Asthma risk for babies
Putting a baby to bed with a bottle increases the risk of wheezing, which may persist throughout early childhood and contribute to asthma, new research shows. Infants with a family history of allergies appear to be especially vulnerable.
Nearly 500 children whose parents had asthma or allergies were followed for five years as part of an ongoing study on home allergens and asthma led by Dr. Diane Gold of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. During the first two years, parents reported every two months how often their babies were bottle-fed in bed before sleep. The parents also kept track of episodes of wheezing and asthma during that time and for the next three years.
Children who went to bed with a bottle more than three times in their first year had 50% greater risk of wheezing episodes from ages 1 to 5 than children who went to sleep without one.
The wheezing may be triggered by irritation in the airways, because formula or milk can flow into them when the infant is lying flat. Tiny amounts of liquid also can be inhaled and cause spasms in the airways.
Lead author Dr. Juan C. Celedon, a researcher at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, said children should not be bottle-fed large amounts of liquid just before bedtime, and should not be put to bed on their backs immediately after feeding.
The study was published in the December issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Older blood pressure devices may still be the most accurate
It’s not unusual for blood pressure to soar at the doctor’s office, but so-called “white coat hypertension” is not necessarily a sign of nervousness. The reason for an unusually high -- or low -- blood pressure reading may be as simple as a damaged blood pressure device.
Frequently used dial-recording and digital units are not as reliable as the old-fashioned, mercury-gauged cuffs and are easily damaged, some experts say. The non-mercury devices can be as much as 50 (diastolic or systolic) points off, says Daniel W. Jones, co-chairman of a recent meeting on blood pressure measurement at the National Institutes of Health. He and other experts are concerned that dial and digital cuffs are not being regularly checked against mercury-gauged ones.
Mercury-gauged blood pressure devices are less commonly used because of concerns about proper mercury disposal should the glass that contains the toxic substance break. But Jones says every doctor’s office and hospital should have at least one on hand to use as a check for the dial and digital devices. The panel of 23 experts recommended, among other things, that research be done to determine if a system for using mercury devices for calibration purposes could be implemented.
Stress may affect effectiveness of vaccines
How the immune system responds to stress is at the forefront of mind-body research. Now, scientists in England have found that reactions to the meningitis vaccine, which is given routinely before college, vary according to recipients’ psychological well-being.
Because vaccines prompt the body to produce antibodies to ward off a specific disease, measuring the antibodies is a kind of yardstick for checking on the immune system. “The results show that the effects of stress are generalizable to different types of vaccine and, therefore, may be widespread,” says Victoria E. Burns, a coauthor of the study published in the November/December issue of Psychosomatic Medicine.
Burns and her colleagues at the University of Birmingham in Britain found that students who scored high on tests of the perceived stress in their lives -- even when there were few notably stressful life events -- were at greater risk of having a poorer response to the vaccine than those who didn’t see their lives as especially stressful. Also, students who scored high on tests of anxiety had lower levels of antibodies stimulated by the vaccine.
