•
A new study suggest out of the University of California San Francisco suggest that children exposed to second hand smoke are more likely to have ADHD and to stutter. According to the CDC your risk of coronary heart disease and stroke increases by 2 to 4 times. your risk of developing lung cancer increase by 23 and 13times respectively for males and females. Your risk of developing COPD increases by 12 to 13 times. If you don’t care about yourself, why not quit for the kids. This study found the rates of ADHD and stuttering were nearly doubled for children ages 4 to 15 exposed to second hand smoke . Other risk factors such as being male or a familial history can not being avoided but this risk factor certainly can. Attempts to quit smoking can be extremely difficult but there is help available for those who are motivated. Perhaps this will serve as motivation for parents to get help. You may not be able to quit or even may not want to quit but if you have children especially boys please make the effort to not expose them to second hand smoke. Changing habits to include not smoking in the car with children present and stepping outside to smoke may help prevent your child from risk factors associated with ADHD such as difficulty in school, higher substance abuse rate and higher incarceration rates.
•
Thus the take home for parents is to know your risk factors and if they start to add up be on the look out for early signs. Early detection leads to early treatment which is always best.
Neonatal jaundice: a risk factor for infantile autism?
Maimburg RD, Vaeth M, Schendel DE, Bech BH, Olsen J, Thorsen P.
Department of Epidemiology, Institute of Public Health, University of Aarhus, Aarhus, Denmark. rmai@soci.au.dk
Abstract
In a previous study, we found that infants transferred to a neonatal ward after delivery had an almost twofold increased risk of being diagnosed with infantile autism later in childhood in spite of extensive controlling of obstetric risk factors. We therefore decided to investigate other reasons for transfer to a neonatal ward, in particular hyperbilirubinaemia and neurological abnormalities. We conducted a population-based matched case-control study of 473 children with autism and 473 matched controls born from 1990 to 1999 in Denmark. Cases were children reported with a diagnosis of infantile autism in the Danish Psychiatric Central Register. Conditional logistic regression was used to calculate odds ratios (OR) and 95% confidence intervals [CI] and likelihood ratio tests were used to test for effect modification. We found an almost fourfold risk for infantile autism in infants who had hyperbilirubinaemia after birth (OR 3.7 [95% CI 1.3, 10.5]). In stratified analysis, the association appeared limited to term infants (>or=37 weeks gestation). A strong association was also observed between abnormal neurological signs after birth and infantile autism, especially hypertonicity (OR 6.7 [95% CI 1.5, 29.7]). No associations were found between infantile autism and low Apgar scores, acidosis or hypoglycaemia. Our findings suggest that hyperbilirubinaemia and neurological abnormalities in the neonatal period are important factors to consider when studying causes of infantile autism.
PMID: 19000294 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
