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Healthy fat consumption is good
Association of dietary fatty acid intake with hypertension in children and adolescents: evidence from the NHANES 2005–2018; Frontiers in Pediatrics, Sept. 11, 2023.
Consuming healthy polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs), commonly known as fats, was associated with a lower risk of developing hypertension in children and adolescents, according to a recent analysis of U.S. children by scientists at China’s Second People’s Hospital of Liaocheng.
Higher intakes of omega-3 and omega-6 PUFAs, octadecatrienoic acid and octadecadienoic acid were particularly protective, as was the “density” of omega-3 PUFAs and octadecatrienoic acid.
Nutrient density is defined as the ratio of a nutrient’s calories to the total calories eaten. The higher the density number, the more of a nutrient you consume relative to everything else you eat.
Researchers included 13,330 children ages 8-17 enrolled in a U.S. health database, the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), from 2005 to 2018. Of those, 11,614 had normal blood pressure and 1,716 were hypertensive. Their analysis evaluated total fat and specific fatty acid ingestion based on two interviews conducted around the time of intake.
The study’s primary endpoint was how nutrient fat makeup affects the incidence of hypertension. Investigators performed additional analyses based on subjects’ age, sex and body mass index (BMI) Z-score.
Z-score is a measure of how a child’s weight differs from age- and sex-matched peers and is especially useful to monitor changes in severely overweight children.
Investigators found that overall higher intake of PUFAs was associated with a statistically significant, 15% reduction in risk for hypertension.
Protection was evenly distributed among the healthy fats, with an 18% reduction for omega-3 fats, 14% for omega-6s, 18% for octadecatrienoic acid, and 14% for octadecadienoic acid. Children with a high ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fats had a 9% higher risk.
Higher nutrient densities for omega-3 fats and octadecatrienoic acid were associated with 14% and 13% reductions in risk, respectively.
Modifying the types of fats your family consumes is easy through the addition or avoidance of common foods.
Microbiome maturation lowers asthma risk
Gut microbiota maturity in infancy and atopic wheeze in childhood; Presented at the European Respiratory Society Sept. 10, 2023.
Young children harboring more “mature” gut bacteria experience fewer wheezing or asthma episodes in later childhood, according to a Sept. 10 presentation at the European Respiratory Society International Congress in Milan, Italy. (To access the abstract click here, then click on OA1434.)
Investigators led by Yuan Gao, Ph.D., a research fellow at Australia’s Deakin University, performed genetic analysis of stool samples from 1,074 children at 1 month, 6 months, and 1 year. They were looking for genetic indicators of population maturity among the bacterial species they found.
Bacteria make up most of the non-viral organisms in the gut microbiome. Maturation is the process by which beneficial species are acquired and colonize the gut and harmful bacteria are eliminated or kept at bay.
Microbiome maturation occurs simultaneously with the development of a child’s immune system.
At timepoints 1 and 4 years, parents completed questionnaires about their child’s asthma-related symptoms over the previous 12 months and children were given an asthma skin prick test.
Earlier studies, including a Nature Communications paper published in August 2023, showed a strong association between microbiome maturation and pediatric allergic responses, including asthma. These investigations normally assess gut microbe populations by prevalence and species.
Gao applied an additional measure, the microbiota-by-age-Z-score, which compares a subject’s microbiome maturity to what would be expected for a typical microbiome at that age.
He found that as subjects’ microbiome maturity rose, their risk for experiencing asthma symptoms fell at years 1 and 4, but not at 1 or 6 months.
In an interview published on the European Respiratory Society website, Gao explained the clinical significance of his study:
“We hope that by understanding how the gut microbiota improves the immune system, new ways of preventing allergy-related disease such as asthma can be developed. For instance, it might be possible to suggest ways of advancing the maturation of gut microbiota in early life, which would lead to fewer children developing asthma and other allergy-related diseases in the future. With so little known about why babies develop allergies and asthma, more research is needed.”
Which VIT strategy should parents use for bee stings?
Venom immunotherapy protocols in the pediatric population: how to choose?; Pediatric Immunology, Sept. 7, 2023.
Venom immunotherapy (VIT), a desensitizing strategy that involves dosing patients with progressively higher doses of venom in a controlled, clinical environment, and increasing the dose over time, is often used to treat kids who are allergic to bee stings.
But not all of these therapies are identical. For example, the starting, ending and maintenance dosages vary significantly from protocol to protocol, as do the timing and spacing of treatments.
A review of the clinical literature on VIT in children concluded that all established protocols work equally well, but the array of choices may confuse parents.
Dosing begins at anywhere from 0.001 to 1 micrograms and typically ends with a maintenance dose of 50 to 100 micrograms. Children undergoing conventional VIT receive maintenance doses once monthly for a year, then once every 8-12 weeks.
Long treatment duration, however, is beset by compliance issues, which was the basis for developing accelerated treatment regimens.
But can a several-year treatment be compressed into months, weeks or even days without sacrificing either safety or effectiveness?
Investigators sought to answer that question by comparing standard treatments to three rapid protocols: Semi-rush VIT involves a five-week build-up and a maintenance dose of 50 micrograms mcg; rush protocols arrive at the maintenance dose in days or weeks while ultra-rush regimens, which may entail several immunizations in one 24-hour period, reach the final maintenance dosage in a few days.
While noting that clinicians tend to prefer longer VIT protocols, the authors concluded that treatments of different lengths and intensities produced essentially the same positive outcomes and that it was “difficult to recommend one VIT protocol over another in children.”
Up to 7.5% of adults and 3.4% of children experience systemic allergic sting reactions. Most are mild and limited to the skin but moderate or severe systemic reactions also occur, including life-threatening anaphylaxis.
Historically, proponents claim VIT is 77% to 84% effective in preventing serious reactions from honey bee stings, and 91% to 96% successful for wasp stings.
WebMD has published a useful guide to VIT.
Does the scientific literature support using massage therapy in newborns?
Effects of massage therapy on preterm infants and their mothers: a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials; Frontiers in Pediatrics, Aug. 31, 2023.
That’s what Chinese investigators at Lanzhou University asked in a review of earlier studies on this topic.
Here’s what they found: Massage therapy improved the infants’ oxygen saturation and strengthened mother-infant attachment to a highly significant degree. Some of the other outcome measures improved but none passed statistical muster.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 9.657% of babies born in the U.S. in 2014 were preterm, defined as delivered before 37 weeks of gestation with a birth weight of less than 2.5 kilograms (about 5.5 pounds).
Preterm, or premature babies, are more vulnerable to infection, breathing problems, jaundice, and other health issues.
The authors of this study scoured the literature through five clinical research databases — the Cochrane Library, Embase, PubMed, Web Science and CINAHL — for papers demonstrating the benefits of massage to the child or mother. They retrieved 940 reports but only 15 made the cut.
Studies had to be randomized and controlled with at least one of the following outcome measures: mother-infant attachment, oxygen saturation, motor function, reflex responses, temperature and caloric intake.
The researchers rejected non-English-language reports, studies that combined massage with other interventions and all other study types regardless of quality.
The main weakness of this study was variability in the investigators’ source material: Studies included for review used different methods, sought to answer different questions and did not use identical massage protocols.
Researchers concluded: “Additional research with a larger sample size and more rigorous design should be conducted due to the heterogeneity of studies in several outcomes.”
Are your kids getting enough sleep?
Short Sleep Duration: Children’s Mental, Behavioral, and Developmental Disorders and Demographic, Neighborhood, and Family Context in a Nationally Representative Sample, 2016–2019; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, July 13, 2023.
A good night’s sleep provides health benefits at every age, but children most at risk for mental, behavioral and developmental disorders don’t get enough.
That’s what the authors of a study sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and appearing in its online Sleep Deprivation, Sleep Disorders, and Chronic Disease collection, concluded.
The good news, the researchers said: Interventions at multiple levels, tailored to individual situations, can help. These include educating parents and children about healthy sleep and avoiding electronic devices right before bedtime.
Researchers combined data on 112,925 children ages 3-17 from the 2016-2019 National Survey of Children’s Health to uncover possible associations between parent-surveyed sleep habits with mental, behavioral and developmental disorders, physical health, and demographic and family factors.
Short sleep was defined by age group: less than 10 hours for 3- to 5-year-olds, less than 9 hours for ages 6-12 and less than 8 hours for 13- to 17-year-olds.
Overall, 34.7% of children were sleep-deprived, with the highest prevalence, 37.5%, among children 6-12.
Correlations between sleep duration and factors other than age were even stronger. Fully half of ethnic minority children did not get enough sleep, as was the case for 39.6% of children with mental, behavioral, and developmental disorders and 44.9% of kids from low-income households.
Lifestyle and family also contributed, for example, inconsistent bedtime (57.3%), poor parental mental (47.5%) and physical health (46.0%), and “adverse childhood experiences” (44.1%).
The study had some shortcomings. The authors wrote: “Because parents may overestimate sleep, particularly among older children and adolescents, our data, based on parent report (sic), may have conservatively estimated short sleep duration.”
Parents’ responses could also be affected by faulty recall, their interpretation of survey questions and a desire to answer in ways that reflect well on them.
A final weakness was reliance on just one measure — sleep duration — rather than sleep quality or the presence of sleep disorders.
