Why do some children develop asthma and others don’t? Scientists at the University of Aberdeen are hoping to be able to answer this question when they follow more than a thousand babies until they’re of school-age to try to find out what factors cause the condition to develop. Previous small-scale experiments carried out in Aberdeen […]
Scans are used in pregnancy to determine the growth and health of the foetus. Ultrasound measurements have been commonly used to detect fetal macrosomia, when a baby in the womb is significantly larger than average. It can be hard to accurately tell a baby’s weight from the size of a mother’s tummy during pregnancy. Women […]
Parents were once encouraged by health experts to avoid giving their weaned babies certain ‘high risk’ foods to reduce the risk of their offspring developing potentially life-threatening food allergies. Many parents in the US in the 1980s and 1990s, advised by the American Academy of Paediatrics avoided giving babies cow’s milk for a year after birth, eggs […]
Midwifery has a very important role to play in helping to solve some really big problems that affect women and their babies around the world. It is estimated that nearly 300,000 women die every year during pregnancy, childbirth or soon after. About 2.6 million women suffer stillbirths, and almost 3 million infants die in the […]
Women who have had their appendixes removed are actually more likely to conceive a child afterwards, rather than less. This is what our latest large-scale study, published in the journal Fertility and Sterility, has found which flies in the face of the classic view that appendectomies harm a woman’s chance of having a baby because they […]
Mums are choosing to have their babies later in life. As a GP, I see a growing number of women in their 30s and 40s who are expecting their first child, or hoping to have a child of their own. Many are professional women who have put their careers first but are now ready to start a family. Of […]
Bad behaviour may be wired into adolescent brains early in life, according to a study which we published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry. Young men with persistent behavioural problems, including destructive behaviour and lying and stealing, seem to have brains which differ significantly in structure from those of their better-behaved peers. We used MRI scans to look at […]
Every year, thousands of children throughout Britain are taken to their local GP or A&E with a high temperature. They may have no other symptoms but they are clearly unwell. The difficulty that the clinician faces is trying to make a rapid assessment as to whether the child has a virus – by far the […]
Peanut allergy affects around one in 30 children (that’s one child in each school class). We think that the rates of peanut allergy have probably stabilised – which means that while it shouldn’t become more common, there are still plenty people out there with peanut allergy, and a real need to help those children and their families affected. One recent […]
Results of our research have shown that babies born to mothers with gestational diabetes have more body fat at two months of age compared to babies born to healthy mothers. The study used MRI scanning to measure body fat in 86 babies – we took these readings shortly after birth, and again when the babies […]
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