child and adolescent

Birth – 18 years.

Our child and adolescent Blogs

Treating severe dental caries improved children’s appetite and dental outcomes

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Worldwide dental caries remains one of the most prevalent chronic diseases of childhood. Sadly, in many countries a significant proportion of this decay remains untreated leading to pain, sepsis and occasionally more severe complications.  Studies have shown associations between caries and poor growth, low weight gain, missed school and poorer performance.   The aim of this [read the full story…]

Fighting mental illness stigma in the classroom

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Stigma can be described as a sign of disgrace setting a person apart from others. Erving Goffman, defined stigma as “the process by which the actions of others spoils normal identity.” For those with mental illness the stigma experienced can result in a lack of funding for services, difficulty gaining employment, a mortgage or holiday [read the full story…]

New meta-review highlights the best approaches for preventing violence in young people

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The WISQARS Leading Causes of Death website is a mine of information for researchers and bloggers alike. I searched it to find out what the leading causes of death are for people (all races, both sexes) in the US aged 10-24 years. The top three in 2010 were: Unintentional injury (e.g. road traffic accidents, poisoning, [read the full story…]

Low birth weight boys who experience stress may be at increased risk of adolescent depression and anxiety

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Premature baby

Depression and anxiety are common conditions in adolescence that can lead to persistent and life-long mood and anxiety disorders for some people. One theory is that prenatal maternal stress can contribute to depression in young people (the so called fetal programming hypothesis). The notion here is that pregnant women who experience stress may send messages to their foetus [read the full story…]

‘Controlled comforting’ and ‘camping out’ are safe long-term techniques for babies with sleep problems

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Hands up who doesn’t have an opinion about the best way to help babies get to sleep? It’s been a hotly contested topic in recent years, at dinner parties and playgrounds across the land. Behavioural sleep techniques have been shown to be effective at reducing sleep problems in infants and the associated maternal depression in the [read the full story…]

NICE publish first guideline for psychosis and schizophrenia in children and young people

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Everyone who read the extracts from Michael Schofield’s memoir, published by the Guardian on January 19th, must surely have been moved by the sometimes harrowing description of his daughter Janni who was diagnosed with child-onset schizophrenia aged just 7 years old. Janni is an exception, as schizophrenia generally starts between the ages of 15 and [read the full story…]

Study suggest 84% survival of composite filings in children and adolescents after eight years

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The aim of this study was to assess the durability of Class I and class II composite resin restorations (CRR) in children and adolescents placed in Public Dental Health Service (PDHS ) clinics. The was a prospective study all children and adolescents up to 18 years treated between November 1998 and December 2002 in all [read the full story…]

Nearly half of the young people who present to hospital with self-harm are not given essential psychosocial evaluations

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Last September I blogged about a cohort study in the Lancet that highlighted the links between self-harm and poor physical health. This same dataset (drawn from over 30,000 patients from 6 hospitals in Oxford, Manchester and Derby from 2000-7) has now spawned a longitudinal study published in the European Child and Adolescent Psychiatry journal. This [read the full story…]

Check out the new BITE-sized mental health summaries from the NIHR CLAHRCs

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Anyone who’s spent any time at all on the Mental Elf website, or any of the other National Elf Service sites, knows that we elves love succinct and focused summaries that are easy to read and quick to digest. It’s always a delight to see other groups publishing similar resources, so I’ve decided today to [read the full story…]

NICE evidence summary on the unlicensed and off-label use of melatonin for sleep disorders in children with ADHD

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NICE have recently started publishing a series of evidence summaries looking at unlicensed and off-label medicines. The second summary in the series looks at the use of prolonged-release melatonin tablets as a treatment for sleep disorders in children and young people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Future mental health summaries include ‘Quetiapine for generalised [read the full story…]