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Routine and inexpensive genetic testing could save a significant number of children from being given drugs that fail to help their asthma and may even make it worse, scientists say.

It is accepted that specific medicines work better on some people than on others. Drug companies are exploring the possibilities for personalised medicines: drugs targeted to an individual’s genetic makeup, which will therefore be much more effective.

But the reverse also holds true: that some drugs are likely to be ineffective and cause more side-effects in some people than in others.

A study, carried out by r...

‘Pregnant women exposed to pollen shortly before birth are more likely to have children with severe asthma,’ is the somewhat alarmist headline in the Daily Mail.

The news is based on a large Swedish study that aimed to investigate the relationship between exposure to pollen during pregnancy and the first few months of a child’s life, and the risk of the child requiring hospitalisation for asthma in the first year of life.

The researchers found that high pollen exposure during the last trimester of a mother’s pregnancy was associated with an increased risk of the child being admitted to hospi...

Today, mothers of newborns find themselves confronting a common dilemma: Should they let their babies «cry it out» when they wake up at night? Or should they rush to comfort their crying little one?

In fact, waking up in the middle of the night is the most common concern that parents of infants report to pediatricians. Now, a new study from Temple psychology professor Marsha Weinraub gives parents some scientific facts to help with that decision.

The study, published inDevelopmental Psychology, supports the idea that a majority of infants are best left to self-soothe and fall back to sleep on ...

The American Academy of Pediatrics has two New Year’s resolutions for schools: Keep the school nurse and don’t drop recess.

The recommendations are part of two new policy statements published in Pediatrics.

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) says there’s a growing trend in schools to take away recess and use the time to teach subjects.

«There is pressure on schools to increase performance on standardized testing, and a lot of times teachers are using withdrawal of recess as a punishment for children,» says Robert Murray, MD, a co-author of the recess policy statement and a professor at ...

Brain changes found in adults with certain gene variants linked to conditions including Alzheimer’s disease, schizophrenia, and autism can also be spotted in brain scans done on newborns, a new study indicates.

Researchers from the University of North Carolina (UNC) School of Medicine said these brain changes could open new avenues for research.

«These results suggest that prenatal brain development may be a very important influence on psychiatric risk later in life,» study author Rebecca Knickmeyer, an assistant professor of psychiatry, said in a university news release...

It’s bad enough that they have to avoid milk and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. A new study reveals that kids with allergies also get picked on at lunch.

About 8 percent of children in the United States have food allergies—to peanuts, shellfish, eggs, etc.-and a study from researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai found that about a third of those children are bullied. Their study appeared online December 24 in the journal Pediatrics.

The researchers surveyed 251 pairs of parents and children on visits to allergy clinics and had them fill out a questionnaire about inciden...

New data suggest that we may have turned an important corner in the childhood obesity epidemic.

While rates of obesity and extreme obesity in preschoolers rose from 1998 to 2003, they began to plateau soon thereafter. And childhood obesity rates decreased slightly in 2010.

«We are very encouraged by this data,» says study researcher Heidi M. Blanck, PhD, of the CDC in Atlanta. «It’s pretty exciting and a nice turning of the tide. But we have to stay vigilant or it will go in the other direction.»

Researchers looked at data on 27.5 million children aged 2 to 4 from 1998 to 2010...

Almost all babies get a cold before their first birthday. Does your baby have a cold? Many parents are hesitant to give their children decongestants, antihistamines, or other drugs. Here’s a look at natural ways to treat your baby’s sniffles and sneezes.

At least two common gene variants are linked to «clinically meaningful» differences in pain scores in children after major surgery, reports a study in the January issue of Anesthesia & Analgesia, official journal of the International Anesthesia Research Society (IARS).

«[O]ur study is highly suggestive of a genetic component in pain response among children,» concludes the study by Dr Chantal Mamie and colleagues of Geneva University Hospitals, Geneva, Switzerland...

The number of low-income preschoolers who qualify as obese or «extremely obese» has dropped over the last decade, new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show.

Although the decline was only «modest» and may not apply to all children, researchers said it was still encouraging.

«It’s extremely important to make sure we’re monitoring obesity in this low-income group,» said the CDC’s Heidi Blanck, who worked on the study.

Those kids are known to be at higher risk of obesity than their well-off peers, in part because access to healthy food is often limited in poorer neighborhoo...