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THURSDAY, Sept. 11 (HealthDay News) -- Bullying is the top "health" concern among parents with overweight and obese children, according to a new report.

Parents of these children, aged 6 to 13, also are much more likely than parents of children at a healthy weight to call bullying a top health issue for kids, according to a report released Monday by the University of Michigan C.S. Mott Children's Hospital National Poll on Children's Health.

"We found that parents with overweight or obese children actually view bullying as a greater problem than childhood obesity," Dr. Matthew M. Davis, director of the National Poll on Children's Health, said in a university news release. "Since bullying is known to be a problem for children with increased weight, bullying prevention programs will need to be mindful of obesity as a potential trigger for bullying behavior and of parents concerns surrounding this issue."

Overall, parents don't take childhood obesity lightly, ranking it No. 1 is among health concern for kids in the National Poll on Children's Health. Still, only two-thirds of parents actually enforce such limits with their children on junk food and time spent in front of a TV or computer screen, the poll found. Still, many parents are talking with their children about having healthier diets and increasing their physical activity, which Davis said is an important first step in setting the stage for a healthier lifestyle.

Nearly two in five of the families polled included one or more overweight or obese child between the ages of 6 and 13. The poll also showed that children who were obese or overweight were almost twice as likely to have an obese parent as healthy weight children.

"In many families, obesity is a two-generation phenomenon among parents and their children. This trend could be the result of genetics or behaviors such as eating habits and physical activity that are shared among parents and their children," said Davis, an associate professor of general pediatrics and internal medicine at the U-M Medical School.

More information

The Nemours Foundation has more about obesity and children  .

WEDNESDAY, Sept. 10 (HealthDay News) -- New cytogenetic tests that can detect subtle alterations in genes and chromosomes are helping doctors better detail and more accurately diagnose complex developmental abnormalities in children, a new report shows.

Emory University researchers explained their use of these technologies to find microdeletions and microduplications in a specific region of one chromosome, called 1q21.1, in patients with unexplained mental retardation, autism or congenital anomalies in an article published online this week in the New England Journal of Medicine.

"In the early 1960s, we began discovering the relationship between chromosome imbalance and diseases and syndromes, such as Down syndrome," David H. Ledbetter, a professor of human genetics at Emory University in Atlanta, said in a university news release. "This was based on identifying multiple patients with the same cytogenetic abnormality and similar clinical symptoms. Ever since then, technology breakthroughs have allowed us to identify new syndromes and ever more subtle genetic differences."

Ledbetter, who also wrote an editorial that accompanied his colleague's article, said he believes the availability of this new information may help clinicians shift to a "genotype first" model of diagnosis.

As increases in genetic information have led researchers to learn that many small genetic variations are common and mostly benign in people, they have realized they need to be able to more finely analyze the relationship between DNA variations and disease before declaring they have found true connections.

Researchers, for example, must show that the difference is never found in other normal or near-normal individuals.

Also, a particular genetic variation may only mildly affect a parent but present a much more severe effect in a child who inherits the same variant, while a group of children with the same gene variation may have many different problems because of it.

"So many variations of developmental disorders and syndromes have been discovered that genetic testing has become essential for making a specific clinical diagnosis," Ledbetter said. "Although more information has made the job of a diagnostician even more challenging, it also is leading to more accurate diagnoses and should lead to much more effective treatments."

More information

The U.S. National Library of Medicine has more about genetic and birth defects.

THURSDAY, Sept. 4 (HealthDay News) -- Vaccine safety experts say that almost all kids who are allergic to vaccines can receive vaccinations with close monitoring and a set of standard precautions.

Reporting in the September issue of Pediatrics, a team of experts led by the Johns Hopkins Children's Center put forth a step-by-step set of instructions -- an algorithm -- to help physicians evaluate and immunize children with known or suspected vaccine allergies.

Allergic reactions to vaccines are extremely rare -- with only one or two per million vaccinations -- but they can be serious and even life-threatening. Symptoms of a severe allergic reaction are usually immediate, may include hives, swelling, wheezing, coughing, low blood pressure, vomiting or diarrhea, and can lead to full-blown, life-threatening anaphylaxis.

To help pediatricians differentiate between these serious reactions to benign responses, the investigators analyzed the available evidence on vaccine safety and allergies.

"We cannot reiterate enough that the vaccines used today are extremely safe, but, in a handful of children, certain vaccine ingredients trigger serious allergic reactions," study author Robert Wood, chief of pediatric allergy and immunology at Hopkins Children's Center, said in a hospital news release. "For the most part, even children with known allergies can be safely vaccinated."

The new sequence of instructions developed by the research team is intended to be used for children who have already had or are at high risk for having allergic reactions to vaccines.

In these cases, the algorithm advises a workup by an allergist, who can perform skin prick testing or blood tests, to detect the presence of an allergy to a suspected allergen in the vaccine.

In many cases where a child is allergic to an allergen in a vaccine, an alternative form of the vaccine that is free of the allergen can be used. If an allergen-free vaccine is unavailable, many children can still be vaccinated under the supervision of a physician for several hours after the vaccination. Immunizations of children with known vaccine allergies should be administered at a clinic that is equipped to treat life-threatening reactions or in a hospital intensive care unit.

Physicians also have the option of checking the child for immunity to the disease that is being vaccinated against. If the child is already immune, further doses of the vaccine may not be necessary.

"Most children who have had an allergic reaction after a vaccine can still be vaccinated against other diseases safely, and some can receive additional doses of vaccines they might have reacted to," investigator Neal Halsey, an infectious disease specialist at Hopkins Children's and a professor of international health at the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health, said in the news release.

More information

The American Academy of Family Physicians has more about childhood vaccines  .

TUESDAY, July 1 (HealthDay News) -- Although tiny babies receiving intensive care must undergo numerous painful interventions, not enough is being done to reduce their discomfort, new research suggests.

Of the 42,413 painful procedures included in this study, only 2 percent of babies received pain medications, and just 18.2 percent received non-pharmacological pain therapy. That means about four out of five babies received no interventions to lessen their pain, according to the study, which was published in the July 2 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

"We found that babies are exposed to a lot of painful and stressful procedures, mostly not treated with pain-relieving interventions," said study author Dr. Ricardo Carbajal, a professor of pediatrics and chief of the National Center of Resources to Fight Pain at Children's Hospital Armand Trousseau in Paris.

The authors explain that it's especially important to control pain in neonates -- babies from 1 to 4 weeks old -- because they're more sensitive to pain, and repeated or prolonged exposure may alter the way their brains process pain. It may also affect their long-term development and behavior, Carbajal added.

With funding from two nonprofit foundations -- Fondation CNP and Fondation de France -- Carbajal and his colleagues reviewed data from 430 neonates admitted to hospitals in the Paris area between September 2005 and January 2006.

The average gestational age of the babies was 33 weeks -- a full-term pregnancy is 40 weeks, so these infants were born almost two months early. The average intensive care unit stay was just over eight days, according to the study.

During that time, the 430 infants underwent more than 60,000 first-attempt procedures. Of these, 42,413 were painful, and 18,556 were stressful. The babies also underwent more than 11,000 supplemental attempt procedures, including 10,366 painful and 1,180 stressful procedures.

The average number of procedures was 141 per baby. The type of procedure varied from a heel stick to draw blood to having to insert a chest tube.

Carbajal said there are numerous factors why neonates aren't receiving enough pain relief. One is a concern about side effects from pharmacological interventions; another is unfamiliarity with pain relief management for newborns and a lack of standardized policies in this setting. He also said that pharmaceutical companies haven't developed analgesic products especially for neonates.

He recommended that procedures be done in combination whenever possible, and that minor procedures should be accompanied by non-pharmacological pain-reducing methods, such as providing oral sucrose or glucose and sucking. He said topical anesthetics can be used to reduce pain from needle punctures, though it's not sufficient for heel stick pain. For major procedures, he said, analgesia in combination in non-pharmacological therapy is needed.

Carbajal said this study's findings would likely be similar in other areas of the world where neonatal intensive care is available.

"For most neonates who undergo any sort of painful procedure, it would be worthwhile to have a combination of pharmacological and non-pharmacological interventions," said Dr. Santhanam Suresh, an anesthesiologist at Children's Memorial Hospital in Chicago.

Carbajal added that parents can act as advocates for optimal pain management for their babies by asking the health-care team to use approaches that "limit the intensity, frequency or duration of pain."

More information

To learn more about pain and pain relief for babies, read this information from the University of Michigan  .