Mental Health

According to the organization Friends for Sight, thousands of children experience an eye injury annually, but 90% of these mishaps can be prevented by wearing suitable protective eyewear.

Rates of developmental delays are still high among premature babies despite increased survival rates over the past 20 years, according to findings recently published in BMJ.

Mothers who are obese or overweight before pregnancy and who give birth at 28 weeks or less, are at an increased risk for having children that perform poorly in cognitive functions and score low on intelligence tests, according to findings recently published in The Journal of Pediatrics.

The last few years have seen a growing force of infectious disease challenges that together pose an unprecedented range of threats to health here in the United States and in countries around the world where Americans travel and conduct business. While outbreaks of Ebola, Zika, SARS and MERS have spread from their places of origin with devastating impacts, rising rates of resistance to antimicrobial drugs threaten the gains of modern medicine at home and globally. New and re-emerging diseases with pandemic potential continue to surface, and diseases that include tuberculosis, once considered all but conquered, have evolved faster than the medicines to control them, to pose new dangers.

Children born to mothers with inadequate vitamin D-serum 25(OH)D levels were more likely to have suboptimal gross-motor skills when compared with children born to mothers with adequate levels, according to research recently published in the British Journal of Nutrition.

Children with hearing loss that meet all three Early Hearing Detection and Intervention guidelines — hearing screening by 1 month, diagnosis of hearing loss by 3 months and intervention by 6 months — have a higher vocabulary quotient despite possessing factors that may inhibit expressive language, such as cognitive, motor or visual disabilities.

Anxiety disorders are the most common psychiatric disorders with onset in childhood, according to a report recently published in Pediatric Annals. A primary care pediatrician recently offered some tips to help health care professionals diagnose and treat some of the medical conditions.

The Trump administration has named Georgia health commissioner Brenda Fitzgerald, MD, to be the next CDC director.

The use of sign language for deaf children who receive cochlear implants by 3 years provides no observable benefits in the learning of spoken language before or after implantation, according to a study published in Pediatrics.

PHILADELPHIA — Teenagers are more likely to be noncompliant with their asthma controller medications, which may lead to self-esteem issues and depression due to uncontrolled asthma and feeling “different,” according to a recent presentation at the annual meeting of the American Association of Nurse Practitioners.