For how we live.
A child with a suspected concussion should be removed from play and not return the same day. But prolonged strict rest is no longer advised, and light activity within days can speed recovery.
Guidelines now ask for an objective test before an asthma label is fixed to a child, and inhaled steroids remain the mainstay of control. Their benefit is real; so is a small, mostly temporary effect on growth.
The main randomised trial found babies who fed themselves were no slimmer, no more iron-deficient and no more likely to choke than spoon-fed babies — provided parents were coached to offer safe, iron-rich foods.
Paediatric bodies advise formal autism screening at 18 and 24 months; a US task force found the evidence for universal screening merely insufficient, not against it. Large studies find no link to vaccines.
Enuresis alarms have the best evidence for a lasting cure, working in about two-thirds of children who use them. Desmopressin acts faster but the wetting tends to return when it stops.
Most acute ear infections settle on their own, and antibiotics barely change symptoms in the first day. Their benefit is real but modest, which is why guidelines allow a short period of watchful waiting.
Intensive family-based behavioural programmes produce small, real cuts in children's BMI; the newer weight-loss drugs produce much larger ones, but the weight returns when they stop.
A 740,744-child natural experiment tested a decade-old hypothesis that rotavirus vaccine might prevent type 1 diabetes. It found no protective effect — and no evidence of harm either.
Its guideline says antipyretics should be considered when a feverish child appears distressed, not to lower a temperature. In critically ill adults, paracetamol for fever changed nothing.
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.
Most childhood lead exposure traces to deteriorating paint in pre-1978 housing and the dust it sheds. The damage to a child's developing brain is steepest at the lowest measured levels.