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...

Sometimes it’s easy for people to simply dismiss attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) as just an irritating childhood learning disorder, which eventually disappears when people reach adulthood.

However, ADHD can actually have a more lasting impact than previously thought.  In the first ever population-based to study to follow children with ADHD into adulthood, researchers discovered that nearly a third of children diagnosed with the disorder continued to have ADHD well into their adult years.

Along with this revelatory finding came a whole host of other surprising discoveries reg...

Children will meet activity goals to earn rewards, but the extra effort doesn’t necessarily affect their weight and health, according to a new study.

The findings reinforce earlier research showing that incentives work to get kids more physically active, but the goal might need to be more challenging to show any health benefits.

«If I had to do it again I would do it at a higher level. It was too easy,» said Eric Finkelstein at the Duke-National University of Singapore, who led the new study.

Inactivity among kids is a pressing concern in the U.S. and abroad.

«Kids are known to be inactive, ge...

Consider your health

Fasting for pregnancy glucose tests is common, but when it comes to fasting while pregnant or nursing, research is still unclear as to whether or not it is a danger to your baby-to-be or nursing child...

Children exposed to the chemical bisphenol A, or BPA, may be at an increased risk for asthma, a new study suggests.
During the study, kids who had greater exposure to BPA at ages 3, 5 and 7 were more likely to be diagnosed with asthma before age 12 than children who had less exposure.
BPA is found in some plastics, canned food containers and other food packaging, and most people have detectable levels of the chemical in their urine. Previous studies have linked BPA to a number of health conditions, including childhood obesity and behavior problems.
The new study is the first to report a link b...

Raising children can be quite a handful, especially when they get out of hand. Here you can find useful tips, which could help you keep your children in order, both physically and behaviourally.

Bed-wetting blues
Your child is wetting his bed and you don’t know what to do. Know that medical treatment is not the only strategy that helps – motivational counselling can make a big difference too.

Take action:
Counselling includes the following: the child assumes an active role by keeping track of wet and dry nights on a calendar; fluids are not consumed 2-3 hours before going to bed; the child h...