I’ve always thought that the only places pediatrics and celebrity gossip intersect are here at “Needles” and in the office of Dr. Harvey Karp. A new cause célèbre, however, may resonate with pediatricians, even if it doesn’t get us any autographs. Halle Berry and Jennifer Garner continue their campaign to strengthen California’s laws against harassing children based on their parents’ professions.
iStockphoto
You know it's bad when the first words out of a celebrity baby's mouth are "No photos!"
These laws originated to protect abortion providers’ kids from being followed and threatened, but it turns out they work pretty well on paparazzi, too. Apparently young, green ambush photographers are assigned to stalk famous people’s children until they get brave enough to take on Kanye West. Personally, I wouldn’t mind having my five kids photographed everywhere they go in public. At some point, perhaps someone would get a shot where not one of the them is picking their nose.
Yo Baby
Don’t you hate it when you get all excited about something, and then on further inspection, it’s just hype, kind of like World War Z? That’s how I felt when I read that allergists had collected evidence that giving babies probiotics prenatally might reduce their risk of allergic disease. All I could think was, “How in the heck did they get fetuses to eat yogurt?”
Sadly, they didn’t. It turns out that the moms ate the yogurt, or, more accurately, various refined probiotics such as Lactobacillus acidophilus and Bifidobacterium lactis, which don’t sound nearly as tasty as Yoplait. And here is where I get confused. I see how exposing newborns and babies to friendly gut bacteria might drive the ratio of type 1 and type 2 of T-helper cells toward a less-allergenic profile (okay, I don’t really, but it sounds cool). I need an immunologist, however, to explain why feeding these bacteria to the mother should have an effect on the infant (start right after the part where some maternal antibodies cross the placenta).
Further disappointment awaits in this meta-analysis of 25 studies. While supplementation seemed to lower kids’ IgE levels, theoretically making them less prone to allergic disease, it failed to protect subjects against asthma, the only clinically relevant endpoint tested. And L. acidophilus seemed to make things worse, not better, despite being really tasty in yogurt. Finally...wait for it...the authors suggest more research is needed. Fetuses and their mothers hope that new investigations will focus on chocolate.
Ban du soleil
Public health officials must sometimes feel like they’re talking to a wall. When it comes to messaging about tanning beds and melanoma, it’s like, “Blah, blah, blah, I can’t hear you! I’m wearing tiny sunglasses!” A discouraging new analysis of data from the 2011 Youth Risk Behavior Survey found that nearly 30% of non-Hispanic white female high school students reported artificial tanning in the past year, with 16.7% being serial offenders (10 or more instances). Death from skin cancer? Schmeath from schmin schmancer! (Even Yiddish scholars have a hard time with that one.)
Of course, we all know that tanning at a young age raises the risk of melanoma by 59%-75% or, put another way, by 1.8% for every single tanning session. We also know that one place kids won’t hear those data are from employees of tanning salons. Here in North Carolina, our legislature offered a bill to ban minors from using tanning beds, and the industry sent a lobbyist to suggest that maybe all those skin cancer deaths were just a coincidence, easily offset by the benefits of all that rejuvenating vitamin D (the bill did not pass).
Adolescents, in the meantime, are apt to adopt the time-honored teen-think trope, “Ya gotta die of something, so you may as well go with toasty brown skin.” But before dermatologists get so disheartened they drink sunscreen, we also have some information on how to get through to these teens. Those who are reminded that tanning will make them into wrinkly middle-age people covered in liver spots are less likely to bake themselves. I think that, rather than legislating against tanning beds for teens, we should simply insist that before they tan, they tour a retirement community for nudists.
Perfect harmony
Some readers (ahem) might be old enough to remember a famous soft drink commercial from 1971 that channeled the hippie spirit of the era by featuring a multiethnic commune of singers holding soda bottles and crooning about achieving world peace by sharing carbonated corn syrup. Now, however, it appears that soda consumption actually promotes interpersonal aggression and violence, at least among children. Can’t we just buy they world a reliable source of clean water?
Researchers publishing in the Journal of Pediatrics strengthened the association between excess soda consumption and aggression, withdrawal, and attention problems among at-risk children. Kids who drank four or more soft drinks a day were more likely to destroy others’ belongings, get into fights, and attack people, even after researchers adjusted for maternal depression, intimate partner violence, and paternal incarceration. The effect didn’t quite reach statistical significance, but I’d venture a guess that consuming 1.4 liters of soda a day is a decent proxy for all sorts of family dysfunction, so whether it’s the caffeine, the fructose, or the simple fact that there’s no regression analysis that perfectly captures parental neglect, I’d buy the results, if not the soda. In the meantime, if you’re a paparazzo and you see some celebrity’s kid holding a 2-liter soda bottle, back away slowly and go look for Kanye West.