I am feeling old. Not because the kids at school are finally getting to me but because my granddaughter is at menstruation age.

Over the weekend her mother – my second daughter – asked me for some advice on what to say to her. After four children (including three daughters), my daughter has finally realised I might know something about this motherhood lark.

This is what I said to her.

Start talking early. The earlier you begin to talk to your daughter about the changes she can expect in her body, the better. It’s not a single discussion but one you can have over many months or even years...

An article in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal highlights a new approach to combating food allergies: Introducing allergenic foods like peanut butter and eggs to babies as young as 4 to 6 months old, according to a study in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology: In Practice.

That is a far cry from the American Academy of Pediatrics’ original recommendation that children not have milk until age 1, eggs at age 2 and peanuts at the age of 3. Food allergies affect about 5 percent of children under age 5 in the United States, and that number has been on the rise in recent years.

There have...

Global news coverage has been dominated by the potentially groundbreaking news that a child born with HIV appears to have been ‘cured’ of the infection.

The Guardian reports that US doctors have made medical history with a ‘first functional cure’ of an unnamed two-year-old girl born infected with HIV and ‘who now needs no medication’. BBC News quotes researcher Dr Deborah Persaud, who presented the news to a medical conference, as saying, “This is a proof of concept that HIV can be potentially curable in infants”.

The researchers report that the baby was started on antiretrov...

Did you know that little ol’ dust mites could provoke allergies and even asthma?

Dust mites are microscopic creatures, related to ticks and spiders, that live in house dust. The proteins in dust mite body parts and feces cause allergic reactions in people who have become sensitized to dust mite proteins.

Dust mite allergen also triggers asthma attacks and is one of the most common causes of asthma attacks worldwide.  This is primarily because dust mites are found nearly everywhere, especially indoors...

A new study may help confirm what some women have long suspected — that pregnancy permanently changes the size and shape of their feet.

Among pregnant women, flat feet are a common problem. The arch of the foot flattens out, possibly because of the extra weight and increased looseness of the joints associated with pregnancy, the University of Iowa researchers explained.

This loss of arch height appears to be permanent, according to the study in the March issue of the American Journal of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation.

«I had heard women reporting changes in their shoe size with pregnancy,...

The controversy about the efficiency and necessity of vaccines is well known. While conventional medicine advocates the use of vaccines, it also ignores the variety of toxic substances that vaccines contain and compromise the immunological responses. At the same time that medical authorities push for compulsory vaccinations, new data proves that these artificial immunization strategies simply do not work as they are supposed to. A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) found that undervaccinated children have better health, as it is indicated by the frequenc...

Treating children after they’ve been exposed to a traumatic event such as a school shooting or natural disaster is challenging, as many treatments don’t seem effective in the long-term, new research suggests.

A review of 22 studies looking at traumatic stress disorders in children and teens shows that no type of psychological treatment provided significant long-term benefits.

Although some psychological treatments with elements of a type of talk therapy called cognitive behavioral therapy did help these patients in the short-term, no drug treatments proved effective.

«Our findings serve ...

Dr. Dana Gossett still remembers the unsettling and obsessive thoughts that filled her brain after her first child was born.

She worried that the baby would roll out of bed. She fretted repeatedly that she’d fall down the stairs while carrying her daughter, now a healthy 13-year-old.

“These are thoughts that come unbidden into your mind. They just appear there and can be uncomfortable,” recalls Gossett, chief of the obstetrics and gynecology division at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

“I had just enough psychiatry to know that this was not normal.”

Gossett’s ...

Parents know that one day they will have to talk to their children about drug use. The hardest part is to decide whether or not talking about one’s own drug use will be useful in communicating an antidrug message.

Recent research, published in the journalHuman Communication Research, found that children whose parents did not disclose drug use, but delivered a strong antidrug message, were more likely to exhibit antidrug attitudes.

How the study was done

Jennifer A. Kam, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Ashley V...

Birthing animals

One common theme pregnant women experience is giving birth to and breastfeeding animals...