News in Brief: Highlights from the Pediatric Academic Societies meeting

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/350241/description/News_in_Brief_Highlights_from_the_Pediatric_Academic_Societies_meeting

Some children at risk of suicide have easy access to guns

Roughly one in six children deemed at risk of suicide say that there are firearms at home, a study in urban centers finds. Stephen Teach, a pediatric emergency medicine physician at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, D.C., and his colleagues analyzed responses collected from 524 children and adolescents interviewed at several urban hospital emergency rooms in the United States. Of the patients, 180 were in the ER with psychiatric complaints and 344 were seen for other reasons.

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Maximizing preemies’ umbilical cord blood

A newborn’s umbilical cord is typically clamped immediately, severing it as a conduit for blood from mother to baby. Researchers now find that for very preterm infants, keeping the cord unclamped shortly after birth and squeezing it with a few long strokes from mother toward the child delivers valuable blood to the infant. The process — called milking because it looks similar to the technique used for milking cows — appears to benefit these at-risk babies.

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Bad attitude on concussions

One in four high school football players attending a competitive football summer camp said they had experienced a concussion, researchers reported May 6. Of the 120 players attending the camp in the summer of 2012, 70 percent said they had received education on symptoms of concussions and a higher percentage recognized symptoms of a concussion, such as headache, dizziness and difficulty remembering things.