For how we live.
In 415,000 New Jersey births, infants of mothers who screened positive for depression died before age one at more than three times the rate, an association steady across race, income and preterm birth.
In 2.5 million Swedish births followed to adulthood, mothers' early-pregnancy obesity was linked to a stepwise rise in offspring cardiovascular disease, though sibling analyses temper the size.
In nearly 12,000 US children, tree and park cover was linked to sharper directed attention and higher crystallized intelligence — and cleaner air seemed to explain part of it.
A cohort of 4,018 children found nearly half were picky at some point, but two-thirds remitted within three years and prevalence fell to 13.2% by age 6. About 4% stayed persistently picky.
Dust sampled inside 38 schools in Calama carried copper, arsenic, lead and molybdenum at levels that tracked the outdoor air — with almost no attenuation for arsenic and lead.
A prospective study found that beginning intensive training before 27 months did not bring completion any sooner — and lengthened the process. Normal completion ages span well over a year.
Two papers landed the same day. An attribution analysis puts children aged 0–9 at roughly three times the added humid-heat exposure of people in their sixties; a German cohort counts the emergency visits.
The MTA trial randomised 579 children and found medication management clearly superior short-term. Its own long-term follow-up found the treatment groups no longer differed by 6 to 8 years.
Twenty-three studies, mostly from the US and China, found mental health risk rising with temperature. Nowhere in the Pacific or Africa was represented.
WHO data put the normal window for walking alone at 8.2 to 17.6 months. The 2022 CDC checklists moved to the age by which 75% of children reach a milestone — to flag real delay, not redefine normal.
Eight primary schools in Porto and 40 homes in the Faroe Islands were sampled by different teams asking the same question: how much of a person's PFAS exposure never touches food or water.
Chronic granulomatous disease is usually X-linked in Western cohorts. A multicentre Middle East and North Africa registry found the opposite pattern, alongside late diagnosis and a median survival of 8.5 years.
A randomised trial tracked infants' cortisol and attachment; a five-year follow-up tracked mental health. Graduated extinction improved sleep with no sign of long-term damage — or lasting benefit.
The AAP advises room-sharing without bed-sharing. Pooled case-control data show bed-sharing raises SIDS risk — sharply when parents smoke or drink, and more modestly even when they do not.
A meta-analysis of 23 blinded studies found no effect on any of 14 behavioural and cognitive measures. A separate trial fed children extreme doses and found nothing. The belief survives anyway.
Cochrane reviews find honey modestly eases a child's cough and does about as well as dextromethorphan, while OTC cough medicines have not beaten placebo in children. The honey trials excluded infants under one.
US and UK guidelines converge: a brief seizure during a fever in a young child rarely needs scans or blood tests, and paracetamol and ibuprofen do not stop them recurring.
A meta-analysis of 16 studies and a daily-temperature cohort agree: tooth eruption brings gum irritation, drooling and fussiness, and at most a slight temperature rise — not a true fever.
A large randomised promotion trial and sibling studies find some real benefits in infancy — fewer gut infections, less eczema — but the sweeping long-term advantages shrink once confounding is accounted for.
Cochrane's living review of 104 trials rates high-dose atropine and orthokeratology moderate certainty. The low-dose atropine most widely used sits at very low certainty, and two Western trials disagree.
A global modelling study puts four million new paediatric asthma cases a year on ambient nitrogen dioxide — and finds that 92% of them occur below the WHO guideline concentration.
The LEAP trial cut peanut allergy in high-risk infants from 13.7% to 1.9%. A second trial found the benefit real but harder to achieve — and only in children who actually ate the food.
Longitudinal data and a meta-analysis of 159,425 children find consistent associations between screen time and development — but the effects are small, observational, and thinner than the guidelines imply.
A cluster-randomised trial in Guangzhou cut three-year myopia incidence by 9.1 percentage points with 40 extra minutes outdoors a day. The eye's underlying growth barely changed.
A November systematic review screened 120 publications and found five eligible papers, all from the US and Canada. All pointed the same way; none could be pooled with the others.
Thirty-seven had the necrotising form, of whom 41% died. Just 16% of vaccine-eligible children with encephalopathy had received that season's flu vaccine. There is no national surveillance for the condition.