Salty diets blamed for increase in children with kidney stones

Doctors around the country are beginning to report a curious increase in children with kidney stones -- another possible consequence of America's dependence on processed foods. Bad eating habits have already fueled twin epidemics of childhood obesity and Type 2 diabetes. Although doctors have blamed fats and sugar for those ills, they say the culprit in this case might be two other features of the fast-food culture: too much salt and not enough water. Though kidney stones remain uncommon among children, specialists who once treated only a few cases a year are trying to figure out why they are now seeing many times that number. ``Five years ago, we used to see maybe a handful of children a year, maybe five or six,'' said Dr. Yegappan Lakshmanan, a pediatric urologist at the Johns Hopkins Children's Center in Baltimore.

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Children's Immunization Status Worsens As Mothers' Income ...

Mothers with more income and education may be less likely to keep their children's immunizations up-to-date, a large new study finds. Children in the poorest Hispanic and non-Hispanic black families were more likely to have received the recommended childhood vaccinations compared to children of non-Hispanic white mothers. "This finding, at least in the case of immunization, indicates that higher income and education is not a predictor of being up-to-date," said Patrick Rivers, Ph.D., study co-author and associate professor at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. The study appears in the February issue of the American Journal of Public Health. Parents of 11,860 children ages 19 to 35 months answered questions about income, marital status and race/ethnicity and noted whether their children had completed the recommended childhood vaccinations by 18 months of age.

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Sleep directly affects mental condition in children

Sleep-disturbed children, with both insomnia and hypersomnia were more likely to face severe depression than those with either insomnia or hypersomnia. In the study led by Xianchen Liu, MD, PhD, and colleagues of the University of Pittsburgh, 553 children with a depressive disorder were observed. Almost three quarters of these children reported to have sleep disturbance, 53.5 percent had only insomnia, 9 percent had hypersomnia alone and 10.1 percent had both these disturbances. Children with both insomnia and hypersomnia reported a longer history of illness, were more severely affected and likely to have weight loss, fatigue, and other problems, compared with those with either insomnia or hypersomnia. Depressed girls report more sleep disturbance than boys.

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