Lead paint poisoning isn’t only a danger to inner city kids in rundown tenements. It can also strike suburban children in million-dollar homes. This dangerous—or even deadly—health hazard is the #1 environmental threat to kids. More than one million American children are affected, putting them at risk for learning disabilities, hyperactivity, aggressive behavior, hearing loss, brain damage or even death. The EPA, HUD, and the Coalition to End Childhood Lead Poisoning (CECLP) teamed up with the Ad Council to launch a public service campaign aimed at ending lead paint poisoning, which is preventable with the right precautions:

*Rate your kids’ risk: If your home was built before 1978, there’s a high likelihood that it contains lead paint which can be hazardous even if it’s under layers of lead-free paint, says Wanda Parks, a family advocate associate at CECLP in Baltimore, MD. “If there’s chipped or peeling paint, or painted doors or windows that are hard to open, kids can be exposed to lead dust, particularly babies who are crawling or put toys in their mouths.” Kids under age 6 are at higher risk for lead poisoning.

*Make repairs safely: Four of Parks’ six kids developed lead paint poisoning after she and her husband renovated their home 1982. “We didn’t know that our home had lead paint, so we were replacing windows and dry sanding to remove flaking paint,” she says. “Our one-year-old son, Gregory, was at the age when he put everything in his mouth. It was scary to find out that he had a high level of lead and three of the other kids were affected to varying degrees.”

*Get your kids tested: The CDC recommends that states test kids for lead poisoning at ages 1 and 2, while the Coalition to End Childhood Lead Poisoning advises annual blood tests from ages 1 to 6. Early detection and treatment may reduce or prevent serious side effects of lead poisoning, adds Parks, who moved to lead-free housing after her kids were diagnosed. Although her son Gregory struggled with learning issues, he’s now healthy and headed to college, reports the mom, who now works to educate others about how to protect their families.

*Practice prevention: “Simple steps like washing kids’ hands and toys frequently can help,” advises Parks. Aim to practice the right cleaning techniques, including removing paint chips immediately, wiping down surfaces like windowsills, and cleaning floors with a damp mop or vacuum with a HEPA filter. “And if an older home needs renovating, hire a professional,” she cautions. “Doing it yourself can be dangerous.”

CONNECT THE DOTS

For more information, visit the Coalition to End Childhood Lead Poisoning and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A study in Oregon found that home renovations or painting are the culprits for 50 percent of childhood lead poisonings. In April, the EPA’s new regulations took effect, requiring contractors working in homes, schools or childcare facilities built before 1978 to be certified and follow specific practices to prevent lead contamination.

The boy’s blunt reaction is not uncommon, says Dr. Ennis-Cole, whose research focuses on helping autistic children. While such children struggle to understand other people, learn social skills, and sometimes even speak, they often excel at—and enjoy—technology. Now she and other researchers are leveraging that love of technology to give autistic children a leg up in the world.

Many children on the autism spectrum face problems that typical children do not, Dr. Ennis-Cole says. They’re oversensitive to visual stimulation, and therefore often turn their head away to avoid eye contact, watching people out of the corner of their eye. They miss, or misread, social cues. They have problems with language, and fail to accurately recognize emotions in themselves or others, which makes it difficult to get what they need or want, leading to intense frustration, tantrums, and self-destructive behavior. Autistic kids “need the opportunity to control their environment. They need to have choices. Technology gives them those choices,” Dr. Ennis-Cole says.

In Dr. Ennis-Cole’s year-old Technology and Applied Research in Autism Laboratory at the University of North Texas, an autistic child can watch videos that show him how to interact with other children, how to start a conversation, how to be part of a team. He (80 percent of autistic children are boys, so the child is usually a “he”) can glide special pens that recognize text and speak it, teaching the child how to pronounce words. He can use a system called Go Talk that recognizes a picture and tells him the word for it. Autistic children, who are often bright, seem to love all of these technologies. “If they’re engaged and active in learning, and they feel safe, then they’re likely to learn a whole lot more,” Dr. Ennis-Cole says.

Other technologies are helping young autistic children learn the language of human emotion. Unlike a typical child, who recognizes intuitively that a smile means that someone is happy and a furrowed brow means that they are worried, autistic kids struggle at recognizing facial expressions. So Simon Baron-Cohen, a British psychologist (and cousin to the comedian Sascha Baron-Cohen) who directs the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge University created eight animated vehicles, including a bulldozer named Barney, a bus named Nigel, and a green tram named Jenny, each with human faces grafted on the front. When Jenny’s wheel buckles in episode one, her brow furrows, but when she’s rescued, she smiles. This teaches young autistic children what a worried or happy face looks like.

New technologies could also help parents and teachers understand and help autistic children. These children often can’t recognize, let alone communicate, their own feelings to parents or teachers. This makes it hard to get what they want and sometimes gets them so frustrated that they have a meltdown. But a wristwatch-like sensor being developed by Rosalind Picard, director of the Affective Computing Research Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology promises to serve as a sort of high-tech mood ring that would read the child’s heart rate and other measures and warn caregivers that the child is stressed.

Whatever the technology, whatever the skill, the goal for these researchers is the same. “We want them to be functional—to give them a fighting chance of taking care of themselves and participating in society,” Dr. Ennis-Cole says.

CONNECT THE DOTS

Watch an introductory video about the TARA Laboratory at the University of North Texas here. To read more about what’s going on at the Autism Research Centre, visit here. Listen to Dr. Rosalind Picard here as she describes how autistic kids and their parents could benefit from the sensors her group is developing. For more information on autism from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, click here.

As if working moms don’t have enough things to worry about, a new study finds that figuratively bringing home the bacon can lead to a very literal weight gain in school-age children.

Lead study author, Taryn Morrissey, PhD, Assistant Professor in Public Administration and Policy at American University, evaluated data on 990 children ages 8-12 who were enrolled in the Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development in 10 different cities.

Published in the journal, Child Development, the study found that for every five months a mother worked, a child could gain a pound more than normally expected.  Over time, the consequence can be an overweight child. It also found a stronger correlation between working mothers and a child’s BMI (a measurement that uses a person’s weight and height to determine their degree of obesity) for 6^th graders compared to younger children.

When Dartmouth College economics professor, Patricia M. Anderson, PhD, conducted a similar study in 2003 to determine the impact of maternal employment on the labor market, she achieved comparable results. “We looked at children from 3-11 and found that working an extra 10 hours a week over a lifetime increased the probability of being overweight as children by 1-3 percent.”

While neither study uncovered the definitive cause for the weight differential among children of working and non-working mothers, researchers did develop some cogent theories. “The difference was strongest for higher socio-economic status families so we theorized that it was about the time constraint,” says Anderson. “Mothers who worked were less likely to prepare home-cooked meals and supervise play dates and things like that.”

Morrissey says there is no need for moms to feel guilty. “Maternal employment per se does not lead to increased child BMI,” she explains. “Rather, the constraints working parents face while trying to negotiate work and family demands present the issue. If we can shed light on these constraints and the many factors that contribute to a child’s BMI, we can help parents balance work and family demands and promote healthy weight among their children.”

What do you think are the best ways for working parents to help their kids maintain a healthy weight?

CONNECT THE DOTS

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Healthy Youth Resources is a great resource for facts about childhood obesity.  Learn more about First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move Campaign.  Discover three healthy family habits that can prevent childhood obesity.

The message should have registered by now:  too much food and too little exercise are making our kids dangerously fat. The statistics from the Centers for Disease Control are staggering:  almost 1 in 6 children in the U.S. between the ages of 2 and 19 are obese, a level that’s nearly tripled since 1980. What’s more, the trouble begins in babyhood, according to a new report from the U.S. Institute of Medicine, which estimates that 10 percent of infants and toddlers are overweight – and may be heading for an increased risk of diabetes, heart disease and other health problems in later life.

But while overeating and inactivity have been tagged as the leading causes of childhood obesity, they’re not the only factors to blame for the epidemic. In an effort to battle this spreading health threat on all fronts, scientists are also tracking other contributory causes.

At the University of Illinois, a multidisciplinary team of researchers is studying how various cultural, environmental, and family factors affect the weights of about 400 children aged 3-5 from various socioeconomic backgrounds. “The issue is more complex than just how much you eat and how much you move,” says team member Sharon Donovan, Professor of Nutrition. The Illinois researchers are identifying and investigating influences ranging from genetic changes to family relations to shopping habits – including bulk-buying at discount stores – in their ongoing study. “We believe that effective intervention needs to be at every level,” Donovan says.

Elsewhere, other researchers are looking into a variety of factors that may worsen obesity levels. Among the possibilities they’ve discovered:

*Stressful Surroundings:  Researchers at Stanford University Medical School have found that children who grow up in troubled homes and violent neighborhoods are twice as likely to be obese as those whose childhood is less traumatic. The study of 710 children from a poor, crime-ridden section of San Francisco suggests that kids who experience high levels of adversity suffer a form of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

*Long-Term Bottle Feeding:  Parents who keep their kids on the bottle past the age of two raise the risk of obesity by about 33 percent, according to a review of data on 6,750 children at Temple University Center for Obesity Research.

*Food Commercials:  Research at the UCLA School of Public Health suggests that overweight kids are harmed by the fusillade of food advertising they see on TV, not the programs they watch in between.  The study of 3,563 kids under the age of 12 found that those with the highest BMI watched the most commercial TV; non-commercial TV and DVDS showed no similar association.

CONNECT THE DOTS

For more information about the treatment and prevention of childhood obesity, visit the American Academy of Pediatrics website and Let’s Move, the White House website to promote children’s health. To learn about what families can do to fight the problem, see our blog entries, “3 Healthy Family Habits to Prevent Childhood Obesity” and “Exergames: Interactive Video Games to Boost Fitness.”

You know hiking is good for your health. But do you know just how good it is?

For adults, regular aerobic exercise such as hiking leads to:

* Improved cardiorespiratory fitness (heart, lungs, blood vessels)

* Improved muscular fitness

* Lower risk of coronary heart disease and stroke

* Lower risk of high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes

* Lower risk of high cholesterol and triglycerides

* Lower risk of colon and breast cancer, and possibly lung and endometrial cancer

* Increased bone density or a slower loss of density

* Reduced depression and better quality sleep

* Lower risk of early death (If you are physically active for 7 hours a week, your risk of dying early is 40% lower than someone active for less than 30 minutes a week.

* Weight control; hiking burns up 370 calories an hour (154-lb person)

Kids get many of the same benefits, including:

* Improved cardiorespiratory and muscular fitness

* Better bone health

* Less chance of becoming overweight

* Less chance of developing risk factors for heart disease, high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes

* Possibly reduced risk of depression and feeling less stress, more ready to learn in school

* Sleeping better at night

What’s more, hiking exercises almost every part of your body: legs, knees, ankles, arms, hips and butt, abdominals, shoulders and neck. “Hiking exercises your body and your mind, and nourishes your imagination,” says Ignacio Malpica, a certified fitness instructor and personal trainer in Boulder, Colorado. “It creates awareness in your eyes and ears and the rest of your senses.”

How much activity do you need to reap these incredible health benefits? Experts say getting active for just 150 minutes a week – doing “moderate-intensity” aerobic exercise such as moderate hiking or brisk walking – leads to most of these benefits (reducing risks of colon and breast cancer requires another hour a week). That’s only 2½ hours a week. And you don’t have to do it all at once. Sneaking in a lunchtime hike up the hill near your office counts toward your total, as long as you’re active for at least ten minutes.

If you take part in more vigorous aerobic activities, such as running, dancing, or hiking uphill or with a heavy pack, you need only half that amount of time, or 75 minutes a week, to get health benefits.

What’s moderate exercise? You can talk, but you can’t sing during the activity. Vigorous? You can’t say more than a few words with pausing for breath. “When you are doing moderate exercise, you can continue for a long time, and you are breathing rhythmically,” explains Malpica. “With vigorous exercise, you can’t do it for more than a few minutes at a time.”

And if you rack up even more time, the benefits keep growing too. For even more substantial health benefits, such as an even lower risk of heart disease, aim for 300 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic exercise, or 150 minutes of vigorous-intensity aerobic exercise each week.

Of course, there are other kinds of physical activity. It’s also important to do some muscle-strengthening activities, such as lifting weights or doing push-ups. The experts say do those at least twice a week. You also need to get in some bone-strengthening activity, which occurs when force on your bones promotes bone growth and strength. Here again, hiking fits the bill.

Another plus: you don’t have to be in perfect shape to start. Even if you are overweight, getting physical can lead to health benefits. But don’t run out and climb a steep peak if you’ve long been inactive. The experts say if you’re 35 or older and have been inactive for several years, or you already have a condition such as high blood pressure, check with your doctor first. “Hiking is a great way to start exercising,” says Malpica. “Start with easy hikes and work up to steeper hikes that work your legs more.”

Kids (age 6-17) need 60 minutes of physical activity each day, mostly aerobic. They also need regular muscle-strengthening (playing on playground equipment, climbing trees) and bone-strengthening (running, playing basketball, jumping rope) exercise.

Track Your Workouts

Keeping track of your activity can help you rack up the minutes. Note what you did as well as the length of each workout, and tally it up at the end of the week. Watching your progress can be a great motivator.

Use a calendar to track your workouts. Or try one of the many online options, such as MapMyHike.com, where you can map your own hikes and share your routes with others.

CONNECT THE DOTS

For more on the health benefits of exercise and to download an activity tracker, see the 2008 Physical Activity Guidelines. To learn more about hiking (including a state-by-state directory of parks), see the American Hiking Society site, and read about some enticing hiking trips on Call of the Wild. Introduce your children to hiking safety and trail manners with GoodHiker’s resources. Track your hiking miles on MapMyHike. Find out more about the exercise for kids on MedlinePlus.

With that prediction, Patricia Kearney, Med,RD, program director for The Peanut Institute, opened the Institute’s educational, science and culinary conference in Napa Valley, California in May. “We know how to study drugs in this country,” she told her audience of researchers and journalists. “What we really don’t do very well is study food.”

What’s changing is our perspective on healthy eating, exemplified in the USDA’s 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which shifted from “just excluding unhealthy nutrients [in previous reports] to getting more healthy foods into our diet.” Peanuts, Kearney said, support that goal with an arsenal of nutrients including more protein than almonds, walnuts or pistachios. What’s more, an ounce of roasted peanuts delivers fiber, calcium, niacin, folate, iron, selenium and vitamins E and B6, among other nutrients. That should be good news to peanut-loving Americans who, in spite of what many see as growing health awareness, eat the same amount of fruits and vegetables as they were eating a decade ago.

Highlights of the conference included:

* Kearney reminded attendees of the 16-year Nurses’ Health Study of almost 84,000 women, showing that those who ate peanuts or peanut butter at least five times a week were at lower risk of developing diabetes than those who never ate peanuts.

* A later study expanded our knowledge of peanuts’ effect on blood sugar, showing that eating peanuts or peanut butter as part of a high-glycemic meal can help keep blood sugar levels stable.

* Nutritional complexities of peanuts, “Mother Nature’s functional powerhouse,” were presented by Ronald B. Pegg, PhD, associate professor of food science and technology at the University of Georgia. High in healthful fatty acids, antioxidants and vitamin E, peanuts also contain heart-healthy phytosterols, plant substances that block the absorption of dietary cholesterol.

* Backing up to the basics, Bob Parker, vice president of the Peanut Institute, gave a brief primer on peanut production to attendees, many of whom had never seen a peanut plant. Few attendees knew the legumes grow underground—or, more importantly, that by law, “peanut butter” must be contain at least 90 percent peanuts in order to show those words on the label. Peanuts are a Southern crop because of their long growing season: up to 160 days, compared to corn’s 90 days.

* Craig Johnston, PhD, assistant professor of pediatric nutrition at Baylor College of Medicine, reported on his just-published “veggie-dipping study,” which found that when middle-school students are given the opportunity to pair their vegetables with a “referred taste,” such as peanut butter, the kids will eat significantly more vegetables. During the four-month duration of the study, he said the students “never got tired of the taste” of peanut butter, adding that if his own kids don’t like what’s been prepared for dinner, he gives them a peanut butter sandwich instead.

Peanuts are a fairly high-calorie, high-fat food, but Kearney points to the

health benefits. “We’re learning that to eat healthier, be healthier and decrease obesity, we’ll need to change our diets,” she said, “not just cut calories.” So to get healthier by eating peanuts, how many are too many?

“We don’t know what a therapeutic dose is,” she said, “but we ask people to incorporate them into their healthy eating plans—and do eat the skins. They have a lot of protective nutrients—they protect the plant and they’ll help protect you.”

CONNECT THE DOTS

Complete nutrient profiles for peanuts and other foods can be found on the USDA’s Nutrient Data Laboratory.  For more information on healthy eating, also check out the USDA’s new choosemyplate.gov site. Read about GE’s free mobile apps My Diet Diary and Pic Healthy, which help you track your food intake as you strive to help meet weight loss goals or eat a healthier diet. Check out more information about food allergies.

Aisha, a woman from a village in Northern Nigeria, was unconscious when she was brought to the Murtala Mohammed Specialist Hospital in Kano. She had given birth to her 9^th child at home but afterward she began to hemorrhage and her body went into shock. Her blood pressure dropped so low it couldn’t be recorded.

Up to now, death would have been a likely outcome for a woman like Aisha. But the hospital is one of many that are benefiting from an ingenious technology to combat postpartum hemorrhage. Thanks to the project’s sponsor, Pathfinder International, a non-profit health care organization, hospital personnel were able to outfit her with an anti-shock garment designed to stop the bleeding and return blood to her vital organs, buying time for care providers to get blood for a transfusion and provide other needed medical care.

Shortly after being put in the suit—called the LifeWrap—Aisha stabilized, her blood pressure rose and she opened her eyes. A few hours later she received a life-saving blood transfusion. She was eventually reunited with her baby and returned to her village in good health.

The anti-shock garment that saved Aisha’s life is badly needed in the third world. Nearly 350,000 women die every year from complications of pregnancy or childbirth—almost all of them in developing nations like India, Nigeria, Egypt and Pakistan. In such countries, about 60 percent of these deaths are due to postpartum hemorrhage.

A woman can bleed to death in less than two hours. Yet, in rural areas, hospitals may be days away or may lack critical supplies and staff trained to treat postpartum hemorrhage and the resulting shock.

LifeWraps provide a simple, low-cost solution to the problem. Shock occurs when women bleed heavily and blood pools in the abdomen and lower body, starving the brain, heart and lungs of oxygen. If the condition is not reversed, it can result in organ failure and death.

The garment, made of neoprene and fastened with Velcro, looks like the lower half of a wetsuit cut into segments. Wrapping it tightly around the abdomen and legs applies pressure to the lower body, thus stopping the bleeding and diverting blood back to the upper body and organs.

“It reduces blood loss by 50 percent and has decreased maternal mortality and morbidity by 40-60 percent in studies in Egypt and Nigeria,” says Suellen Miller, RN, Ph.D., director of the Safe Motherhood Program at the University of California at San Francisco, who helped develop the project with Pathfinder and has led trials of the LifeWrap. “Women are able to be stabilized and travel long distances in the garment to large hospitals where they can receive care.” A five year randomized clinical trial, started in 2007, is underway in three sites in Zambia and Zimbabwe. The goal of the project is to gather evidence on the effectiveness of the suit when used at the lowest level of the health care system, the primary community health center where women go to give birth or as the first stop after complications arise.  Previous research had focused on the use of the suit at referral hospitals.

The suit—and the training to use it—is being made available at sites in India, Nigeria, Tanzania, Peru and Bangladesh, and Pathfinder hopes to expand the program further over time. “As long as women can get access to what they need and health providers who know what to do, they don’t need to die while giving birth,” says Susan Collins, Pathfinder’s program director. “Women can literally be brought back from death’s door.”

CONNECT THE DOTS

Find more about Pathfinder’s efforts to address postpartum hemorrhage and access the organization’s training videos and booklets.

The pneumonia-fighting approach grew from a successful strategy developed by the Union, a Paris-based health organization, to fight tuberculosis, which is now the cornerstone of the global battle against that disease. This is the so-called DOTS strategy, short for “directly observed treatment, short-course.” The strategy includes training local health care workers; putting in place simple, standardized ways to diagnose and treat the disease; ensuring an uninterrupted supply of medicine to hospitals and clinics, and improving record-keeping and reporting to track how well the efforts are working.

In Malawi, 20 percent of children die before the age of five, many from bacterial pneumonia, which can be treated with antibiotics. In 1999, the Malawian government asked The Union to help it stop the scourge, says Penny Enarson, head of the child lung health division of The Union, who helped develop the DOTS approach. To fight pneumonia, “I took the same principles of TB control that we developed and adapted them to a different disease,” she says. The result was a collaboration between The Union and the Malawian government called the Child Lung Health Programme.

To fight pneumonia, the health officials first identified ways to diagnose the disease without x-rays or a stethoscope, which allowed even low-ranking health workers to do it. That was a critical step given that Malawi’s public health service had a grand total of two fully trained pediatricians in 2000, when the Child Lung Health Programme began. They also made sure to hospitalize children in danger of dying from the disease—those who were breathing fast and visibly laboring to breathe.

They had medics give patients a standardized course of antibiotics, oxygen, or both. “You follow the same routine with the same drugs that are known to be effective,” Enarson explains. They had international public health professionals fly in periodically to supervise the effort. They also ensured reserves of medicine and a clear supply chain to deliver it, and made sure every hospital kept good records. Over five years, the approach saved more than 4,300 lives and cut the fatality rate for childhood pneumonia in Malawi by 55 percent.

The Child Lung Health Programme accomplished all that with only $1.93 million of funding, which was provided by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. “It was not a lot of money, and it saved a lot of lives,” Enarson says. The program was designed from the beginning so that the Malawian government could keep it up after it ended in 2005—a critical factor in a world with spotty funding for global public health initiatives. And they have: Malawi has continued the pneumonia program and it’s going strong, Enarson says.

“I would like to see the program implemented in most of the sub-Saharan countries,” where the mortality rate for pneumonia is 10 to 50 times higher than in developed countries, and the biggest killer in children is pneumonia,” Enarson says.

It’s an affordable goal. Researchers reported in the Lancet a few years ago that a $600M investment could provide antibiotic treatment for children with pneumonia everywhere, saving the lives of 600,000 children a year. The Union has started pilot programs in Sudan, Benin and China to work toward that goal, but hasn’t found the funding to scale it up. In fact, pneumonia gets only 2.5 percent of the funding to fight disease in sub-Saharan Africa. “I write concept notes like crazy to funders,” Enarson says. “They want new and sexy things, but that’s not what’s killing the children.”

CONNECT THE DOTS

To find out more about the global efforts to combat childhood pneumonia, visit the World Pneumonia Day site here. Mayo Clinic has more information on the disease itself and The International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease offers a variety of resources.

The PillCam SB (“small bowel”) was revolutionary, but until it was shown to be safe for younger children, it was a device for adults and older children only.

Scientists quickly began studying its use in small children. In one trial, researchers in nine medical centers studied the effects of the PillCam SB on children younger than eight years old with gastrointestinal problems that could not be pinpointed; the suspected culprits included Crohn’s disease, protein-losing enteropathy, occult gastrointestinal bleeding and undiagnosed abdominal pain. Children as young as four years old swallowed the PillCam SB easily. More studies followed, and in late 2009, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) opened the way for even younger children to use PillCam 2, declaring it safe from the age of two years.

The long-awaited FDA approval is a godsend for the toddlers whose gastrointestinal symptoms can cause them terrible pain. “The needs of these patients are often overlooked,” says Homi Shamir, President and CEO of Given Imaging, developers of the PillCam technology, “but they represent a very important group for whom accurate diagnosis and effective treatment can impact their lives significantly.”

This imaging technology requires neither radiation nor sedation. The child simply swallows the PillCam SB, just as an adult would swallow it, and eliminates it naturally in about 48 hours. In the meantime, the patient can eat, drink and move normally while the PillCam SB snaps tens of thousands of photos. All that’s required of the patient is to wear a small belt that contains a data recorder, enabling the images to be transmitted electronically.

Using PillCam SB for diagnosing gastrointestinal disorders in very young children was selected as one of the Top 10 Medical Innovations for 2011, at the Innovation Summit hosted by the Cleveland Clinic Foundation last fall. What other medical breakthroughs do you think should be on the list?

CONNECT THE DOTS

An animated video showing how the PillCam works, produced by the manufacturer, is available online. To learn more about the PillCam SB for pediatric GI disorders, visit the developer’s website. For more news about diagnosis, read our blog posts, “Breakthroughs to Beat Cancer,” “Track Your Health With Home Medical Tests,” and “Tuberculosis: New Weapons Against an Old Disease.”

Each year, David Blanton, OD sees an increasing number of children with myopia in his Charlotte, NC practice. Commonly called nearsightedness, myopia usually starts in children of elementary age and is defined by the inability to focus the light from distant objects correctly onto the retina.

According to the Institute of Eye Research, myopia has become increasingly common over the past 50 years. It is currently believed to affect around 1.6 billion people worldwide and the numbers are expected to grow to 2.5 billion by 2020.

“Although research indicates that there is a hereditary component, the development of the condition can be affected by environment,” says Dr. Blanton. “For example, a person who spends a lot of time reading or doing extensive work on the computer or other close visual work may be at higher risk of developing myopia.”

Recent studies support that conclusion. Researchers in Australia found that myopia is most prevalent in societies where children watch television and play computer games instead of playing outside. For example, 30 to 50 percent of 12-year-old children in Hong Kong and Tokyo are myopic, compared to 20 percent of US children in this age group.

Dr. Jane Gwizada of the New England College of Optometry was one of the lead researchers for a report in the January, 2009 issue of Optometry and Vision Science which found that nearsighted children spent on average of 4.3 fewer hours outside each week than children who did not have that vision problem. The study also found that children with myopia watched several additional hours per week of television, on average.

The main treatment options are laser surgery for adults and orthokeratology or Corneal Refractive Therapy, rigid gas-permeable contact lenses—typically worn at night—improve vision by reshaping the cornea. However, these treatments do not slow or prevent myopia.

Parents can reduce the risk by planning more outdoor activities for children. New England College of Optometry researchers concluded that sunlight could expand the vision range in both active and passive outdoor activities.

CONNECT THE DOTS

Learn about the benefits of outdoor activities. Spending just two to three hours a day outdoors can lower the risk of myopia. For more information on myopia, visit the websites of Mayo Clinic and MedlinePlus.