Month: April 2012

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Health Risks of Child or Teenage Pregnancy

Health Risks of Child or Teenage Pregnancy. A 10-year-old tribal girl from Colombia gave birth on April 6 to her five-pound daughter by Cesarean section, sparking global outrage for becoming one of the youngest mothers in recorded history.

The unnamed girl, a member of the indigenous Wayuu tribe whose homeland is in northern Columbia’s La Guajira Peninsula, arrived at the hospital crying and in pain. She was 39 weeks pregnant when she underwent a C-section, Univision’s Primer Impacto reported. Most pregnancies are 38 weeks.

The baby was otherwise healthy, despite the fact that the new mom reportedly refused to breastfeed her newborn. The child-mom was also doing fine — even if the first time she saw a doctor during her pregnancy was on the day she gave birth. The pair had to be confined for a few days at the neo-natal unit of an undisclosed Columbia hospital.

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How to Stop Leukemia from Returning? Block β-catenin Pathway

Target stem cells to prevent leukemia’s return, Harvard scientists say. Usually, stem cells are seen as the “good guys,” and today, research into their regenerative properties is at an all time high. As the “building blocks” of the body that can go on to develop into blood, bone, brain and body organ tissues — they are seen as a potential renewable source of replacement tissues to treat many ailments for which there is no cure, or for which few treatments exist.

But where leukemia is concerned, stem cells are both the “good” and the “bad” guys. As the “good guys,” they are used in the bone marrow transplantation to treat this blood cancer.

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Smoker’s Cough: Will Novartis’ Drug QVA149 Be Effective vs. COPD?

‘Smoker’s cough’ drug succeeds in late-stage trials, Novartis says. Four more trials will be completed this year, to prepare for United States Food and Drug Administration approval, as well as that of European and Japanese drug regulators.

Caused mainly by tobacco smoking, air pollution or job exposure to lung hazards, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) — known commonly as smoker’s cough — is painful and debilitating. It forces its sufferers to cough most of the time, to take painful breaths, and to fall into debilitating bouts of breathlessness.

Chronic bronchitis and emphysema — over-inflation of the air sacs or alveoli in the lungs — are common symptoms that progress slowly and in time, lead to an irreversible loss of lung function. Around three-fourths of patients with advanced COPD are unable to perform normal everyday activities — and a good number of them go on to die when their lungs collapse.

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Can Autistic Children Bloom & Develop Later?

Autistic kids “bloom,” outgrow symptoms if given one-on-one early intervention. There’s good news and there’s bad news. And in between, there’s a whole new set of reasons to encourage parents of autistic children to keep plodding on.

Findings of a new study from Columbia University give parents of autistic children more hope — boosting the conventional wisdom that they should persist in making sure their kids get all the help they can need.

The study found about one in ten children diagnosed with severe autism goes on to experience rapid gains in skills — progressing from severely affected to high functioning. What’s more, by the time they turn 8 years old, this small group of autistic kids may even shed many symptoms of their disorder. Some may even grow out of their diagnosis by their teens.

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Teen Celebrity Drug & Alcohol Abuse: Drew Barrymore’s Not Alone

Like Drew Barrymore, U.S. teen substance abusers begin using drugs and alcohol at age 14. She looks like the epitome of the fresh-faced, innocent all-American girl-next-door, but Drew Barrymore is really more of a poster child for teenage drug addiction.

After making her film debut at five years old, she starred in her breakout role in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, then quickly went on to become one of Hollywood’s most recognized child actors.

But her life quickly spiraled downward into drug and alcohol abuse. By the time she was nine, she was smoking cigarettes. At 11, she was drinking alcohol, at 12, smoking marijuana and at 13, snorting cocaine. This landed her a first stint at rehab, and at 14, a suicide attempt put her back in rehab. In 1990, Barrymore disclosed all this in her autobiography, Little Girl Lost.

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Oprah’s Yo-Yo Weight, BMI Misclassification, & Fat-Muscle Ratio

Did relying on BMI measurements cause Oprah to fall victim to yo-yo dieting? Perhaps — if we’re to follow the findings of a new study published April 3 in the journal PLoS One. Best known for her blockbuster talk show, African-American billionaire Oprah Winfrey has been called “arguably the world’s most powerful woman” by CNN and Time.com.

For a time the world’s only black billionaire, she’s also definitely one of the most influential persons of the 20th century. Her story of triumph against overwhelming odds — born into poverty in rural Mississippi to a teenage single mother, raised in an inner-city Milwaukee neighborhood, raped at age nine, getting pregnant at 14 and having her son die in infancy, but going on into wealth and fame — will continue to inspire thousands of people across the world.

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