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Raise a Smarter Child by Kindergarten
The Better Brain Book
Dr. Perlmutter’s bestsellingRaise a Smarter Child by Kindergarten is now available worldwide. Latest release is the Chinese version:
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From The Associated Press
Children suffered higher rates of fever-related convulsions when they got a Merck & Co. combination vaccine instead of two separate shots, according to a new study presented Wednesday.
The results prompted a federal advisory panel on vaccines to water down their preference for the combo vaccine ProQuad, which protects against measles, mumps and rubella as well as chickenpox.
In the study of children ages 12 months through 23 months, the rate of seizures was twice as high in toddlers who got ProQuad, compared with those who got one shot for chickenpox and one for the three other diseases.
The risk translates to about one extra case of convulsion for every 2,000 doses of ProQuad given said Dr. Nicola Klein, who lead the federally funded study. She presented the data at a meeting of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.
The study focused on children who develop fevers and then go into convulsions
an occurrence that frightens parents but usually has no lingering consequences. There were no deaths in the new study.
ProQuad was licensed in 2005. It’s been in extremely short supply since last year, when Merck suspended production because of manufacturing problems. The company expects to resume ProQuad production next year.
The panel had previously taken a position that they preferred doctors give children as few needlesticks as possible, and that ProQuad is preferable to giving separate shots.
It voted Wednesday to amend that, to say they’re no longer voicing a preference for ProQuad over the separate shots.
“Safety, shortages, delivery issues
lots of reasons not to state such a strong preference,” said member panel Patsy Stinchfield, an infectious disease expert at Children’s Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota.
Merck officials said their own research, though preliminary, also showed a doubling of the risk in children within five to 12 days of vaccination. However, the occurrence was low
about 5 cases in 10,000, Merck officials said.
They said there was five times more chickenpox antigen, the key ingredient, in the ProQuad shot than in the stand-alone chickenpox shot. But they said it’s not clear that would explain the difference in seizure rates.
For some reason, the difference disappears when comparing rates for 30 days, Merck officials added.
Klein’s research checked seizure rates only at seven to 10 days after vaccination, and looked at about 43,000 kids who got ProQuad and 315,000 who got the two other shots together. It found fever-related seizures occurred at a rate of 9 per 10,000 children vaccinated with ProQuad, compared with 4 per 10,000 for those who got separate shots.
Klein is co-director of Kaiser Permanente Vaccine Study Center in Oakland, Calif., one of seven sites in the study. Her work was funded by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
ProQuad costs $124 per dose, about the same as the two other shots combined.
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The Renegade Neurologist recently ate dinner at the Cheesecake Factory. After dinner we were tempted by the amazing low carb cheesecake having only 6 grams of carbohydrate! Surely this wouldn’t break anyones diet, or would it ?
Further investigation reveals that while there are only 6 “net” carbs per slice, there are an incredible 57 grams of fat with 29 grams of saturated fat and an amazing 610 calories for just one slice of this stealthy diet-buster.
Click here to learn more:CalorieKing - Calorie Counter - Calories in The Cheesecake Factory, Cheesecakes: 6 Carb (Net Carbs) Original
Caveat emptor
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Most Patients Satisfied With Treatment
From WebMD
A relatively new treatment for uterine fibroids is a reasonable alternative to hysterectomy for women who want to avoid surgery, new research shows.
Outcomes among patients who had the treatment, known as uterine artery embolization (UAE) or uterine fibroid embolization (UFE), were compared to those of hysterectomy patients in the trial from the Netherlands.
Both groups reported significantly improved health-related quality of life two years after treatment, but nearly one out of four women initially treated with UAE ended up having hysterectomies because of treatment failure.
“For those women seeking absolute certainty of being asymptomatic after treatment, I would recommend a hysterectomy,” study researcher Jim A. Reekers, MD, PhD, says in a news release. “But for women who wish to retain their uterus and who desire a fast recovery, I would definitely recommend UAE.”
Fibroid Treatment Options
As many as one in four women have symptoms from uterine fibroids, which are benign tumors of the uterus.
Symptoms of uterine fibroids can include heavy, painful menstrual bleeding, pelvic pain or pressure, and frequent urination.
According to the National Women’s Health Information Center, uterine fibroids are the reason for about one-third of the 600,000 hysterectomies performed in the U.S. each year.
Introduced just over a decade ago, uterine artery embolization is a minimally invasive catheterization treatment designed to choke off uterine fibroids.
A small tube is inserted into a leg artery and guided into the blood vessels feeding the uterus. Tiny particles are then strategically injected to block the blood supply that feeds the fibroids.
In most cases, the fibroid tissue shrinks or dies, leading to relief of symptoms. Recovery time after UAE is typically around a week, compared to six weeks with hysterectomy.
This is also far shorter than recovery times for another surgical fibroid treatment known as myomectomy, in which the fibroids are removed but not the uterus.
The EMMY Findings
Reekers and colleagues report two-year follow-up from their Embolization versus Hysterectomy (EMMY) trial in the March issue of the journal Radiology.
The study included 177 women with uterine fibroids and heavy menstrual bleeding, half of whom were initially randomly assignedto treatment with UAE and the other half to hysterectomy.
During two years of follow-up, no significant differences in health-related quality of life were reported among the two treatment groups. Nine out of 10 patients in both groups reported being at least moderately satisfied with the treatment they received.
A total of 20% of women who had undergone embolization did end up having hysterectomies, however.
Georgetown University interventional radiologist James B. Spies, MD, tells WebMD that the UAE failure rate was higher in the EMMY study than in many others.
In Spies’ own UAE study involving 200 patients, the symptom-recurrence rate was still 20% with the nonsurgical treatment five years after treatment.
Spies says UAE has proven to be as effective as any uterus-sparing treatment, including myomectomy, for the long-term relief of symptoms related to fibroids.
“Women now have a choice, and they can weigh the factors that are most important to them before making a decision about treatment,” he says.
Another UAE researcher tells WebMD that myomectomy offers the best chance of preserving fertility, while hysterectomy is the best choice for patients who aren’t concerned about fertility, recovery time, or surgical complications and want to make sure their fibroids don’t come back.
“Obviously, there is no re-treatment after hysterectomy because once the uterus is gone, it’s gone,” Scott C. Goodwin, MD, of the University of California, Irvine, tells WebMD. “But UAE has been proven very effective for women who want a shorter recovery time with fewer treatment-related complications.”
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No reason to give them to kids to try to prevent fluid buildup, analysis shows
From HealthDay
Antibiotics don’t significantly reduce fluid buildup in young children with inner ear infections, a new analysis shows.
Whether such drugs work in this regard has been a matter of conjecture, with one recent study suggesting a benefit in children aged 2 and under. So, Dutch researchers did a meta-analysis of several previously published studies and found the results don’t support the use of antibiotics for the fluid buildup that can accompany inner ear infections.
“Due to the marginal effect and the known negative effects of prescribing antibiotics, such as the development of antibiotic resistance and side effects, we do not recommend prescribing antibiotics to prevent middle ear effusion,” said lead researcher Maroeska M. Rovers, from the Julius Center for Health Sciences and Primary Care at the University Medical Center Utrecht in The Netherlands.
Ear infections are very common among infants and children. They can lead to fluid buildup in the ear, which is known as otitis media with effusion. This buildup can result in hearing loss, which can affect language development, cognitive development, behavior and quality of life, according to the researchers.
The report was published in the February issue of the Archives of Otolaryngology-Head & Neck Surgery.
In the study, Rovers’ team collected data on 1,328 children aged 6 months to 12 years with acute middle ear infection. These children had participated in five studies that compared treating ear infections with antibiotics to a placebo or no treatment at all.
Among the children in the studies, 44 percent were younger than 2. Of these children, 51.8 percent had recurrent ear infections. It was in this group of children that the risk of fluid buildup was the greatest.
Rovers’ group found that the children taking antibiotics were 90 percent as likely to develop fluid buildup as children who weren’t taking the medications. However, this difference was not statistically significant. “No difference in the development of effusion could be detected between the placebo and the antibiotics group,” Rovers said.
“More research is, however, needed to identify relevant subgroups of children that have middle ear effusion that might benefit from other treatments,” Rovers added.
One expert noted that doctors do not routinely prescribe antibiotics to prevent fluid buildup in ear infections.
“To the best of my knowledge, physicians generally don’t prescribe antibiotics for acute otitis media in order to prevent middle-ear effusion; they prescribe them to bring about more prompt resolution of the infection and of its symptoms, especially pain,” said Dr. Jack Paradise, a professor of pediatrics and otolaryngology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh.
The question of prescribing to prevent middle-ear effusion has become a non-issue over the past decade, Paradise said. “Asymptomatic middle-ear effusion is extraordinarily common and has been shown to be essentially harmless under ordinary circumstances,” he said.
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