Parents Dilemma: Pox Party or Vaccination?

Parents are intentionally exposing their children to chickenpox—as well as measles, mumps and rubella—at arranged "pox parties."

Last week we reported on the use of chickenpox-laced lollipops, available on the internet, to expose children to the disease rather than receive a vaccination. The clampdown by law enforcement on this method is causing the increased popularity of “pox parties,” assemblages of children gathered together for the sole reason of infection.

Social media outlets like Facebook have advertisements for such get-togethers, and they seem to be gathering steam. But there is a question of whether this type of exposure is safer for children than getting immunized.

The backlash against wholesale childhood vaccination has promoted pox play dates, and has even spread to measles, mumps, and rubella. The belief is that infecting children at a young age will spare them the risk of serious complications if they get the disease as an adult.

Since the vaccine for chickenpox has basically ended easy access to contamination since becoming available in 1995, manual transfer of the virus seems to be the only way to create an environment that will allow for children to be “naturally” infected with the disease.

But while building immunity through such methods may be effective, parents could be putting their children at risk for serious unexpected infections, such as Hepatitis A, encephalitis, and strep.

What do you think about these parties? Would you expose your children intentionally? We’d love to hear your thoughts.

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Posted in: HEALTH

Can Weight Loss Reset Health Risks in Heavy Kids?

Overweight or obese children who shed excess pounds in adulthood are not automatically destined for higher rates of diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease.

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Overweight children who shed their excess pounds in adulthood don't face a higher risk of obesity-related health problems, an analysis of four studies involving children and adults in the United States, Australia and Finland has concluded.

The findings don't prove weight loss in itself will eliminate the extra risks, but they mean overweight or obese children are not automatically destined for higher rates of diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease.

"There is hope for overweight and obese children," chief author Dr. Markus Juonala at the University of Turku told Reuters Health in a telephone interview. "If they manage to become non-obese adults, then the risks of these outcomes -- diabetes, hypertension, early atherosclerosis -- are quite similar to those who have been normal weight all their lives. I think that's quite a positive message."

In the United States, about one out of every six children and adolescents is considered obese.

The report in the New England Journal of Medicine combined data from four studies that followed more than 6,000 children for an average of 23 years.

"It's been thought that if you're an obese kid, it's all done," said Juonala. "But based on these findings what really matters is what you are at as adult."

The researchers just observed what happened over time and did not test whether actively bringing down a child's weight can stave off health problems later on. But the results suggest that "there's time and opportunity for intervention to help those children who are overweight and obese," Juonala said.

At the start of the studies, 12 percent of the children were overweight or obese, and two percent were obese. By adulthood, those figures had leapt to 55 percent and 21 percent, respectively.

The analysis also confirmed what doctors have known for years: being an overweight adult increases your risk of various health problems.

Compared to people who were normal-weight both as children and adults, obese adults who had been heavy as kids as well tended to face the highest risks.

About 7 percent of them had type 2 diabetes, 29 percent had high blood pressure and 18 percent had high levels of "bad" cholesterol, for instance.

Among people who had never been overweight, only 1 percent had diabetes, 11 percent had high blood pressure and 9 percent had high-risk levels of bad, or LDL, cholesterol.

All of these problems raise the chances that people will end up with heart disease, the leading killer worldwide.

For adults who had trimmed their waistline back from large to normal, however, the picture looked less bleak: Their rates of heart disease risk factors were no different from those of people who had been slim all their lives.

"Primary care physicians should not take the pessimistic view that once childhood obesity is established, cardiovascular risk is also determined," the researchers said.

Because previous studies have shown that getting children to lose weight reduces heart disease risk factors, the results appear solid, Dr. Albert Rocchini of the University of Michigan said in an editorial.

"If we want to reduce the incidence of adult heart disease and thereby start to control the continuing escalation in U.S. health care expenditures," he said, "now is the time to do whatever it takes to develop more effective methods for both the prevention and the treatment of childhood obesity."

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Posted in: HEALTH

Green Tea Shows Small Effect on Cholesterol

Green tea, in a cup or a capsule, may shave off a few points of your "bad" cholesterol, a new research review suggests.

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Green tea, in a cup or a capsule, may shave off a few points of your "bad" cholesterol, a new research review suggests.

Looking at 20 past clinical trials, researchers found that green tea trimmed 5 to 6 points more from people's total cholesterol and "bad" LDL cholesterol levels than dummy capsules or other inactive treatments.

The trials tested either green tea itself or capsules containing green-tea compounds called catechins, which are thought to decrease cholesterol absorption in the gut.

In general, green tea in a cup was more consistently effective than capsules. But the benefits overall were fairly small.

"The analysis suggests there is only a modest effect of green tea on cholesterol levels," said senior researcher Olivia J. Phung, an assistant professor of pharmacy at Western University of Health Sciences in Pomona, California.

LDL cholesterol is considered optimal when it is below 100 milligrams per deciliter, whereas 160 mg/dL or more is considered high.

The researchers found no strong evidence that green tea boosted "good" HDL cholesterol, or cut triglycerides, another type of blood fat. So for people who have high cholesterol, green tea is no replacement for medication, Phung told Reuters Health in an email.

"If someone is already taking medication for their cholesterol," she said, "they should stick with it and not try to trade it for green tea -- either capsules or the beverage."

On the other hand, Phung noted, adding green tea to your diet could be one way to further improve your cholesterol numbers.

But green tea is not a dietary magic bullet. To keep your cholesterol in check, experts recommend getting plenty of high-fiber grains, fruits and vegetables, and limiting saturated fat (from meat and full-fat dairy) in favor of "good" fats from fish and vegetable oils.

A good number of clinical trials have examined whether green tea, or green tea extracts, can benefit people's cholesterol levels. But they have come to mixed conclusions. One problem is that most of those trials have been small, which makes the findings less reliable.

So for their study, published in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, Phung's team pooled the results of 20 clinical trials that involved a total of 1,415 adults.

In all of the trials, participants were randomly assigned to either use green tea everyday (as a beverage or capsule) or be part of "control" groups that took placebo capsules, drank a low-catechin tea or downed water in lieu of tea.

The trials lasted anywhere from three weeks to six months, with the green-tea users showing a bigger average decline in LDL and total cholesterol than their counterparts in the control groups.

The benefit seemed to be limited to people who already had high cholesterol when they entered the study.

Overall, teas appeared more effective than capsules. But Phung said there isn't enough data to be sure that the beverage is better than the extract.

"We would really need to have some head-to-head studies comparing the different forms of green tea in order to show which ones work more effectively," Phung said.

There are other questions, too—including what dose of green tea catechins is "ideal."

In the trials Phung's team studied, the daily catechin dose ranged from 145 milligrams to 3,000 milligrams. But the researchers were not able to test for a "dose-response" effect—which would have shown whether the cholesterol benefits increase as the catechin dose goes up.

As for side effects, green tea is considered safe in moderate amounts—though the drink and the extracts contain caffeine, which some people may need to avoid.

There have also been a few dozen cases of liver damage reported among people using green tea extracts, but it's not certain that the supplements are to blame.

The current study had no industry funding, and none of the researchers reports financial conflicts of interest.

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Posted in: HEALTH