Healthy diet may be key to kids’ reading skills - Study
Codeine is unsafe for children and should no longer be given to them, a new report from a leading paediatricians’ group warns. Codeine has been used to treat kids’ pain and coughs for decades “because we thought it was safer than other narcotics,” said report author Dr. Joseph Tobias.
But doctors have learned that the way codeine is processed in the body is very dangerous for children and can result in death, said Tobias, chief of anesthesiology and pain medicine for Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio.
Codeine is converted by the liver into morphine, but genetic differences between people can prompt the liver to create too much morphine in some and too little in others, he explained.
“Now, lo and behold, we’re learning that due to this genetic variation it’s a very dangerous medication,” Tobias added.
Children who rapidly metabolize codeine into an overdose of morphine can experience severely slowed breathing rates, and may even stop breathing and die, he said.
Concerns regarding codeine have been mounting for years, but the drug is still available without a prescription in over-the-counter cough formulas from outpatient pharmacies
Healthy eating may offer young children an unexpected benefit -- it might help them become better readers, a new study suggests. Researchers in Finland found students’ reading skills improved more between first grade and third grade if they didn’t eat a lot of sugary foods or red meat, and if their diet consisted mainly of vegetables, berries and other fruits, as well as fish, whole grains and unsaturated fats.
The study included 161 Finnish students. They were between the ages of six and eight (first grade to third grade). The researchers reviewed the children’s diets and their reading ability using food diaries and standardized reading tests.
A healthier diet was associated with better reading skills by third grade, regardless of how well the in 28 states and the District of Columbia, the American Academy of Paediatrics (AAP) report noted.
Codeine is also still commonly prescribed to children after surgical procedures such as tonsil and adenoid removal, the report added.
More than 800,000 patients under the age of 11 were prescribed codeine between 2007 and 2011, according to one study cited in the report.
Ear/nose/throat doctors most frequently prescribe liquid codeine/acetaminophen blends, followed by dentists, paediatricians and family physicians, the report found.
The report is published online Sept. 19 in the journal Paediatrics.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration slapped a black box warning on codeine medications in 2013, warning doctors to avoid giving the drug to children having surgery to remove their tonsils or adenoids.
Given the slow response to this health threat, the AAP decided to make a “stronger push” against the use of codeine in children, Tobias explained.
Dr. Robert Glatter, an emergency physician with Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, said codeine causes relatively few deaths, but should not be used because it is too unpredictable.
The AAP report noted at least three students could read in first grade, the researchers said.
“Another significant observation is that the associations of diet quality with reading skills were also independent of many confounding factors, such as socioeconomic status, physical activity, body adiposity [fat] and physical fitness,” study author Eero Haapala said in a University of Eastern Finland news release. He is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Eastern Finland and the University of Jyvaskyla.
Does that mean parents of picky eaters should be concerned about their child’s reading abilities? Not necessarily. Although this study found an association between the foods young children ate and their reading skills, it didn’t prove cause-and-effect.
Still, the study’s authors said parents, schools, governments and corporations all have an opportunity to enhance academic performance in schools by making healthy foods more available to children.