Before They Are Even Breathing, Air Pollution Can Hurt Babies’ Health
Victoria Niklas, M.D., takes care of some of the area’s sickest newborns at the NICCU at Childrens Hospital Los Angeles. Grace was born early because her mother had preeclampsia.
It was back in the late 1980s, as an OB-GYN in South Los Angeles, that Robin Johnson, M.D., says she first understood how important a mother’s breathing can be to her unborn baby. One of her patients had asthma so bad it landed her in the hospital three to four times a month.
“She eventually delivered, and delivered early,” Johnson says, though the baby was almost at term. What surprised the doctor was that, though the mother was of normal stature and not really sickly, “she ended up having this little four-pound baby.”
Today, Johnson teaches at USC’s Keck School of Medicine and is a fellow with the Reach the Decision Makers Training Program, created by the National Center of Excellence in Women’s Health at UC San Francisco. Her project: To convince the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to look at birth outcomes when setting environmental policy. The agency says they do consider birth outcomes in the “science assessment phase” of National Ambient Air Quality Standard reviews, but confirms that birth outcomes aren’t taken into account when analyzing costs and benefits of setting a new National Ambient Air Quality Standard.
“Women and children are always the last variable that is thought about,” Johnson says. “It’s up to us to say, Hey, wait a minute, we’re where it starts! When you talk about the chicken and the egg, we’re both.”
Around 150,000 babies are born in L.A. County every year, and when they are born to mothers breathing polluted air they are up to 30% more likely to be premature or underweight, studies over the past decade show. Research out last month from a team at USC, UC Davis and Childrens Hospital L.A. also found they could have double the risk of autism. Click to read more about air pollution in utero …
The first evidence that exposure to bisphenol A (BPA) might compromise the quality of a woman’s eggs is in. A small study from UC San Francisco found women who had double the level of BPA in their blood had half as many eggs that would fertilize, compared with women who had lower BPA levels. The 26 women in the study, published this month in the journal Fertility and Sterility
Who couldn’t use a little calm and focus after the hectic pace of the holidays? Here’s a way to carve out a little quiet time, and then take advantage of your child’s Zen-like state for some skill building.
As we head into the new year, maybe you’d like some help with your get-fit or get-slim goals. One way to boost both your resolve and your results is to hire a trainer. Alexis Peraino, M.D., who has a degree in exercise physiology and selects the personal trainers referred by the Cedars-Sinai Center for Weight Loss in Los Angeles, offers her tips for finding one who can get you there. She says to ask about:
I took your question to James Cherry, M.D., a professor of pediatric infectious diseases who works with Mattel Children’s Hospital at UCLA. Asked if your daughter’s cold could have been related to the nasal flu vaccine, he responded, “Almost certainly not.” Some people do experience symptoms after having the nasal flu vaccine, but Cherry says these come on right away. Since your daughter’s cold didn’t come along until a week after she received the vaccine, “Unfortunately, she was exposed to somebody with a cold and she caught it,” Cherry says.
No matter where you live, it’s a good idea to prepare for “nature” at its most exciting. Here are 10 items the Los Angeles County Office of Emergency Management says we should all have on hand.
If you are pregnant and have symptoms of depression, seek out a therapist. That’s the take-home message from a new study that found higher levels of stress hormones in babies born to depressed moms. As many as one in every five women experiences depression during pregnancy.
Is your child one of the millions (approximately 3 million in the U.S., the CDC said in 2008) diagnosed with food allergies? New government guidelines suggest you should pay attention to how that diagnosis was made.
