One-sixth of children in paediatric intensive care units (PICUs) were harmed by medications, of which most cases were preventable, according to a new study published in the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology.
Researchers conducted an observational study across three PICUs in England over a three-month period in 2019.
The study included 302 patients and 62 adverse drug events were confirmed. The estimated incidence of adverse drug events were 20.5 per 100 patients, and most were preventable as judged by the expert panel. ADEs were commonly involved with medicines prescribing (46.8%) and caused temporary patient harm (67.7%).
Medications for the central nervous system (22.6%), infections (20.9%), and the cardiovascular system (19.4%) were commonly implicated with adverse drug events. Analysis revealed that patients who stayed in PICU for seven or more days were more likely to experience an adverse event compared to patients with a shorter stay.
“This multicentre study is the first of its kind in the UK hospitals, and its findings can guide future remedial interventions to reduce avoidable medication-related harm in this vulnerable patient population,” said lead author Anwar A. Alghamdi, PhD, of the University of Manchester.
Physicians have recommended that children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) receive screening for abnormally high or low cholesterol levels at least once during their childhood, since ASD is a risk factor for cardiovascular disease in both children and adults.
The recommendation stemmed from a recent study, published in Translational Psychiatry, that found reduced levels of high density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C) in individuals from families with two or more children with ASD. Additionally, they found reduced or elevated levels of other lipids, apolipoprotein A1 (ApoA1) and apolipoprotein B (ApoB). Individuals with low HDL-C levels or ApoA1 levels had lower adaptive functioning than other individuals with ASD.
“This latest research is part of our ongoing work to understand some of the co-occurring conditions with ASD,” said Elaine Tierney, MD, a child and adolescent psychiatrist with Kennedy Krieger Institute. “Our work indicates that lipids are abnormal in many individuals with ASD. Our findings, in addition to studies that show an increase in heart disease in individuals with ASD, lead us to recommend that children with ASD be screened for abnormal total and HDL cholesterol levels. We hope our work underscores the importance of cholesterol screening and raises awareness for families in the ASD community.”
Previously, Dr Tierney and colleagues identified that Smith-Lemli-Opitz Syndrome (SLOS), a genetic condition of impaired cholesterol biosynthesis, is associated with autism. This led to a recommendation that all children with ASD be screened for SLOS if they exhibit some of its characteristics, such as slow growth, microcephaly, mental retardation and other birth defects, although the severity of this rare disease can vary.
Current guidelines could be causing cow’s milk allergy to be over-diagnosed in infants, according to a new study.
Researchers analysed data on 1303 healthy infants who were exclusively breastfed until at least three months of age, and found that 38% and 74% of infants had multiple mild-to-moderate milk allergy symptoms – as defined by current allergy guidelines – at three months and 12 months old, respectively. By comparison, non-IgE-mediated cow’s milk allergy has a prevalence of less than 1% in children.
The researchers’ findings, which are published in Clinical & Experimental Allergy, suggest that following current guidelines may lead to over-diagnoses in infants by labelling normal infant symptoms as possible milk allergies.
“There is an assumption that the existence of a guideline is more beneficial than no guideline. However, well-meaning guidelines need to be supported by robust data to avoid harms from over-diagnosis that exceed the damage of missed and delayed cow’s milk allergy diagnoses that they are seeking to prevent,” the researchers wrote.
Globally, less than two thirds of children and adolescents living with HIV who are receiving treatment are virally suppressed, according to new research published in The Lancet HIV.
Viral suppression [PDF] for HIV means that treatments are protecting health and preventing the transmission of HIV to others. UNAIDS has set a target of achieving 95% viral suppression among all people living with HIV on treatment by 2030.
“We estimate viral suppression one, two and three years after people start taking antiviral treatment, so that we can understand how well the treatments are working over time,” said Professor Matthew Law from the Kirby Institute.
“The data among adults on treatment in our studies show that viral suppression was achieved in an estimated 79% of adults at one year, and 65% at three years. However, viral suppression is poorer among children, at an estimated 64% at one year and 59% at three years.”
Senior study author, Dr Azar Kariminia from the Kirby Institute, said there are unique barriers to achieving viral suppression for children and adolescents. “It can be challenging for them to take treatment regularly, and children rely on caregivers who are often having to manage their own medical needs. There are also a range of factors that stem from stigma and discrimination, including a fear of disclosing the child’s HIV status.”
For this study, the researchers analysed data from 21 594 children/adolescents and 255 662 adults from 148 sites in 31 countries who initiated treatment between 2010 and 2019.
Dr Annette Sohn, from amfAR’s TREAT Asia program, is Co Principal Investigator for IeDEA Asia-Pacific (along with Prof. Law). She says that “while there has been substantial progress in the global response to HIV, the needs of children and adolescents often fall behind those of adults. Our efforts must extend beyond ensuring access to paediatric medicines to address the social and developmental challenges they face in growing up with HIV if we are to achieve the WHO targets by 2030.”
Viral load testing is essential to find out whether HIV treatments are working effectively. It is recommended by WHO at six and 12 months following the initiation of treatment, and then every 12 months thereafter. While viral load testing is common in high-income countries, scaling up accessible viral load testing in resource-limited settings remains a challenge.
With Australian government funding, the Kirby Institute and the Papua New Guinea Institute of Medical Research (PNGIMR) are partnering with the PNG government and a consortium of partners are implementing a program called ‘ACT-UP PNG’ which will scale up HIV viral load testing in two provinces with high HIV rates.
“Our work is ensuring that infants and children are afforded the same access to testing and treatment as other people with HIV,” says Dr Janet Gare from the PNGIMR and a Co-Principal Investigator on ACT-UP-PNG.
Instead of doing viral load testing in distant laboratories, ACT-UP PNG provides same-day molecular point-of-care testing in HIV clinics.
“This brings HIV viral load testing closer to patients, which currently includes children aged 10 and older, and adolescents,” says Dr Gare. “However, we are also pioneering the implementation of a diagnostic platform that will allow the same access to timely HIV viral load testing and results for infants six to eight weeks of age, and children up to nine years, who are currently unable to be included in point-of-care methods.”
Scientia Associate Professor Angela Kelly-Hanku says that these technologies will make testing for viral suppression in infants and children easier.
“We cannot end AIDS without addressing the inequalities that exist between paediatric and adult HIV programs. Projects like ACT-UP make a real difference and bring us closer to achieving the UNAIDS targets.”
Saliva samples are easy to obtain and useful for measuring antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 in children, which could improve epidemiological surveillance in school settings. The study followed over 1500 children who went to summer schools in Barcelona last year. The results were published in BMC Medicine.
One of the pressing questions during this pandemic has been to understand children’s susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2 infection and how they infect others. An obstacle to answer this question is that most infections in children are mild or asymptomatic, and are therefore missed. To establish whether an individual has been exposed to SARS-CoV-2 in the past, virus-specific antibodies in blood need to be detected. Measuring antibody prevalence over time in a cohort of children can provide very valuable epidemiological information. However, this requires techniques that are both sensitive and minimally invasive.
In this study, performed through the Kids Corona platform, the team led by Carlota Dobaño, from the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), and Iolanda Jordan, from Hospital Sant Joan de Déu (HSJD), used saliva instead of blood to measure virus-specific antibodies in over 1500 children who attended different summer schools in Barcelona in 2020, as well as around 400 adult staff. Two saliva samples per participant were analysed, one at the beginning and one at the end of the camp stay, and different antibody types (IgG, IgA and IgM) targeting different viral antigens were measured.
The study found that 3.2% of the participants developed antibodies between the first and second sample, indicating new infections. This is six times higher than the infection rate estimated by weekly PCR screening. “It has been reported that some children can be positive for antibodies despite being negative by PCR, which suggests that they can generate an immune response that prevents the establishment of SARS-CoV-2 infection,” explained Dobaño, first author of the study. It could also be because asymptomatic children have lower viral loads or that their viral clearance is faster.
Furthermore, the analysis shows that the percentage of new infections was higher in adults (2.94%) than in children (1.3%), suggesting differences in infection and transmission dynamics. Finally, contrary to blood tests, asymptomatic people had higher levels of anti-Spike antibodies in saliva, suggesting these antibodies play a protective role in respiratory mucosae. “This means that anti-Spike antibodies in saliva could be used to measure protective immunity upon vaccination, especially in the case of intranasal vaccines,” said senior study co-author Gemma Moncunill.
“We previously demonstrated in other Kids Corona studies that saliva is useful for detecting virus by PCR. With this study, we demonstrate that it’s also an effective and much friendlier way to measure antibodies, making it the ideal sample for children, instead of the more invasive nasal swab,” said Jordan.
Researchers have found that it is possible to distinguish a girl’s voice from a boy’s from as young as five years old, but identification requires the listener to perceive the size of the speaker, providing a clue to their likely age.
Perceiving gender in children’s voices is of special interest to researchers, because in children, a girl’s voice and a boy’s are very similar before the age of puberty. Adult male and female voices are fairly easy to distinguish due to acoustic differences.
With children, gender perception is much more complicated because gender differences in speech may emerge before sex-related anatomical differences between speakers. This suggests listeners may need to consider speaker age when guessing speaker gender and the perception of gender may depend on acoustic information besides anatomical differences between boys and girls.
In the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, researchers reported developing a database of speech samples from children ages five to 18 to answer two questions: What types of changes occur in children’s voices as they become adults, and how do listeners adjust to the enormous variability in acoustic patterns across speakers?
Listeners assess a speaker’s gender, age, height, and other physical characteristics based primarily on the speaker’s voice pitch and on the resonance (formant frequencies) of their voice.
“Resonance is related to speaker height — think violin versus cello — and is a reliable indicator of overall body size,” said co-author Santiago Barreda, from the University of California, Davis. “Apart from these basic cues, there are other more subtle cues related to behaviour and the way a person ‘chooses’ to speak, rather than strictly depending on the speaker’s anatomy.” When co-authors Barreda and Peter Assmann presented listeners with both syllables and sentences from different speakers, gender identification improved for sentences. They said this supports the stylistic elements of speech that highlight gender differences and are better conveyed in sentences.
They made two other important findings. First, listeners can reliably identify the gender of individual children as young as five.
“This is well before there are any anatomical differences between speakers and before there are any reliable differences in pitch or resonance,” said Barreda. “Based on this, we conclude that when the gender of individual children can be readily identified, it is because of differences in their behavior, in their manner of speaking, rather than because of their anatomy.”
Second, they found identification of gender of speakers must take place along with the identification of age and likely physical size.
“Essentially, there is too much uncertainty in the speech signal to treat age, gender, and size as independent decisions,” he said. “One way to resolve this is to consider, for example, what do 11-year-old boys sound like, rather than what do males sound like and what do 11-year-olds sound like, as if these were independent questions.”
Their findings suggest that “perception of gender can depend on subtle cues based on behaviour and not anatomy,” said Barreda. “In other words, gender information in speech can be largely based on performance rather than on physical differences between male and female speakers. If gendered speech followed necessarily from speaker anatomy, there would be no basis to reliably identify the gender of little girls and boys.”
In a new study, penicillin significantly reduces the risk of underlying rheumatic heart disease progression in children and adolescents.
The research also showed that early screening was critical for preventing serious rheumatic heart disease progression and death in young children. Rheumatic heart disease affects 40.5 million people globally, causing 306 000 or more deaths every year. The chronic disease results from damage to the valves of the heart after a case of Strep throat. It’s considered a disease of poverty and disadvantage.
Associate Professor Andrea Beaton of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center said that prior to this study, it was unknown if antibiotics were effective at preventing the progression of latent rheumatic heart disease.
“The trial is the first contemporary randomised controlled trial in rheumatic heart disease. The results are incredibly important on their own, but also demonstrate that high-quality clinical trials are feasible to address this neglected cardiovascular disease,” she said.
The trial involved 818 Ugandan children aged 5 to 17 years with latent rheumatic heart disease, who received either four-weekly injections of penicillin for two years or no treatment. All underwent echocardiography screening at the beginning and end of the trial.
The findings from the screenings, published in theNew England Journal of Medicine, reported just three (0.8%) participants who received penicillin experienced latent rheumatic heart disease progression, compared to 33 (8.3%) who didn’t receive the treatment.
Dr Daniel Engelman of Murdoch Children’s Research Institute (MCRI) said the results showed a significant and greater than expected reduction in disease development.
MCRI Professor Andrew Steer said screening for latent rheumatic heart disease was critical to stop progression because heart valve damage was largely untreatable.
“Children with latent rheumatic heart disease have no symptoms and we cannot detect the mild heart valve changes clinically,” he said.
“Currently, most patients are diagnosed when the disease is advanced, and complications have already developed. This late diagnosis is associated with a high death rate at a young age, in part due to the missed opportunity to benefit from preventative antibiotic treatment. If patients can be identified early, there is an opportunity for intervention and improved health outcomes.”
Uganda Heart Institute Dr Emmy Okello said the Ugandan government should strengthen programs that promote screening of rheumatic heart disease and the availability of penicillin.
“Our study found a cheap and easily available penicillin can prevent progression of latent rheumatic heart disease into more severe, irreversible valve damage that is commonly seen in our hospitals with little or no access to valve surgery,” Dr Okello said.
While the importance has long been known, little research has examined the necessity of sufficient sleep during the first months of life. New research suggests that newborns who sleep longer and wake up less throughout the night are less likely to be overweight in infancy. Their results are published in Sleep.
“While an association between insufficient sleep and weight gain is well-established in adults and older children, this link has not been previously recognized in infants,” said study co-author Susan Redline, MD, MPH, senior physician in the Division of Sleep and Circadian Disorders at the Brigham. “In this study, we found that not only shorter nighttime sleep, but more sleep awakenings, were associated with a higher likelihood of infants becoming overweight in the first six months of life.”
To conduct this research, Dr Redline and colleagues observed 298 newborns born at Massachusetts General Hospital between 2016 and 2018. The infants’ sleep patterns were monitored using ankle actigraphy watches – devices that measure patterns of activity and rest over multiple days. Researchers obtained three nights’ worth of data at the one- and six-month marks while parents kept sleep diaries, recording their children’s sleep and wake episodes.
Scientists measured infant height and weight and determined their body mass index, classifying infants as overweight if they fell into or above the 95th percentile on the World Health Organization’s growth charts.
Notably, researchers found that just one extra hour of sleep was associated with a 26% decrease in overweight risk. Additionally, infants that woke up less during the night faced a lower risk of excess weight gain. Scientists speculate that having more sleep promotes routine feeding practices and self-regulation, factors that mitigate overeating.
Investigators noted an underrepresentation of African-American individuals and lower-income families in their dataset. Additionally, confounding variables, such as breastfeeding duration, could have impacted infant growth. In the future, the researchers aim to extend this study to evaluate how sleep patterns impact growth within the first two years of life and identify key factors that mediate the correlation between sleep and weight gain. They also aim to evaluate interventions for promoting healthy sleep habits.
“This study underscores the importance of healthy sleep at all ages,” said Dr Redline. “Parents should consult their pediatricians on the best practices to promote healthy sleep, like keeping consistent sleep schedules, providing a dark and quiet space for sleeping, and avoiding having bottles in bed.”
Giving children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) regular doses of the hormone oxytocin does not appear to overcome deficits in social functioning, according to a study funded by the National Institutes of Health.
The findings contradict earlier reports that indicated oxytocin, a hormone associated with empathy and social bonding, could alleviate the difficulties in social functioning characteristic of ASD.
The study, believed to be the largest of its kind to date, appears in the New England Journal of Medicine, and was conducted by Linmarie Sikich, MD, of Duke University, and colleagues.
ASD is a complex neurological and developmental disorder that begins early in life and affects how a person interacts with others, communicates and learns. Many individuals with ASD have been prescribed oxytocin by their physicians. Several small studies have tested the potential of oxytocin to improve social functioning in ASD but have produced inconsistent results.
For the current study, oxytocin was administered by nasal spray every day for 24 weeks to children with ASD who are minimally or fluently verbal. Participants ranged from 3 to 17 years old. Of those completing the study, 139 received oxytocin and 138 received a placebo. During the study, participants’ caregivers rated them on a questionnaire measuring irritability, social withdrawal and other behaviors associated with ASD. When the participants completed the trial, the differences between the two groups’ initial score and last score did not differ significantly. The researchers concluded that the 24-week course of oxytocin did not improve social interaction or other measures of social function related to ASD.
Renowned American gymnast Simone Biles has a combined total of more than 30 Olympic and world championship medals, not to mention several world records. But there’s more to her than that, she said during a plenary session at the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) virtual meeting.
“I’m a person at the end of the day and people respect that and understand that,” she said, noting that the positive support she received during the Japan summer games when she cited mental health concerns, and withdrew from several events, “made me feel whole as a person and an athlete.”
In her AAP keynote talk with AAP president Lee Savio Beers, MD, 24 year-old Biles explained that “Growing up, we’re told ‘Push through, Push through,’ but I knew at that point [during the 2020 Tokyo games, held in 2021], I really couldn’t…my safety and my health were on the line.”
She also acknowledged that “I honestly expected a lot more backlash than what I got [for withdrawing]. What I got was an overwhelming outpouring of support and love and understanding. That’s something I never expected…so that was quite a twist for me.”
Injury, overtraining, and pressure in competitive athletes can take a toll on athletes’ mental health, research has shown. Biles is among a number of high-profile athletes who have been outspoken about supporting the mental health of athletes. She has adopted a platform “to help advocate for mental health and support initiatives that provide education and assistance for children and young adults associated with adoption and foster care,” according to AAP News. Biles and her siblings were in and out of foster care before being adopted by their grandparents.
Biles also talked about Larry Nassar, DO, the former team doctor of the US women’s national gymnastics team who was jailed for sexual abuse and child pornography, and tampering with evidence.
In testimony before Congress in September, Biles said, “I blame Larry Nassar, and I also blame an entire system that enabled and perpetrated his abuse.” The gymnast singled out the FBI which she said “turned a blind eye” as Nassar molested young female patients, according to the Washington Post.
Biles offered this advice on how paediatricians can help abuse cases: “If you see something, speak up no matter what the consequences are because not only could you be helping that individual, but you could be helping multiple individuals too.”
Biles hopes more youth athletic programs will educate young children on spotting and reporting abuses. “From a very young age, a lot of us are thrown into these sports and we don’t know what’s right or wrong, unless somebody sits down and tells us, or we have adults looking after us, so I think handbooks can be a really good thing.”
Biles told the AAP audience that, before she became a gymnast, she wanted to be a paediatric nurse like her mother. “After making five World and two Olympic teams, the nursing career didn’t work out for me,” she said, “but…I’ve always wanted to help kids and I love kids…and I come from a family of [nurses].”
