U.S. groups and companies that have tried to change the country's growing childhood obesity rate are starting to see noteworthy outcomes as more American children exercise and have better access to healthy foods, a new study reports. Exercise has been widely publicised, and has successfully encouraged 3 million children to start becoming more physically active over the last year...

Texas was the first state in the nation to mandate school policies on dating violence, but it still has some work to do in protecting victims and addressing consequences for the crime, according to a study by the Crime Victims' Institute at Sam Houston State University...

Each year, more than 130,000 children younger than 13 are treated in U.S. emergency departments after motor-vehicle crash-related injuries. Each of these visits offer a chance to pass along tips for proper use of child passenger restraints, but a new study from the University of Michigan indicates emergency departments may not be taking advantage of those opportunities...

Support is needed in child care centers to help meet existing water policies and new water requirements included in the 2010 Child Nutrition Reauthorization Act, according to a study published by the Yale Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity...

Grow it, try it, and you just might like it is a motto many schools are embracing to encourage children to eat more fruits and vegetables. Through community-based kitchen garden programs, particularly those with dedicated cooking components, schools are successfully introducing students to healthier foods...

An important predictor of the severity of respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) in infants may be what their mothers ate during pregnancy, according to a Vanderbilt study published in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine. RSV is the most common cause of severe lower respiratory tract disease among infants and young children worldwide...

The underdeveloped immune systems of newborns don't respond to most vaccines, leaving them at high risk for infections like rotavirus, pertussis (whooping cough) and pneumococcus...

New results from a prospective clinical trial conducted in France show that children with low-risk retinoblastoma do not need postoperative (adjuvant) chemotherapy to prevent disease recurrence or metastasis; the results also suggest that certain patients with intermediate-risk disease can receive less aggressive adjuvant treatment, or perhaps forego it altogether...

A study led by University of Massachusetts Medical School professor and immunologist Katherine Luzuriaga, MD, and Johns Hopkins Children's Center virologist Deborah Persaud, MD, highlights the long-term benefits of early antiretroviral therapy (ART) initiated in infants...

Scoring methods commonly used to evaluate Newborn Intensive Care Units (NICU) are inconsistent, according to new research from the University of Michigan. The research published last week in the journal Pediatrics compared 10 well-known scores that have been developed to evaluate NICUs. The researchers found more differences than similarities...

Two Michigan State University neuroscientists report in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Scientists used to think the brain cells you're born with are all you get. After studies revealed the birth of new brain cells in adults, conventional wisdom held that such growth was limited to two brain regions associated with memory and smell...

Grandmother's cigarette smoking could be responsible for her grandchild's asthma, and the recent discovery of this multi-generational transmission of disease suggests the environmental factors experienced today could determine the health of family members for generations to come, two Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute (LA BioMed) lead researchers write in the March editi...

Kids with ADHD (attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder) are at risk of still having the disorder in adulthood. ADHD does not go away in many cases, and children with the disorder are more likely to have other psychiatric conditions later in life, according to a new study...

Researchers at Moffitt Cancer Center and colleagues have found that healthy adolescent females have predetermined expectations for becoming parents in the future, but have concerns about fertility and childbearing should they develop a life-threatening illness, such as cancer. The study appeared in the February issue of the Journal of Adolescent Health...

A baby who received antiretroviral therapy within 30 hours of birth has been cured, researchers from Johns Hopkins Children's Center, the University of Mississippi Medical Center and the University of Massachusetts Medical School reported at the 20th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) in Atlanta, Georgia, USA...

In addition to struggling in school, many learning disabled children are known to face social and emotional challenges including depression, anxiety, and isolation. Often beginning early in childhood, they become more pronounced during adolescence, an emotionally turbulent time...

Sexting, the use of technology to send or receive sexually explicit messages, photos, or videos, is a relatively new trend and, in many cases, has legal implications. As many as 25-50% of young people may participate in sexting...

A prospective study by U.K. researchers found that adolescents who are double-jointed - medically termed joint hypermobility - are at greater risk for developing musculoskeletal pain as they get older, particularly in the shoulders, knees, ankles and feet...

Although the long-term consequences of childhood obesity are well documented, some school districts have reduced physical education classes to devote more time to the 3 Rs in education - reading, writing, and arithmetic. However, there is new evidence that leaving out an important fourth R - aerobics - could actually be counterproductive for increasing test scores...

Although they have an important impact on children's health and education, school-based deworming programmes have a limited impact on the level of infection in the wider community, according to a mathematical modeling study conducted by researchers at Imperial College London...