Health

A new study purports that the parents of children with autism are twice as likely to have been hospitalized for a mental disorder. Is this getting scientists closer to proving some sort of genetic link?

The study looked at 1,237 children born between 1977 and 2003 who were diagnosed with autism before age 10. To be deemed autistic, the children all had to have received a diagnosis of autism disorder, Asperger Syndrome or pervasive developmental disorder.

Seventy-seven per cent of the children involved in the study were boys.

“These results support those of smaller studies that indicated an increase in psychiatric conditions among parents of children with autism, specifically schizophrenia, neurotic disorders and depression,” write the authors. “Identifying families with a propensity for rare psychiatric conditions may help uncover rare genes that contribute to the susceptibility of both disorders.”

Alice Tyson, a 3-year-old in the U.K., has a rare condition that only affects one in a million people. It’s called Xeroderma Pigmentosum, which causes her skin to be permanently damaged and increases her risk of skin cancer if she is exposed to sunlight.

The little girl spends much of her time confined to the darkness of the family sitting room.

So dermatology nurse at the Cumberland Infirmary, Julie Bowman, decided the youngster more than deserved a grand day out.

She hit the phonebook and got in touch with businesses all over the city calling on them to pledge a treat for Alice.

She said: “A lot of local people have been so interested in Alice and I thought the family deserved something nice.

So the question, as the article states, is “does it mean U.S. kids are being over-treated? Or that U.K. children are being under-treated”?

Experts say that’s almost beside the point, because use is rising on both sides of the Atlantic. And with scant long-term safety data, it’s likely the drugs are being over-prescribed for both U.S. and U.K. children, research suggests.

Among the most commonly used drugs were those to treat autism and hyperactivity.

In the U.K. study, anti-psychotics were prescribed for 595 children at a rate of less than four per 10,000 children in 1992. By 2005, 2,917 children were prescribed the drugs at a rate of seven per 10,000 — a near-doubling, said lead author Fariz Rani, a researcher at the University of London’s pharmacy school.

A 15-year-old girl from the Philippines is undergoing surgery to fix her feet that are so clubbed they twist upside down and backwards. Doctors at the Montefiore Medical Center in New York are performing the surgery free of charge. How cool is that? And hot on the heels of the story we highlighted last week about a pro bono surgery to remove a large tumor from a Vietnamese girl’s face. Rock on, medical community!

[Jingle Luis] and her mother have journeyed from the Philippines to Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx for surgery Thursday and follow-up treatment that will consist of slowly rotating her feet until she can walk normally.

Her case is more severe than those usually seen by doctors in industrialized countries.

“Generally speaking, with modern technology, it doesn’t get to this point,” said Dr. Terry Amaral, a pediatric orthopedic surgeon who will perform the surgery at Children’s Hospital at Montefiore.

What an incredibly odd correlation. Apparently if your child attends daycare when they are very young, it can reduce their risk of developing leukemia by 30%. Make sure to whip out that statistic next time someone looks down at you for being a working mom.

The new research, to be presented April 29 at the 2nd Children with Leukaemia Causes and Prevention of Childhood Leukaemia Conference in London, is the first comprehensive analysis of studies investigating the association between social contact and childhood leukaemia.

“Combining the results from these studies together provided us with more confidence that the protective effect is real. Analysing the evidence in this way gives a more reliable answer to the question and a more precise estimate of the magnitude of the effect,” said the study’s leader, Dr. Patricia Buffler, professor of epidemiology at the School of Public Health of the University of California, Berkeley.

A 7-year-old Saudi Arabian boy had his arms severed in a farming accident, and unfortunately they could not be saved. The reason is that medical care where he lives is woefully inadequate.

Al-Ashdaf Muhammad Al-Sharari’s arms were severed by the irrigation machine at a farm in Al-Jouf three weeks ago. The two hospitals he stayed at near his home lacked proper facilities and specialists to treat Al-Ashdaf’s condition.

He was recently transferred to King Faisal Specialist Hospital in Riyadh where he is in stable condition.

However, surgeons at King Faisal said the inadequate medical treatment that Al-Ashdaf received right after the hospital has made it impossible for the boy to have his arms reattached because another infection would likely develop.

A 5-year-old girl has a disease that is so rare, only 200 people in the world have been diagnosed with it. It’s called Leukodystrophy, a “congenital hypomyelination”, and it’s a neurological disease that actually attacks the white matter in the brain.

This makes it difficult for Lexi [Drumm]’s brain to communicate with other parts of her body, Drumm told the newspaper.

Lexi was born healthy and could even walk and talk up until she was 14-months-old. That’s when she had a seizure and “everything deteriorated from then on,” Drumm said.

Now the disease has started attacking white matter on Lexi’s brain stem and she is unable to move her head and eyes. She can still control her smile.

“I could be in the worst mood possible, and that little smile can still perk me up,” Drumm said.

An alarming new study shows that the number of pregnant women with pre-existing diabetes has increased more than 100% in the last 7 years. The condition causes a risk to both the mother and baby:

Expectant mothers who don’t control their diabetes face an increased risk of miscarriage and stillbirth. Their babies have a higher chance of being born with birth defects.

“These are high-risk pregnancies,” said Dr. Florence Brown, an expert on pregnancy and diabetes. “All women with pre-existing diabetes need to plan their pregnancies.”

Brown is co-director of the Joslin-Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center diabetes and pregnancy program in Boston. She had no role in the study, which was done by researchers at Kaiser Permanente, a California-based health care provider.

Hopefully they can help this girl out. What started as a tiny cyst on Lai Thi Dao’s tongue, and because her family did not have access to medical treatment, it has grown into a massive facial tumor that is estimated to weigh over 10 pounds. Fortunately, it looks like doctors are finally going to be able to get rid of it:

Now, a team of surgeons at the University of Miami is preparing for a marathon 10-hour procedure next Tuesday intended to cut away the growth, which now weighs an estimated 10 pounds and could be the largest recorded tumor of its kind reported in the medical literature.

The good news: the surgeons believe that once the tumor is successfully removed, it will not likely return. And they say they are hopeful that the operation will give Lai a chance at a more normal life.

Warning: do not click through to the full story if you have a weak stomach.

Man, this kid can’t catch a break. We wish her the best, and a speedy recovery.

Emily Miller was diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia in 2002, overcame it in 2005 and was in remission until April of last year when she was diagnosed with T-cell lymphoma.

She was excited to finish chemotherapy this August.

But after recent routine labs, doctors told the family that Emily has acute myeloid leukemia. It’s a cancer that starts inside bone marrow and develops quickly.

Her father Cory Miller says Emily told him she didn’t want to die. She says she has about 10 fights left in her.

Brianna Jeffries, a 4-year-old with a “rare cancerlike condition”, is amongst the thousands of people in Illinois alone that is waiting for an organ transplant. She’s been hoping to receive a liver transplant for 6 months now, and without one her health is likely to continue to deteriorate. That’s why we here at MT urge people and their families to become organ donors — someday you might be able to save a life like Brianna’s, and provide a “miracle”.

Brianna has a rare cancerlike condition that ultimately destroyed the bile ducts in her liver. Without them, Brianna’s liver can’t absorb fat from the food she eats, leaving her chronically malnourished.

A liver transplant would allow her to grow to a normal height and weight. But Brianna can’t get one until complications from her illness — Langerhans cell histiocytosis — can be brought under control.

As sick as she is, it’s hard to see Brianna as anything other than a lively preschooler who likes “Dora the Explorer,” drawing pictures and singing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” to all who will listen.

“She’s definitely the life of the floor,” Brianna’s mom, Veronica Jeffries, said while watching her daughter chat with nurses at the University of Chicago’s Comer Children’s Hospital.

Chalk this up as another reason to bank cord blood. A couple in British Columbia are trying to have a baby for pretty much only one reason — to collect the stem cells from the infant’s umbilical cord blood to help their 8-year-old son battle leukemia. We get it — we’re certainly not going to pretend that we know the lengths we would go through to save our child. But you have to admit it’s an odd way to begin a parent/child bond.

A Port Coquitlam, B.C., couple is hoping to battle their eight-year-old son’s leukemia by having a so-called saviour baby, even though they admit their chances of success are slim.

“There are such things as miracles, so we are going to hope for that,” Pam Obadia told CBC Monday morning.

Pam and her husband Michael Obadia, both 47, are trying to have another child so they can use stem cells from the umbilical cord blood to help their son Ben beat leukemia.

The process is called pre-implantation genetic diagnosis and involves pre-screening embryos before the in vitro fertilization procedure to find one that matches their son’s tissue type.

This heartbreaking story is one more reason to make sure you officially become an organ donor before it’s too late.

With her mother desperately in need of a transplant, Laura Ashworth told family and friends she wanted to donate one of her kidneys.

So when the 21-year-old died after an asthma attack, it seemed that the tragedy would at least give Rachel Leake a chance of a healthy new life.

But because Laura had not begun the formal process of becoming a “living donor,” the authorities refused to let her mother receive her organs. Instead they went to strangers at the top of the waiting list.

Finn McConnell, a 15-month-old baby in Puyallup, Washington, has a very rare form of cancer, Opsoclonus Myoclonus Syndrome, which causes antibodies to mistake the brain for a cancerous tumor creating a situation where one’s “own body [attacks the] brain.”

Last December, Finn’s mother took him to the hospital after he began to act funny.

“We had noticed that he had stopped talking. He was having more difficulty crawling. His balance was off and he would wake up absolutely just screaming, probably five to six times a night,” said mother Theresa McConnell.

She thought he had an ear infection. But the doctor’s diagnosis was much more grim than she ever imagined.

“He says ‘I think he has a tumor in the brain,’” she said. “Of course our hearts just drop. You don’t want to get that kind of news.”

Finn was admitted to the hospital for a series of tests.

An MRI revealed that Finn’s tumor was not in his brain, but in his chest.

A new government report says that one in 50 children are abused in the first year of their life. Of course we know the psychological damage child abuse can cause, but the report also states that it can affect children physically all the way into adulthood:

“Kids unfortunately who are being maltreated show problems in brain development,” said Ileana Arias, director of the CDC National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, who, along with the Administration for Children and Families, created the report. Maltreatment can begin “a trajectory of a number of negative outcomes, including health outcomes,” according to Arias.

Now, the mechanism behind those problems may have been pinned down.

A recent study revealed a physiological connection between child abuse and feelings of intense pain. Researchers at UCLA and the University of North Carolina compared pain responses in a group of women with and without irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), with surprising results.