Weekend Open Thread
by Elisa
Fri Feb 29, 2008 at 06:11:54 AM PDT
I was sucked into a Larry King Live segment on autism, which included actress Holly Robinson Peete, singer Toni Braxton and retired football player Doug Flutie -- all who have children with autism. The segment also included an interview with Jason McElwain, a young inspirational basketball player who also has autism and just wrote a memoir.
It is frightening how common autism has become among children: Now one in every 150 children -- mostly males -- is diagnosed with autism and it is much more common than pediatric cancer and diabetes. No one knows of its causes, although both Peete and Braxton thought vaccines such as MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) were responsible for their sons' conditions.
Tommy John Surgery for 12-Year-Olds: As Time recently reminded us, there is a such thing as too much training for young athletes -- even if they are destined to become the next Michael Jordan and Venus Williams. Anecdotally, doctors are seeing more sports injuries among kids like those that plague professional athletes.
A young body that's worked too hard can suffer in a lot of ways, but it's the bones that take the worst pounding. Activities like skating uphill on a Plexiglas surface, which allows skaters to strengthen their strides, or doing the explosive muscle-building movements known as plyometrics can wreak havoc on the skeletal system, particularly the epiphyseal plate, or growth plate, which is essential in bone development--a process that is not complete until the late teens.
Harming a plate before a child hits puberty can affect the way the bones grow. "I saw one kid who was asked to do multiple plyometric jumps through the pain, and he pulled a growth plate off his knee," says Dr. Jordan Metzl, a member of the American College of Sports Medicine's youth sports committee. "Another kid tore a piece of plate off his hip from using too high weights while lunging and squatting."
There are other problems as well. Tommy John ligament surgery, an elbow procedure named after the Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher who was the first to undergo it, used to be limited to players in their 20s and older, but it is now performed on kids as young as 12--not surprising if they started pitching excessively at age 8 or 9. Similarly, stress fractures in the backs of middle-school football and soccer players have nearly doubled over the past decade as a result of overtraining.
Research on Peanut Allergies: It does seem like peanut allergies are more prevalent now than when we were kids, but apparently we are giving peanuts to our kids at a younger age than our mothers did, according to a recent article in Parents magazine.
Children are developing peanut allergies about six months sooner than they did a decade ago, says a study in Pediatrics. Instead of being diagnosed with the allergy at 2 years old, most kids are now typically diagnosed at 18 months. Researchers also found that most children eat peanuts for the first time at 14 months, while ten years ago most kids didn't try them until they were 22 months.
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