The last few weeks, a summary:
Regarding the Children
They finally returned to school last Wednesday, and today starts their first full week back. Outdoor Lab went off without a hitch, though AG fell sick a couple days afterward and then suffered through bronchitis through most of her winter break.
Oh, who am I kidding. We all suffered. She’s a good sport, but it’s probably impossible for an almost 12 year-old not to whine about lying on the couch for 10 days straight while her friends are off snowboarding in the Rockies with their families.
Regarding the Posting (or Lack Thereof)
See above.
Regarding the Posting From Now On
I have lots of stuff in the works, from AG’s long-promised article about Outdoor Lab to a food review to my resumption of the regular old Asthma Mom post schedule – Tuesday’s question, Friday’s links, and random scattered articles in between.
Regarding Some Links
Recently, the British Medical Journal called out Andrew Wakefield, discredited physician and the man behind the autism/vaccination scare, for outright fraud in his “research,” including alteration and/or misrepresentation of all 12 study subjects. Don’t miss the BMJ editorial on the matter, either.
Let’s see. What else have I been reading lately? Oh, yeah. Parents of babies, listen up: early antibiotics may not be the best idea.
Some scientists have been rereading some research and talking about food and asthma risk/prevention again, but we still don’t have a specific Asthma Diet recommendation. So don’t go changing your eating habits drastically or anything.
Tangentially related, Steve knows someone who wrote a cookbook for people dealing with the dreaded Prednisone Stomach, so that’s sort of like an asthma diet.
Finally, check the lot numbers on your albuterol respules. There’s been a recall.
I think that catches me up now.
Come back tomorrow for Tuesdays are Your Turn, the first one in what? Two weeks? Three?
I’m so glad that Wakefield has been openly declared a fraud. I just hope criminal charges are to follow. He’s done so much damage in the world – and he keeps perpetuating the vaccine/autism myth.
Anyway, welcome back!
Well I did take fish oil while pregnant but now I feel guilty about all the cake as I have a wheezer.
I see that a low carb (i.e. Mediterranean) diet is recommended for asthma–very interesting article.
My prednisone recipe? An entire bunch of celery with a corresponding amount of bleu cheese dip. Works like a charm.
M
With the antibiotic use making kids more likely to get childhood asthma…what about having childhood asthma and it being more likely for you to need antibiotics for bronchitis as a kid?
Melissa, I think a lot of the risk factor research involves just that sort of chicken-and-egg question, and I don’t know the answer. It almost makes me glad I didn’t start reading much of it until after my daughter was diagnosed, you know?
“It almost makes me glad I didn’t start reading much of it until after my daughter was diagnosed, you know?”
Yeah, I know! This kind of decision making would make me crazy if I were a parent.
Melissa
A similar issue popped up earlier last year with acetaminophen (paracetamol if you’re outside North America) and asthma. In one of the studies that generated alarm, it turned out to be a case of bad reporting: The study was on acetaminophen use and frequency of asthma symptoms in kids already diagnosed with asthma, and tellingly, the kids with high use of acetaminophen also had higher frequencies of URTIs, which could just as easily have explained the link. The researchers themselves strongly emphasized that this was a prospective, correlational study, and though the findings merited further study on the subject, no firm conclusions could be drawn.
It appears (to my non-medical expert eyes) that the antibiotic/asthma studies might suffer from the same flaw: They seem to me to be purely correlative studies, just based on the language in the reporting that’s been done on them. From what I’ve read, critics of the studies have raised the same issue, and pointed out that the antibiotics were often given for respiratory ailments (which is a known risk factor for asthma on its own). My impression is that, like with acetaminophen, it definitely merits further study, but it’s premature to jump to any conclusions.