FindingsNoted123rtfView full imageTo some new parents, bringing the baby into bed at night seems a natural part of care—but the practice is strongly associated with Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Unfortunately, Yale School of Medicine pediatrics professor Eve R. Colson ’89MD and her team have found that bed-sharing increased from 6.5 to 13.5 percent during 1993–2010. (The work drew on data from the National Infant Sleep Position Study and was published in the September 30 JAMA Pediatrics Online First.) Bed-sharing leveled off among white parents, but continues to increase among black and Hispanic parents. Health-care providers can help reverse the trend, says Colson. Mental health professionals who treat obese patients should be free of stigma against overweight people. But Rebecca Puhl ’04PhD and colleagues surveyed 329 specialists treating eating disorders, and found that 56 percent had heard or witnessed fellow professionals making negative comments about obese patients. A smaller but significant percentage reported that peers had expressed negative stereotypes. (Puhl is deputy director of Yale’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity. The study appeared online on September 5 in the International Journal of Eating Disorders.) Such attitudes may affect treatment, so Puhl prescribes “stigma reduction efforts in training and clinical practice.” The experimental drug Teplizumab can forestall the destruction of beta cells in the pancreas, a process that results in Type 1 diabetes. Now, Yale immunobiologist (and endocrinologist) Kevan Herold and colleagues have reported, online in Diabetes, a strategy to identify individuals most likely to respond to the drug. The researchers treated 52 patients with Teplizumab two weeks after diagnosis—the typical protocol—and then also treated each person with the drug a year later. On average, their ability to make insulin was 88 percent higher after two years. Herold is hopeful that Teplizumab could even prevent diabetes from developing in people at high risk for the disease.
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