MONDAY, Jan. 21 (HealthDay News) -- Rinsing with a special saline nasal wash made from Atlantic seawater improves symptoms in children with colds and flu, and may prevent recurrence of these infections, a new study claims.

"We brush our teeth every day, however, we do not pay attention to our noses -- a potential gate for infection," said study co-author Dr. Jana Skoupa, of Pharma Projects in Prague, Czech Republic. "Nasal wash should be used, based on our findings, immediately."

The study seems to confirm what many doctors already know.

"We have recommended this for years. This study gives some objective evidence," said Dr. Jonathan Field, emeritus director of the pediatric allergy and asthma clinic at New York University/Bellevue Medical Center in New York City.

An alternative to the many cough and cold medications that line drugstore shelves comes not a moment too soon.

Just last week, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued an advisory stating that over-the-counter cough and cold medicines should not be given to infants and children under the age of 2. The agency has not come to a final decision on the use of such products in children aged 2 to 11.

"This is very promising, but there need to be more studies to confirm what the authors have found," Dr. Tom DeWitt, director of general pediatrics at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center. "It is a suggestion that it may be an alternative to cold preparations that the FDA [recently issued a public health advisory about]."

The saline technique could provide a more holistic alternative to such over-the-counter medications, and has the added advantage of having little downside and not contributing to the growing problem of antibiotic resistance.

The study, published in the January issue of the Archives of Otolaryngology-Head & Neck Surgery, involved about 400 children aged 6 to 10 with colds or the flu. The children were randomly assigned to receive either standard medication plus the nasal wash, or standard medication alone.

The nasal wash formula was given six times a day for eight weeks, then three times a day for the next four weeks.

By the second visit, patients receiving the nasal wash had less stuffy and runny noses. By eight weeks, those in this group had less severe sore throats, coughs, nasal obstructions and secretions.

Also, after week eight, only 9 percent of children in the saline group were using fever-reducing drugs, compared with 33 percent in the control group; only 5 percent were using decongestants, versus 47 percent in the control group; and only 6 percent of saline recipients were using antibiotics, compared with 21 percent in the control group. Children using the nasal wash also had shorter illnesses and fewer missed school days.

Compliance, however, may become an issue outside the context of a clinical study. "They did it six times a day," DeWitt pointed out. "How many parents are going to do that six times a day?"

The trial was funded by French company Goemar Laboratoires, which makes the product, Physiomer, that used in the study.

"As far as I know, Physiomer is not available in the U.S. It is the leading brand in Europe," Skoupa said. "The manufacturing process uses electro-dialysis (not simple dilution of seawater) to achieve isotonicity. This results in preserving the majority of minerals and trace elements in similar concentrations to seawater from the Atlantic Ocean."

An isotonic solution has the same concentration of salt as the human body.

"I would not just simply expect a normal saline solution to be the same thing," DeWitt said.

More information

The Medical College of Wisconsin   has more on respiratory infections in children.

THURSDAY, Jan. 17 (HealthDay News) -- A international epidemic of maternal and childhood malnutrition accounts for more than one-third of childhood deaths and 11 percent of the world's disease burden, researchers report.

"The key messages here are that the international nutrition system is fragmented and dysfunctional, and reform is needed," lead researcher Dr. Robert Black, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said during a news conference Wednesday. "The problems are long standing and embedded in organizational structure, but a concerted effort can provide greater progress and accountability. Progress is possible."

Black was lead author of a special series on maternal and child malnutrition appearing online Jan. 17 in The Lancet.

The issue was hailed by different development agencies at the news conference.

"[The World Bank] does agree with the conclusions in the series. They have huge implications for the architecture of an international nutrition system," said Joy Phumaphi, vice president and network head of human development at the World Bank. "We want to associate ourselves with the report."

According to Kent Hill, assistant administrator for global health at USAID, there are some 852 million chronically hungry people living in the world today, and roughly half are children. Even though many can eat enough to ward off hunger, many still don't get the nutrition necessary for growth and development. Mothers and children are the most vulnerable, Hill added.

The quandary has far-reaching consequences for individuals, societies and economies, the experts said.

"Malnutrition and nutrition as a whole is an economic imperative," Phumaphi said. Nutrition affects productivity as well as cognitive functioning and performance in school. "It also increases health costs and, therefore, has catastrophic implications," she noted.

According to Jayaseelan Naidoo, board chairman of the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN), in the absence of proper nutrition, many people are abandoning therapy for HIV/AIDS because of side effects.

The Lancet series starts off with a paper from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in Baltimore and Aga Khan University in Karachi, Pakistan, which finds that one-third of child deaths and 11 percent of the total disease burden globally are a result of maternal and child malnutrition.

Deficiencies in vitamin A and zinc had the greatest effect among the micronutrients studied and caused 0.6 million and 0.4 million deaths, respectively, in 2005. Deficiencies in iodine and iron are of lesser concern because of successful interventions. But suboptimal breast-feeding is estimated to be responsible for 1.4 million child deaths worldwide.

"We concur with the report that the first six months of a child's life should be exclusively focused on breast-feeding," Naidoo said.

The second study reported that poor fetal growth or stunting during a child's first two years of life can lead to shorter adult height, lower school attendance and reduced adult income potential. Better nutrition can remedy much of this.

Other researchers found that implementing existing nutrition-related interventions for mothers and children could prevent one-quarter of all child deaths in the 36 countries with the most severe deficits. Breast-feeding counseling and vitamin A supplementation would provide the greatest boost.

The fourth study found that 80 percent of undernourished children worldwide live in just 20 countries. The final paper reported that the international nutrition system is fragmented and needs reform.

"We need to take this amazing piece of work and translate it into practical, measurable results," Naidoo said.

But in addition, said other experts, the world needs better knowledge.

"As much as we know about food, we know very little about the science of food," said Dr. Tadataka Yamada, president of the Global Health Program at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. "In a sense, nutrition has been a little bit of a fractious community, because the less you know, the more your opinion counts. We need new knowledge in nutrition, and we have to invest in this because that will allow other investments we make in nutrition to be wisely and strategically placed."

More information

Visit the World Health Organization   for more on nutrition and malnutrition.

TUESDAY, Jan. 8 (HealthDay News) -- Teenaged girls who believed they were lower on the social ladder were more likely to put on extra pounds, U.S. researchers report.

The researchers, led by Adina R. Lemeshow of the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston and the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, Bureau of Tobacco Control, analyzed questionnaires completed by 4,446 girls, aged 12 to 18, in 1999.

The questionnaire collected information about height, weight, television viewing habits, diet and other factors, including the girls' perceived social standing at school.

Girls who said they were at four or below (lowest) on a 10-point scale of social standing were more likely to put on extra weight over the next two years than those who said they had a standing of five or higher.

The average body-mass index (BMI) among all the girls was 20.8 in 1999 and 22.1 in 2001. During those two years, 520 of the girls (11.7 percent) had at least a two-unit increase in BMI.

"After adjusting for age, race/ethnicity, baseline BMI, diet, television viewing, depression, global and social self-esteem, menarche, height growth, mother's BMI and pretax household income, adolescent girls who placed themselves on the low end of the school subjective social status scale had 69 percent increased odds of having a two-unit increase in BMI during the next two years compared with other girls," the study authors wrote.

The findings were published in the January issue of the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.

"It is important that researchers consider physical, behavioral, environmental and socioemotional factors that might contribute to the rising prevalence of overweight in adolescents," the researchers concluded.

"Previous research suggests that emotional factors such as depression and low self-esteem and self-perception contribute to the burden of overweight in adolescents. Our study contributes to this body of literature in that, to our knowledge, it is the first to prospectively evaluate the relationship between subjective social status in the school community and change in BMI, and our findings suggest that low school subjective social status may be an important contributor to increases in BMI in girls over time."

According to background information in the study, the percentage of American teen girls classified as overweight increased from 14 percent to 16 percent between 1999 and 2004.

Another study in the same issue of the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, looked at 3,345 American teens in grades 8 to 12 and found that those who were physically active at school and outside of school were less likely to be overweight when they were young adults.

For every day per week that teens were physically active at school, their risk of being overweight as young adults was reduced by 5 percent, the study said. Teens who had physical education five days a week were 28 percent less likely to be overweight as young adults.

"Regarding extracurricular physical activities, the likelihood of being an overweight adult was reduced most (i.e., 48 percent) by performing certain wheel-related activities (i.e. in-line skating, roller skating, skateboarding or bicycling) more than four times a week," the study authors wrote.

About 16 percent of American teens are overweight or obese, and 85 percent of obese adolescents become obese adults, according to background information in the study.

More information

The Nemours Foundation has more about teens and healthy weight  .

FRIDAY, Dec. 21 (HealthDay News) -- Black children living in disadvantaged neighborhoods fall behind the equivalent of one year or more of schooling simply because of where they live.

"[The study] does speak to the power of external resources," said Richard Gilman, coordinator of psychology and special education in the division of developmental and behavioral pediatrics at Cincinnati Children's Hospital in Ohio. "It focuses on race as a characteristic, but it's not necessarily race. It's what's going on in families and external to families. . . the characteristics [of neighborhoods they identify] are going to be disproportional to African-American families because of the state of affairs for those families. They are the type of families living primarily in the inner cities."

Gilman was not involved with the study, which is published in this week's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A person's cognitive ability, which is mainly shaped early in life, can predict how well he or she will do later in life in terms of education, employment, whether or not they enter the criminal justice system and health.

But experts differ in whether genetics or environment are the primary shapers. And the role of the neighborhood has not been extensively studied.

For this study, sociologists at Harvard University analyzed Chicago census tract data from 1990 and 2000 and identified six neighborhood characteristics which, together, formed "concentrated disadvantage" and were linked to the cognitive abilities of children.

The six characteristics were: welfare receipt, poverty, unemployment, female-headed households, racial composition and density of children.

More than 2,000 urban Chicago children aged 6 to 12 were assessed for verbal ability and other characteristics.

The children, with their caretakers, were followed wherever they moved in the United States for seven years.

The researchers took into account the impact of moving into and out of areas of disadvantage. About 17 percent of black children not living in disadvantage moved to a disadvantaged neighborhood between 1995 and 2002, while 42 percent of black children in disadvantaged neighborhoods in 1995 moved to a non-disadvantaged neighborhood during those years.

Children who lived in a severely disadvantaged neighborhood halfway through the follow-up period were almost all black, and they fell behind their otherwise identical peers by about four points on an IQ test. This translates into about one year of schooling.

Almost one-third of black children lived at some point in "concentrated disadvantaged" neighborhoods compared to almost no white or Latino children.

The findings tilt the nature-versus-nurture debate toward the latter factor.

"The study has implications for interventions, because they've identified the risk factors, it appears, that contribute to negative outcomes," Gilman said. "We don't have a lot of intervention research. It would seem that if you began to design intervention studies that target these specific risk factors, hopefully, you will begin to see an increase in verbal scores, particularly among African-Americans."

More information

Visit the Nemours Foundation   for more on kids' health.