A research team lead by Deepa Sekhar, associate professor of pediatrics at Penn State College of Medicine, investigated major depressive disorder screening rates among privately insured teens and found screening rates are insufficient to address the youth mental health crisis.
Penn State Children’s Hospital hosted the first of two events to celebrate a milestone in the three-floor expansion of the region’s only freestanding children’s hospital on Oct. 18.
Adding higher frequencies to the American Academy of Pediatrics hearing test protocol helps detect adolescent hearing loss, according to a team of pediatricians and audiologists.
Using sign language with intensive speech therapy may be an effective treatment for children with a rare speech disorder called apraxia of speech, according to Penn State College of Medicine researchers. They suggest further exploration of the results of a case study showing the effectiveness of using several therapies together in cases of early diagnosis.
Understanding how parents cope while their child is in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) could lead to better support for the family and a more successful transition to home when the baby is healthy, according to Penn State College of Medicine and Penn State Harrisburg researchers. Parental use of religious and secular coping strategies while their prematurely born baby receives intensive medical care may affect the family's interactions.
Teaching parents bedtime techniques to encourage healthy sleep habits in their infants may help prevent obesity, according to Penn State College of Medicine researchers. Strong links exist between inadequate sleep and childhood obesity.
Mothers who practiced responsive parenting -- including reacting promptly and appropriately to hunger and fullness cues -- were less likely to have overweight babies at their one-year checkup than those who did not, say health researchers.
Dr. Leslie R. Walker-Harding, chief of the Division of Adolescent Medicine at Seattle Children’s Hospital, has been named chair of the Department of Pediatrics and pediatrician-in-chief at Penn State Health Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, and medical director of Penn State Children’s Hospital.
Physicians use different definitions of "reasonable medical certainty" when testifying as expert witnesses in child abuse cases. The variability is troubling because it could result in flawed rulings, according to researchers at Penn State College of Medicine. In court cases involving alleged child abuse, expert medical witnesses are asked to testify if abuse has occurred and when. Attorneys commonly ask expert witnesses to express their opinions in terms of reasonable medical certainty. However, there is no clear legal definition for the term.
