Shootings and other traumatic events involving children are not rare events, but there's a startling lack of scientific evidence on the best ways to help young survivors and witnesses heal, a U.S. government-funded analysis found.

School-based counselling treatments showed the most promise, but there's no hard proof that anxiety drugs or other medication work and far more research is needed to provide solid answers, say the authors who reviewed 25 studies. Their report was sponsored by the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

According to research cited in the report, about two-thirds of U.S. children and teens younger than 18 will experience at least one traumatic event, including shootings and other violence, car crashes and weather disasters. That includes survivors and witnesses of trauma. Most will not suffer any long-term psychological problems, but about 13 per cent will develop symptoms of post-traumatic stress, including anxiety, behaviour difficulties and other problems related to the event.

The report's conclusions don't mean that no treatment works. It's just that no one knows which treatments are best, or if certain ones work better for some children but not others.

"Our findings serve as a call to action," the researchers wrote in their analysis, published online Monday by the journal Pediatrics.

"This is a very important topic, just in light of recent events," said lead author Valerie Forman-Hoffman, a researcher at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

She has two young children and said the results suggest that it's likely one of them will experience some kind of trauma before reaching adulthood. "As a parent I want to know what works best," the researcher said.

Besides the December massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, other recent tragedies involving young survivors or witnesses include the fatal shooting last month of a 15-year-old Chicago girl gunned down in front of a group of friends; Superstorm Sandy in October; and the 2011 Joplin, Mo., tornado, whose survivors include students whose high school was destroyed.

Some may do fine with no treatment; others will need some sort of counselling to help them cope.

Parents' handling of aftermath

Studying which treatments are most effective is difficult because so many things affect how a child or teen will fare emotionally after a traumatic event, said Dr. Denise Dowd, an emergency physician and research director at Children's Mercy Hospitals and Clinics in Kansas City, Mo., who wrote a Pediatrics editorial.

One of the most important factors is how the child's parents handle the aftermath, Dowd said.

"If the parent is freaking out" and has difficulty controlling emotions, kids will have a tougher time dealing with trauma.

Traumatized kids need to feel like they're in a safe and stable environment, and if their parents have trouble coping, "it's going to be very difficult for the kid," she said.

The researchers analyzed 25 studies of treatments that included anti-anxiety and depression drugs, school-based counselling, and various types of psychotherapy. The strongest evidence favoured school-based treatments involving cognitive behaviour therapy, which helps patients find ways to cope with disturbing thoughts and emotions, sometimes including talking repeatedly about their trauma.

This treatment worked better than nothing, but more research is needed comparing it with alternatives, the report says.

"We really don't have a gold standard treatment right now," said William Copeland, a psychologist and researcher at Duke University Medical Center who was not involved in the report. A lot of doctors and therapists may be "patching together a little bit of this and a little bit of that, and that might not add up to the most effective treatment for any given child," he said.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/story/2013/02/11/trauma-children.html

Roads are 'getting worse and worse,' as 20 cm forecast to fall today

February 5, 2013 -- Greater Toronto Area REALTORS® reported 4,375 transactions through the TorontoMLS system in January 2013. This number represented a slight decline compared to 4,432 transactions reported in January 2012.

“The January sales figures represent a good start to 2013. While the number of transactions was down slightly compared to last year, the rate of decline was much less than what was experienced in the second half of 2012. This suggests that some buyers, who put their decision to purchase on hold last year due to stricter mortgage lending guidelines, are once again becoming active in the market,” said Toronto Real Estate Board (TREB) President Ann Hannah.

“It is interesting to note that sales were up for many home types in the GTA regions surrounding the City of Toronto. This is due, at least in part, to the additional upfront land transfer tax in the City of Toronto,” added Ms. Hannah.

The average selling price for January 2013 sales was $482,648 – up by 4.3 per cent compared to $462,655 in January 2012. The MLS® Home Price Index (HPI) Composite Benchmark price was up by 3.8 per cent over the same period.

“There will be enough competition between buyers in the marketplace to prompt continued growth in home prices in 2013. Expect annual average price growth in the three to five per cent range this year,” said Jason Mercer, TREB’s Senior Manager of Market Analysis.

Regular consumption of deep-fried foods such as French fries, fried chicken and doughnuts is associated with an increased risk of prostate cancer, and the effect appears to be slightly stronger with regard to more aggressive forms of the disease, according to a study by investigators at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

Corresponding author Janet L. Stanford, Ph.D., and colleagues Marni Stott-Miller, Ph.D., a postdoctoral research fellow and Marian Neuhouser, Ph.D., all of the Hutchinson Center's Public Health Sciences Division, have published their findings online in The Prostate. While previous studies have suggested that eating foods made with high-heat cooking methods, such as grilled meats, may increase the risk of prostate cancer, this is the first study to examine the addition of deep frying to the equation.

From French fries to doughnuts: Eating more than once a week may raise risk Specifically, Stanford, co-director of the Hutchinson Center's Program in Prostate Cancer Research, and colleagues found that men who reported eating French fries, fried chicken, fried fish and/or doughnuts at least once a week were at an increased risk of prostate cancer as compared to men who said they ate such foods less than once a month.

In particular, men who ate one or more of these foods at least weekly had an increased risk of prostate cancer that ranged from 30 to 37 percent. Weekly consumption of these foods was associated also with a slightly greater risk of more aggressive prostate cancer. The researchers controlled for factors such as age, race, family history of prostate cancer, body-mass index and PSA screening history when calculating the association between eating deep-fried foods and prostate cancer risk.

"The link between prostate cancer and select deep-fried foods appeared to be limited to the highest level of consumption -- defined in our study as more than once a week -- which suggests that regular consumption of deep-fried foods confers particular risk for developing prostate cancer," Stanford said.

Deep frying may trigger formation of carcinogens in food Possible mechanisms behind the increased cancer risk, Stanford hypothesizes, include the fact that when oil is heated to temperatures suitable for deep frying, potentially carcinogenic compounds can form in the fried food. They include acrylamide (found in carbohydrate-rich foods such as French fries), heterocyclic amines and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (chemicals formed when meat is cooked at high temperatures), aldehyde (an organic compound found in perfume) and acrolein (a chemical found in herbicides). These toxic compounds are increased with re-use of oil and increased length of frying time. Foods cooked with high heat also contain high levels of advanced glycation endproducts, or AGEs, which have been associated with chronic inflammation and oxidative stress. Deep-fried foods are among the highest in AGE content. A chicken breast deep fried for 20 minutes contains more than nine times the amount of AGEs as a chicken breast boiled for an hour, for example.

For the study, Stanford and colleagues analyzed data from two prior population-based case-control studies involving a total of 1,549 men diagnosed with prostate cancer and 1,492 age-matched healthy controls. The men were Caucasian and African-American Seattle-area residents and ranged in age from 35 to 74 years. Participants were asked to fill out a dietary questionnaire about their usual food intake, including specific deep-fried foods.

The first study of its kind "To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to look at the association between intake of deep-fried food and risk of prostate cancer," Stanford said. However, deep-fried foods have previously been linked to cancers of the breast, lung, pancreas, head and neck, and esophagus.

Because deep-fried foods are primarily eaten outside the home, it is possible that the link between these foods and prostate cancer risk may be a sign of high consumption of fast foods in general, the authors wrote, citing the dramatic increase in fast-food restaurants and fast-food consumption in the U.S. in the past several decades.

The project was supported by the National Cancer Institute and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center

With the demise of the copper coin, many people are unsure of how this will affect their financial transactions. Here are a few tips to consider.

Today the Royal Canadian Mint stops making pennies. This will change the way Canadians make cash transactions; in some instances, we’ll have to replace the lucky penny with a nickel or a dime. While penny-pinching will never be the same, many of us will be glad to see those little copper nuisances gone for good from our wallets, pockets and junk drawers. Whether you’re celebrating or mourning the demise of the penny, here are a few things to keep in mind:

1. You can still use pennies
The Royal Canadian Mint isn’t going to make them anymore, but pennies are still legal tender in Canada and you’ll still be able to find goods and services priced in one-cent increments.

2. Get used to rounding

Businesses that decide to stop accepting pennies will round your transactions up or down – so, if your total is $1.01 or $1.02, you might pay $1.00. If your total is $1.03 or $1.04 it could be rounded up to $1.05. The catch: whether they round up or down is 100 percent up to the business so you could end up paying more.

3. Everything stays the same if you don’t pay cash

If you pay by debit, credit or cheque, prices will stay the same. So, if your bill is $1.52 you’ll pay $1.52.

4. You can still take your pennies to the bank

Because they’re legal tender, your bank will take them indefinitely.

5. You can donate them to charity

With the elimination of the penny, charities like Habitat for Humanity are now conducting penny drives. You’ll be able to get rid of those old copper coins while doing some good!

 

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