Study Ties Infant Birth Weight to Mothers' Breast Cancer Risk

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Health Tip: Bonding With Your Infant

HealthDay – 4 mins 46 secs ago (HealthDay News) -- Developing an intimate relationship with your newborn appears key to your baby's social and mental development, the Nemours Foundation says.

Bonding provides the infant with initial exposure to intimacy and helps foster the infant's self-esteem, the Foundation says.

Here are the Foundation's suggestions for new parents to promote bonding with their infants:

Provide soothing touch and skin-to-skin contact.Engage in eye-to eye contact with baby at close range.Move an object back and forth in front of baby's face.Make lots of faces and gestures for your baby to watch, learn and mimic.Talk to your baby frequently to foster a familiarity with your voice.

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Infant Vaccination 'Delays' Triple in Oregon: Study

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Infant 'Smarts' Similar With Different Types of Formula: Study

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New Techniques May Improve Infant Heart Surgery

HealthDay – 4 hrs ago WEDNESDAY, April 25 (HealthDay News) -- Two new monitoring techniques may provide early warnings about possible brain damage in children as they undergo surgery for heart defects, researchers report.

Autoregulation monitoring is a noninvasive technique that can determine when blood flow to the brain may be low. The other method, a blood test, uses a small sample of blood to detect brain-tissue injury during surgery.

Doctors previously had no way to detect brain injuries as they occurred during heart surgery.

Details of the research are to be presented Wednesday during an American Heart Association press briefing.

Brain injury occurs in 30 percent to 70 percent of infants and children who have surgery to repair congenital heart defects, which are heart abnormalities present at birth. For each 1,000 live births in the United States, about eight babies will have some type of heart defect, according to a heart association news release.

This was a pilot study to evaluate the feasibility of new ways to monitor for brain damage while children have surgery to repair heart defects. The researchers plan to conduct another study to assess the effectiveness of these brain monitoring techniques 18 months after surgery.

Researchers' data and conclusions should be considered preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed medical journal.

More information

The March of Dimes has more about congenital heart defects.

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Mom's caffeine not linked to infant sleep problems: study

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Bed-Sharing, Smoking Play Role in Sudden Infant Death

HealthDay – 1 hr 45 mins ago MONDAY, March 26 (HealthDay News) -- Although the rate of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) dropped by more than 50 percent following the start of a U.S. campaign encouraging parents to put babies to sleep on their backs, new research suggests that risk factors other than "tummy sleeping" may explain why SIDS rates have not declined further.

Chief among those other risk factors are bed-sharing (where the baby shares a sleeping surface with a parent or parents), smoking exposure before and after birth, and having objects in the crib, the study revealed.

"It's not that there are new risk factors; it's that now not all babies are sleeping on their tummies, so other things can be uncovered," explained study co-author Felicia Trachtenberg, a senior research scientist at New England Research Institutes, in Watertown, Mass.

The findings, culled from an analysis of 568 SIDS deaths that occurred in San Diego between 1991 and 2008, appear online March 26 and in the April print issue of Pediatrics.

Tummy sleeping is still the leading risk factor for SIDS, according to study co-author Dr. Henry Krous, director of the San Diego SIDS/Sudden Unexplained Death in Childhood Research Project at Rady Children's Hospital.

Nevertheless, the Back-to-Sleep program, started in 1994, has made a huge difference.

"It has been the most successful program that one could imagine," Krous said. "The incidence rates from SIDS have dropped dramatically in the United States, and similar public educational campaigns in Western Europe and Australia and New Zealand have had similar dramatic declines."

The study found that the percentage of infants who died of SIDS who were found on their stomachs decreased from about 84 percent to 30 percent.

Certain environmental or genetic factors -- including being black, male, premature or exposed to alcohol or smoking in the uterus -- also made a baby more susceptible.

"Exposure to cigarette smoke, either when the baby is in utero or after the baby has been born, is a very important risk factor for SIDS," Krous said.

Physical risks around the time of death included having the head covered; sleeping on an adult mattress, couch or playpen; soft bedding; bed sharing, and having cold symptoms.

Bed-sharing increased from 19 percent to almost 38 percent during the study period.

Dr. Carl Hunt, a research professor of pediatrics at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Md., commented on the findings.

"The most striking thing is that SIDS mortality rates have fallen considerably over this period of time, and the prevalence of prone sleeping has decreased significantly," Hunt said.

He noted that bed-sharing increased the most with infants younger than 2 months of age. The issue of bed-sharing has been very controversial, because of "concern that

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