The charity Alcohol Concern has issued a stark warning about the number of children drinking at dangerous levels.
It has published a report estimating the cost of hospital treatment for underage drinkers in England to be about £19m a year.
And the number of under-18s ending up in hospital after drinking too much is rising, the charity has warned. Read the rest of this entry »
US researchers writing in a leading journal concluded that a new form of pelleted tobacco product that in some cases looks like candy could poison children and lure young people into nicotine addiction.
You can read about the study, by researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Northern Ohio Poison Control Center and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), online in the 19 April ahead of print issue of Pediatrics.
Last year, RJ Reynolds, one the biggest tobacco companies in the US, started market testing a new pelleted product made with finely ground tobacco flavoured with mint or cinnamon that dissolves in the mouth like breath mints.
The product, called Camel Orbs, contains 1 mg of nicotine per pellet, which is about the same as that contained in the average nicotine lozenge marketed to people trying to quit smoking. Read the rest of this entry »
A urine test that can differentiate between dangerous and safe snoring is possible, say researchers at the University of Chicago.
They looked at 90 children referred to a clinic to be evaluated for breathing problems in sleep, and 30 controls.
A number of proteins were increased in the urine of the children diagnosed with dangerous snoring.
The research is published in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine. Read the rest of this entry »
Teenagers when going to bed earlier protects against depression and suicidal thoughts, New York research suggests.
Of 15,500 12 to 18-year-olds studied, those who went to bed after midnight were 24% more likely to have depression than those who went before 2200.
And those who slept fewer than five hours a night had a 71% higher risk of depression than those who slept eight hours, the journal Sleep reports. Read the rest of this entry »
Scientists have discovered what they believe is a genetic cause of severe obesity in children.
The team concluded that the loss of a key segment of DNA can be to blame.
It said the findings might improve diagnosis of severe obesity – which on occasion has been wrongly attributed to abusive overfeeding.
The study, of 300 children with severe obesity by the University of Cambridge and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, appears in Nature. Read the rest of this entry »
Australian researchers have identified a link between allergic asthma in 3 to 5 year-old children and exposure to folic acid that their birth mothers took as supplements during late pregnancy. They said the timing of when folic acid is taken in pregnancy might be important.
The study was the work of Dr Michael Davies, associate professor with the Research Centre for the Early Origins of Health and Disease at the Robinson Institute in the University of Adelaide, and colleagues, and is published online in the 15 November issue of American Journal of Epidemiology. Read the rest of this entry »
