Judah Fundraiser

Help Judah as he is awaiting a new heart

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Here's Judah's story


-NewsAnchorMom Jen

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What is a Mental Disorder?

There are a lot of topics of discussion in here, so I put my notations in black.

FROM CNN: Sweeping new changes are out tonight in the whole area of behavior, and what is really a mental disorder. Have we way over-diagnosed ourselves? Does everything need a label, a treatment? The implications are huge.

Is this just a typical temper tantrum or a new disorder? What about this? Clinical depression or just sadness?

The editors of the so called "bible of psychiatry" want to re-name and re-categorize dozens of behaviors. And it could affect the drugs millions of people are treated with and what therapies insurance companies cover.

One of the biggest proposed changes eliminating the Aspergers diagnosis and folding it in new category called "autism spectrum disorders."

Dr. Max Wiznitzer/ Rainbow Babies & Children Hospital "The use of single term will actually simplify care in some states for instance a label of Aspergers Syndrome does not get you educational services but a label of autism spectrum does." (I do know people who have kids with autism who struggled to get them the education they needed because they didn't have the right autism diagnosis.)

And they're introducing new disorder called "temper dysregulation with dysphoria" defined as children who have persistent bad moods with bursts of rage.

sa: sounds like that could be any child? f: it could.

But doctors says the new label was actually created to stop doctors from mis-diagnosing and medicating kids for bi-polar disorder. (Seriously, every kid has this disorder at some point. I am not sure this new disorder is a good idea.)

Gambling addiction is also in the book for the first time. But Internet and sex addiction didn't make the cut. The authors weren't convinced they're actual "addictions."

Another new label: 'mixed anxiety depressive" .. defined as exhibiting depressive symptoms...for just two weeks.

Dr. Michael First/ Professor of Clinical Psychiatry, Columbia University "Clearly doctors will be very tempted to try out anti-depressants on this and you know there's a huge potential for people getting medication being pressured to get medication for normal sadness."(What is normal sadness anyway? Who is to say how sad you should or shouldn't be about a situation. I never have understood that.)

Doctors expect pharmaceutical companies will re-market their existing products...for these "new" disorders. Small changes in language that could mean millions of dollars for the drug companies. (Obviously that is a bad thing if it means people will be taking medication they don't really need!)

-NewsAnchorMom Jen

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Preventing SIDS

The reporter interviewed parents who had an 8 month old who died from SIDS. I feel naive, but I thought I was in the clear with my 5 month old. He is so mobile now. This story made me nervous about SIDS again. How am I supposed to know whether he has low serotonin levels?

FROM NBC:What could be a key piece of information on the mystery of sudden infant death syndrome. A campaign to encourage putting infants to sleep on their backs has lowered the number of SIDS cases: but new research may answer some bigger questions on what really causes the syndrome.

Howard and Pam Teibel are among two thousand families a year who lose a child to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome - commonly known as SIDS. Howard: "I can't imagine what your, what you go through, and I think that, I know that what I go through is very also private." Their baby Andrew seemed healthy but his death at 8 months brought grief, anger and many unanswered questions.

Pam: "With the death of a child comes complications of unbelievable guilt and responsibility. This happened on my watch." The known risk factors for SIDS include prematurity, being male, over-bundling, maternal smoking and exposure to second hand smoke.

But new research from Boston's Children's Hospital and others suggest that something else is going on in SIDS babies, a deficiency of serotonin, which in infants, helps regulate breathing, sleep, blood pressure, and heart rate.

Dr. Kinney: "if there's too little serotonin, that circuit doesn't function well, that alarm system doesn't work, and the baby, when stressed, goes on to die." Sleep position is still an independent risk factor for SIDS and that's why all babies should be put to sleep on their backs.

Dr. Kinney: "A normal baby will wake up, and stir and turn its head and get itself out of that dangerous situation. Facedown baby may be re-breathing carbon dioxide and this builds up." There is currently no screening test for serotonin levels in the brain, but Kinney and colleagues hope that one day there will be.

Dr. Nancy: "What are you hearing from parents?" Dr. Kinney: "What we hear is hope. I don't know how else to say it." Hope that fewer babies die and more families like the Teibel's are spared this terrible grief.

-NewsAnchorMom Jen

See what all your friends are talking about. Join us at Skin Dimensions Day Spa in Peoria for a bareMinerals^® by Bare Escentuals Party on Saturday, February 20th between 9am and 3pm. This is your chance to try bareMinerals^®, the number one mineral makeup! No appointment necessary. Call 309-691-9381 for more information.

Older Moms and Autism

Since we seem to be focusing a lot on autism this week, I thought I should post this article on older moms and autism. Many people believe there are multiple reasons for the sharp increase in autism. One may be that women are waiting longer to conceive.

FROM CNN:A 10-year study examining 4.9 million births in the 1990s has found more evidence that there's a link between autism and the mother's age at conception.

"The risk of having a child with full syndrome autism increases with maternal age," concluded researchers at the University of California, Davis, who examined data from all births in their state for the decade. The findings are published in the February issue of the journal Autism Research.

The link between the parents' age and children's health is not entirely new. Prior studies have indicated that babies born to older women have higher risks of birth defects, low birth weight and certain chromosome problems, such as Down syndrome.

A 2007 Kaiser Permanente study conducted in California reported that autism risk increased with both the mother's and father's age. An Israeli study based in statistics from 1980s had isolated only paternal age as being linked with increased risk for autism.

Dr. Max Wiznitzer, a pediatric neurologist at Rainbow Babies & Children's Hospital in Cleveland, Ohio, said the latest research had a far larger sample size.

Autism is a growing disorder; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that one in 110 children had the condition in 2006. But its causes remain unknown.

In the latest study, researchers found that mothers over the age of 40 had 51 percent higher odds of having children with autism compared with mothers between the ages 25 and 29.

The father's age also played a factor, but only when he had a child with a woman under 30.

"When the mom has minimal age risk of an autistic child, we do see increased risks as dads get older," said lead author Janie Shelton, a graduate student researcher at UC-Davis.

It's unclear why the mother's age has more bearing in autism risk than the father's.

The study authors emphasize that while autism rates have risen 600 percent in the past two decades, older women having children contributed to only 5 percent more cases of autism.

As more women delay childbearing, it's important to keep the study in perspective, said Geraldine Dawson, chief science officer of Autism Speaks, the nation's largest autism science and advocacy organization.

"When we look at that dramatic increase [of autism] over the last two decades, there are multiple factors that have contributed to this," she said. "It appears that advanced parents' age, not just mothers but also father's, account for a very small portion of that increase."

Shelton said older mothers should not jump to conclusions.

"I don't think a mom blaming herself is going to help us understand what's causing autism or help prevent further cases," she said. "I would urge parents not to blame themselves, regardless of what age they are."

Shelton and the co-authors obtained all birth records in California from 1990 to 1999 and then collected data from the state's Department of Developmental Services to count the number of autism diagnoses from children born during that decade.

How parental age increases autism risks remains unknown, but several hypotheses exist. Some suggest that the cumulative effects of the environment, changes to the autoimmune system, stress and reproductive technology may affect autism risk.

"As people age, we know there are changes to our DNA that occur," Dawson said. "There have been studies that show we have increased damage to our DNA as parents age. They're more likely to have children of low birth rate and more birth complications. It's not surprising that those factors would slightly increase the risk for autism as well as other neurological disorders."

Despite the lack of concrete answers, Shelton said, the findings offer some hints.

"It gives us some clues where to look biologically," Shelton said. "In an epidemiological study, age is a proxy for a lot of things. And so we're trying to further understand why age might be showing up as a risk factor, because we don't know the mechanism yet."

-NewsAnchorMom Jen

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Eat with your Kids

We try to eat dinner together as much as possible. Although, I often make something different for the kids to eat. I am still working on getting them to eat the same things my husband and I like. It is challenging!

FROM NBC: Whatever you drink or eat, experts say sharing meals with your preschooler can cut his or her risk of becoming overweight and obese. Ohio State researchers studied data on more than 85-hundred children.

4-year-olds who regularly ate dinner with their families had lower levels of obesity. Getting at least 10 and a half hours of sleep each night and limiting TV time to less than two hours each day also cut the risk for obesity.

These data were collected in 2005 on 8,550 children who were born in the U.S. in 2001. The date were collected as part of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Birth Cohort, a study conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics.


-NewsAnchorMom Jen

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The Other Autism Debate

Last week we ran a story about Dr. Andrew Wakefield's study on the connection between autism and the MMR vaccine being discredited.

Here is the response from Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey:

Los Angeles, February 5, 2010

Dr. Andrew Wakefield is being discredited to prevent an historic study from being published that for the first time looks at vaccinated versus unvaccinated primates and compares health outcomes, with potentially devastating consequences for vaccine makers and public health officials.

It is our most sincere belief that Dr. Wakefield and parents of children with autism around the world are being subjected to a remarkable media campaign engineered by vaccine manufacturers reporting on the retraction of a paper published in The Lancet in 1998 by Dr. Wakefield and his colleagues.

The retraction from The Lancet was a response to a ruling from England's General Medical Council, a kangaroo court where public health officials in the pocket of vaccine makers served as judge and jury. Dr. Wakefield strenuously denies all the findings of the GMC and plans a vigorous appeal.

Despite rampant misreporting, Dr. Wakefield's original paper regarding 12 children with severe bowel disease and autism never rendered any judgment whatsoever on whether or not vaccines cause autism, and The Lancet's retraction gets us no closer to understanding this complex issue.

Dr. Wakefield is one of the world's most respected and well-published gastroenterologists. He has publisheddozens of papers since 1998 in well-regarded peer-reviewed journals all over the world. His work documenting the bowel disease of children with autism and his exploration of novel ways to treat bowel disease has helped relieve the pain and suffering of thousands of children with autism.

For the past decade, parents in our community have been clamoring for a relatively simple scientific study that could settle the debate over the possible role of vaccines in the autism epidemic once and for all: compare children who have been vaccinated with children who have never received any vaccines and see if the rate of autism is different or the same.

Few people are aware that this extremely important work has not only begun, but that a study using an animal model has already been completed exploring this topic in great detail.

Dr. Wakefield is the co-author, along with eight other distinguished scientists from institutions like the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Kentucky, and the University of Washington, of a set of studies that explore the topic of vaccinated versus unvaccinated neurological outcomes using monkeys.

The first phase of this monkey study was published three months ago in the prestigious medical journal Neurotoxicology, and focused on the first two weeks of life when the vaccinated monkeys received a single vaccine for Hepatitis B, mimicking the U.S. vaccine schedule. The results, which you can read for yourself HERE, were disturbing. Vaccinated monkeys, unlike their unvaccinated peers, suffered the loss of many reflexes that are critical for survival.

Dr. Wakefield and his scientific colleagues are on the brink of publishing their entire study, which followed the monkeys through the U.S. childhood vaccine schedule over a multi-year period. It is our understanding that the difference in outcome for the vaccinated monkeys versus the unvaccinated controls is both stark and devastating.

There is no question that the publication of the monkey study will lend substantial credibility to the theory that over-vaccination of young children is leading to neurological damage, including autism. The fallout from the study for vaccine makers and public health officials could be severe. Having denied the possibility of the vaccine-autism connection for so long while profiting immensely from a recent boom in vaccine sales around the world, it's no surprise that they would seek to repress this important work.

Behind the scenes, the pressure to keep the work of Dr. Wakefield and his colleagues from being published is immense, and growing every day. Medical journals take extreme risk of backlash in publishing any studies that question the safety of the vaccination program, no matter how well-designed and thorough the research might be. Neurotoxicology, a highly-respected medical journal, deserves great credit for courageously publishing the first phase of this vaccinated monkey study.

The press has been deeply misled in the way The Lancet retraction, and Dr. Wakefield's mock trial, have been characterized. Led by the pharmaceutical companies and their well-compensated spokespeople, Dr. Wakefield is being vilified through a well-orchestrated smear campaign designed to prevent this important new work from seeing the light of day.

What medical journal would want to step in front of this freight train? Moreover, why now, after 12 years of inaction, did The Lancet and GMC suddenly act? Is it coincidence that the monkey study is currently being submitted to medical journals for review and publication?

We urge the media to take a close look at the first phase of the monkey study discussed above and to start asking a very simple question: What was the final outcome of the 14 primates that were vaccinated using the U.S. vaccine schedule and how did that compare to the unvaccinated controls?

The U.S. vaccine schedule has grown from 10 vaccines given to our children in the 1980s to 36 today, perfectly matching the dramatic rise in autism. The work of Dr. Wakefield and his colleagues deserves to be shared with the world to further, rather than censor, scientific progress.

-NewsAnchorMom Jen
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Autism Services for free?

Easter Seals in the Peoria and Bloomington areas of Illinois are looking for volunteer families to participate in the P.L.A.Y. project. Some families will be given one year in a community standard intervention group. Some will be chosen for one year in a community standard group plus the P.L.A.Y. project. Either way, your child would be getting extensive and sometimes expensive services at no cost. Easter Seals is offering this to find out whether kids in the P.L.A.Y. project have more success than those who do not participate.

Requirements: Your child must be 2 1/2 to 51/2 years old and diagnosed with an Autism Spectrum Disorder or in the process of getting that diagnosis. You have to be willing to spend 1-2 hours a day doing playful interaction with your child. You must agree to have your child periodically evaluated and you cannot be receiving more than 10 hours a week of therapy services for your child at this time.

If you or a family you know is interested, contact Jim Runyon at Easter Seals: (309) 686-1177 Ext. 2306

The last time I checked, they were looking for 5-6 families in Bloomington and 5-6 families in Peoria.

Easter Seals Peoria-Bloomington to Participate in The P.L.A.Y. Project Research Grant from the National Institute of Mental Health

Grant to Fund Research on Play-based Early Intervention for Autism; Confronts Increasing Numbers of Young Children on the Spectrum

Peoria, IL - Through the support of a $1.85 million grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), Richard Solomon, MD, is conducting a three-year study of The Play and Language for Autistic Youngsters (P.L.A.Y.) Project Home Consulting model, a parent-training program that addresses the need for intensive early intervention for young children on the autism spectrum. Five sites have been selected for study participation throughout the Country, and local Easter Seals affiliate will serve as two of those five sites.

Today, approximately one in every 91 to 150 children is diagnosed with an autistic spectrum disorder (AAP and CDC). As the fastest growing disability in the U.S., autism continues to gain public attention, yet there is a national shortage of personnel trained in intensive approaches as recommended by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). The P.L.A.Y. Project addresses this shortage by using a ‘train the trainer’ approach, which promotes rapid dissemination of the program.

Developed by Dr. Solomon, P.L.A.Y. is a practical, family-friendly application of renowned child psychiatrist Dr. Stanley Greenspan’s Developmental, Individual-differences, Relationship-based (DIR) framework, popularly known as Floortime. Through structured monthly home visits focused on modeling, coaching and video feedback, consultants train parents to engage their child with autism in ways that promote emotional connection and communication. By training parents to participate in their child’s intervention, the program also promises to be cost-effective. The P.L.A.Y. Project costs under $4,000 per year, in comparison with other interventions that cost $40,000 to $60,000 per year.

Details of the study: With research-design guidance from Michigan State University, and community-outreach support from Easter Seals, The P.L.A.Y. Project is conducting a randomized, controlled, and blinded clinical trial. Drawing participants from five Easter Seals autism service locations, including Peoria and Bloomington, the study compares the outcomes of 60 children who participate in The P.L.A.Y. Project with the outcomes of 60 children who receive standard, community interventions, making it the largest study of its kind. Before and after the 12-month intervention, each child is assessed with a battery of tests to measure developmental level, speech and language, sensory-motor profile, and social skills.

“Preliminary research and early dissemination into community agencies, schools and hospitals around the world has demonstrated the effectiveness of our model,” said Dr. Solomon, medical director of The P.L.A.Y. Project. “Positive research outcomes would support efforts to encourage private insurers and government agencies to approve increases in funding for play-based autism intensive intervention services and ultimately, help children with autism become more engaged with the world around them.”

About The P.L.A.Y. Project®

Created by Richard Solomon, MD and based on the DIR® (Developmental, Individual-differences, Relationship-based) theory of Stanley Greenspan, MD, The P.L.A.Y. Project emphasizes the importance of helping parents become their child’s best P.L.A.Y. partner through evidence-based practice. Practical, affordable, and family-friendly, the P.L.A.Y. Project Home Consulting model has become widely practiced with positive clinical and research results. The program is operating in three countries and 26 states in the U.S., including many Easter Seals locations. More than 300 trained Home Consultants serve over a thousand children on the autistic spectrum every year. For more information about The P.L.A.Y. Project, visit www.playproject.org.

-NewsAnchorMom Jen

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