategies for dealing with them.

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