Infant Sleep Training is NOT Dangerous

The unspoken concern that we are "emotionally scarring" our children by training them to fall asleep alone appears to be unfounded. Dr. Susarla

Infant sleep training has no long term effects: study

(Reuters Health) - Using behavioral training to help babies fall asleep doesn't seem to harm them emotionally or developmentally years later, but it doesn't benefit them long-term either, according to a new study.

Australian researchers, who published their findings in the journal Pediatrics on Monday, found that of 225 six-year-olds, those who participated in sleep training when they were babies were no different in terms of emotional health from those who did not.

The study is a follow-up to some of the researchers' earlier work - originally published in 2007 - that found babies and their parents benefited when the infants were taught to settle themselves through various behavioral techniques.

Parents and doctors, however, have expressed concern that the techniques could harm the children's emotional development, and thus their later mental health and ability to handle stress. There were also concerns over whether the techniques would impact the children's relationships with their parents.

"We wanted to find out if the benefits were really long lasting and if there were any long term effects," said Anna Price, the study's lead author from The Royal Children's Hospital in Victoria,Australia.

Price and her colleagues turned to the same children and parents they followed for the 2007 study to answer those questions.

In the original study, 326 children who had trouble sleeping were randomly assigned to different groups for their parents to try various sleep-encouraging techniques with the help of nurses.

At the end of the study, researchers found the use of certain methods - such as "controlled comforting" and "camping out" - improved the children's sleep problems and helped mothers with depression.

Controlled comforting is when a parent periodically responds to their child's cries - instead of the frowned upon approach of letting the child "cry it out." Camping out, on the other hand, is when parents slowly ease out of a child's room, which eventually teaches the baby to sleep without a parent there.

For the new study, the researchers were able to follow-up with 225 of the children from the original study. Of those, 122 had gone through the sleep training while the other 103 had not.

Overall, nine percent of the six year olds who went through training were having sleep problems compared to seven percent of those who did not go through training - a difference so small that statistically, it could be due to chance.

The researchers also didn't find any differences when it came to the children's emotions, conduct or stress.

Among parents, the researchers didn't see a difference between those who had tried training their infants and those who did not when it came to rates of depression, anxiety and stress.

Moreover, there didn't seem to be any difference between the two groups in the degree of closeness between children and their parents.

Dr. Umakanth Khatwa, the sleep lab director at Boston Children's Hospital in Massachusetts, called the new study "excellent work."

"I think they looked at this from all sides, and we needed this kind of long term study," Khatwa, who was not involved in the new research, said in an interview.

Price told Reuters Health that the new results show the techniques are safe for children older than six months old. And, regarding possible harm, "the research that's out there answers the questions quite conclusively."

Read article here.

Reporter Anthony Shadid’s Death Highlights Asthma Dangers

Asthma experts responding to the death of New York Times correspondent Anthony Shadid 

say his death is a sad reminder of the potentially serious nature of his condition.

The 43-year-old journalist’s death, apparently the result of a severe asthma attack, occurred while he was on assignment in Syria. Times photographer Tyler Hicks, who was with Shadid at the time and tried to revive his colleague, said Shadid had already had a smaller asthma attack days before his death as the pair accompanied smugglers from Syria to Turkey. On the day of his death, Shadid collapsed, Hicks told the Times, and soon lost consciousness. Hicks said Shadid’s breathing was faint and shallow before he died.

Shadid’s father, Buddy Shadid, told the Associated Press that he believes his son’s allergy to horses triggered an allergic reaction that led to the asthma attack. He told the AP that his son had lived with asthma all his life and had his medications with him at the time.

The Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America issued a statement following the news that said the organization “is deeply saddened to learn of the death of Anthony Shadid due to asthma.

“Our thoughts are with his family, friends, colleagues and readers worldwide who will miss the clear, calm and truthful voice of his reporting,” the statement reads. “This tragedy is a sad reminder that there is still no cure for asthma.”

About 34.1 million Americans have been diagnosed with asthma by a health professional during their lifetimes, according to statistics from the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology. And Dr. Harold Nelson, a professor of medicine at National Jewish Health in Denver,  said roughly 3,600 people die each year in the United States from asthma.

“Fortunately, this is down from a peak, some 15 years ago, of about 5,600,” Nelson said in an email, noting that the use of inhaled corticosteroids that reduce the likelihood of a severe, life-threatening attack. Despite this advance, he said, dangers still persist  for many.

“Individuals with asthma often underestimate the severity of their condition and often rely on ‘rescue medicine’ such as an albuterol inhaler to control their symptoms, he said. “These people are at increased risk of a severe and even fatal attack when they encounter ‘triggers’ for their asthma.”

The remoteness of Shadid’s location and the nature of his assignment may have also made management of his condition more difficult, doctors said.

“Being in a conflict zone, far from medical care, it is possible that Mr. Shadid focused on things other than his personal health,” said Dr. Sally Wenzel, director of the University of Pittsburgh Asthma Institute at UPMC, in an email to ABC News. “Often that may mean forgetting to take critical asthma medications that prevent severe asthma attacks, like inhaled corticosteroids.”

Doctors said that though Shadid’s circumstances may have made it difficult for him to ward off an asthma attack, most who live with asthma can take steps to protect themselves.

“Most deaths from asthma are preventable,” said Dr. Miles Weinberger, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Iowa. “A study on asthma deaths from the New England Journal of Medicine several years ago found that most were from what could be called ‘too little care too late’ — that is, there was sufficient time for intervention to have prevented the progression of an asthma exacerbation to a fatal conclusion.”

Though details have yet to emerge to confirm that Shadid’s death was indeed a result of an asthma attack, asthma doctors said that the sad story can serve as an important reminder to those who live with the condition to take necessary steps to stay safe.

Dr. Clifford Bassett, medical director of Allergy and Asthma Care of NY and an assistant clinical professor at the NYU School of Medicine, said those with the condition should have an “asthma action plan” to address any symptoms that could predict a serious attack.

...

“Avoiding known triggers of your asthma when you can is also a good idea,” Wenzel said, “but when you can’t avoid them — as would seem to be the case here — making sure that you are taking your daily corticosteroid medications can still help prevent these types of disastrous attacks.

“Asthma still kills. And it often kills young people with incredible futures.  Awareness — and appropriate treatment — is critically important.”

New Discovery May Help Limit the Side Effects of Certain Asthma Drugs

Discovery May Lead to Safer Treatments for Asthma, Allergies and Arthritis

ScienceDaily (Dec. 19, 2011)

Scientists have discovered a missing link between the body's biological clock and sugar metabolism system, a finding that may help avoid the serious side effects of drugs used for treating asthma, allergies and arthritis.

In a paper published last week inNature, scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies report finding that proteins that control the body's biological rhythms, known as cryptochromes, also interact with metabolic switches that are targeted by certain anti-inflammatory drugs.

The finding suggests that side effects of current drugs might be avoided by considering patients' biological rhythms when administering drugs, or by developing new drugs that target the crypto chromes.

We knew that our sleep and wake cycle are tied to when our bodies process nutrients, but how this happened at the genetic and molecular level was a complete mystery," says Ronald M. Evans, a professor in Salk's Gene Expression Laboratory, who led the research team. "Now we've found the link between these two important systems, which could serve as a model for how other cellular processes are linked and could hold promise for better therapies."

Glucocorticoids are steroid hormones that occur naturally in the body and help control the amount of sugar in a person's blood, so that nutrient levels rise in the morning to fuel daily activities and fall again at night. They function in cells by interacting with glucocorticoid receptors, molecular switches on the outside of the nucleus, which Evans first discovered in 1985.

Glucocorticoids also play a role in regulating inflammation and are used as anti-inflammatory drugs for diseases caused by an overactive immune system, such as allergies, asthma and rheumatoid arthritis. They are also used to treat inflammation in cancer patients.

Link