Health News

Certain Vaccines May Help Guard Against Childhood Cancer
Children vaccinated against hepatitis B might be at a lower risk of developing leukemia, according to a new study.
Love Your Baby's Brain
Two new studies reveal how a mother's love is good for her baby's developing brain.
Birth Defects: Get In the Know
January is National Birth Defects Prevention Month. In order to increase awareness, the CDC has released a report that highlights statistics and information on birth defects, the leading cause of infant mortality.
Schooled on Local Food Benefits
With schools serving breakfast, lunch and sometimes snacks to students, the opportunities to benefit students and local farmers with local-food programs are bountiful.
Saving All the "Bubble Boys"
Researchers have found that screening newborns for severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID) substantially improves their survival.
Kids Need Z's
Insufficient and disorganized sleep puts kids at higher risk of developing obesity and other health conditions, which may be able to be mitigated by "catch up" sleep on weekends and holidays.
Lupus Loophole Turns Out to be Dead-End
Even though pediatric lupus patients are at increased risk of developing heart disease as adults, statin drugs, which lower cholesterol, do not provide enough benefit to warrant use in these patients. Children with lupus, an autoimmune disease that causes widespread inflammation and organ damage, often exhibit early signs of atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries) putting them at risk of heart attack and stroke. Researchers at Duke University Medical Center wanted to find a way to lower this risk and turned to statin drugs for the study. The randomized trial included 221 partici...
Tubby Toddlers and Portly Preschoolers
Two recent studies point toward causes for the expanding rates of obesity -- and related health problems such as type 2 diabetes and hypertension -- among children. Problems start earlier than you think.
Poverty Affects Genetic Potential
According to researchers at the University of Texas at Austin, poverty may hold back children's genetic potentials as early as age two.
Heavyweight First Nation Babies
In a recent study, Canadian researchers sought to determine if the prevalence of high birth weights in First Nation babies poses a risk for perinatal and postneonatal death.