Reducing the duration of antibiotics can do more harm than good when treating children with ear infections, warns a study.

When treating children between 9 and 23 months of age with antibiotics for ear infections, a shortened course has worse clinical outcomes without reducing the risk of antibiotic resistance or adverse events, showed results of the trial involving over 500 kids.

"Given significant concerns regarding overuse of antibiotics and increased antibiotic resistance, we conducted this trial to see if reducing the duration of antibiotic treatment would be equally effective along with decreased antibiotic resistance and fewer adverse reactions," said Alejandro Hoberman, Professor at University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine in the US.

"The results of this study clearly show that for treating ear infections in children between 9 and 23 months of age, a five-day course of antibiotic offers no benefit in terms of adverse events or antibiotic resistance," Hoberman noted.

"Though we should be rightly concerned about the emergence of resistance overall for this condition, the benefits of the 10-day regimen greatly outweigh the risks," Hoberman added.

In the current trial, 520 children with acute otitis media were randomly assigned to either a standard 10-day regimen of the antibiotic amoxicillin-clavulanate or a shortened five-day treatment followed by five days of placebo.

Acute otitis media is a common bacterial infection of the middle ear behind the ear drum in kids which causes it to become painfully inflamed.

The risk of treatment failure in the five-day group (34 per cent) was more than twice as much the risk in the 10-day group (16 per cent), according to the results published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

When they tested the presence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria through back of the nose swabs, there was no decrease in the 5-day group as might have been expected with a shorter duration of antibiotics.

Also, reduced-duration antibiotics did not decrease the risk of frequent adverse events like diarrohea or diaper rash, the study said.

A new research has revealed that expectant mothers should not smoke during pregnancy as it might impair children's kidney.

It is said that children who are born to women who smoked during their pregnancy were more likely to show signs of kidney damage by the age of three, compared to those born to non-smoking mothers.

The findings showed that maternal smoking during pregnancy was one of the risk factors of childhood proteinuria, abnormal amount of protein in urine -- a sign of kidney disease.

The effects on kidney health were evident in 3-year-old children.

Koji Kawakami from Kyoto University, in Japan, "Maternal smoking during pregnancy is known to be associated with preterm birth, low birth weight, and neonatal asphyxia. The findings from this study suggest an additional adverse effects of maternal smoking during pregnancy".

For the study, the team looked for the presence of proteinuria in urinary tests from 44,595 children from pregnancy to three-years of age.

The results showed that the prevalence rates of proteinuria in children at age three in the maternal smoking groups -- none, past, and current -- were 78.9 per cent, 4.4 per cent and 16.7 per cent, respectively.

Maternal smoking during pregnancy was associated with a 1.24-times increased risk of child proteinuria compared with no exposure to maternal smoking during pregnancy.

"Prevention of child proteinuria is important since child proteinuria can lead to development of chronic kidney disease in adulthood and ultimately end stage renal disease," Kawakami said.

The findings is forthcoming in the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (CJASN).

Parents, take note! Encouraging children to use gestures as they think can help them come up with more creative ideas, according to new research.

"Our findings show that children naturally gesture when they think of novel ways to use everyday items, and the more they gesture the more ideas they come up with," said Elizabeth Kirk from the University of York in the UK.

"When we then asked children to move their hands, children were able to come up with even more creative ideas," said Kirk.

"Gesturing may allow us to explore the properties of the items - for example, how the item could be held, its size, its shape, etc - and doing so can trigger ideas for creative uses," Kirk added.

In their first study, researchers compared the creativity of children who spontaneously gestured with those who either did not or could not gesture.

A total of 78 children, ranging from nine to 11 years old, saw a series of images depicting ordinary household items, including a newspaper, a tin can and a kettle.

The researchers asked the children to look at each image and list as many novel uses as they could think of.

The children could take as much time as they needed; when they paused, researchers prompted them by saying "What else could you do with it?"

A subset of participants completed the task twice - on one version of the task, they wore mittens that limited their ability to gesture.

Researchers transcribed and coded each session, measuring the number of valid novel uses generated by each participant, as well as the originality of those responses and the diversity of categories that the responses fell under.

The data showed that children spontaneously gestured and that greater gesturing was associated with a greater number of creative ideas.

Restricting children's ability to gesture did not impact their ability to come up with creative uses for the objects.

Children who were free to gesture produced about the same number of ideas as those who wore the mittens and could not gesture.

This may be because children still had many other idea-generating strategies at their disposal when their hands were restricted.

In a second experiment, 54 children, ranging from 8 to 11 years old, completed the same alternative uses task.

In some cases, children gestured normally; in other cases, researchers instructed them to "use your hands to show me how you could use the object in different ways."

Children who gestured normally produced 13 gestures, on average, while those who were specifically prompted to gesture produced about 53 gestures, on average.

Children who were encouraged to gesture generated a greater number of novel uses for the everyday objects than did the children who were not given any special instruction.

The research appears in the journal Psychological Science.

Researchers said men could be more prone to Type 2 diabetes as they accumulate more iron than women. As compared to one-fifth of women, two-fifth of men were at risk of the disease.

Iron is a micronutrient which is required in the formation of some essential body proteins and enzymes, like haemoglobin, cytochromes and peroxidase.

Though it is harmful when stored in excess in the body, but promotes the release of free radicals that damage the secretion capacity of beta cells of pancreas to produce insulin.

The findings said, it also decreases insulin sensitivity in peripheral tissues and organs involved in glucose metabolism.

The study led by Alex O. Aregbesola from University of Eastern Finland, showed that men have 61 per cent higher prevalence and 46 per cent increased risk of developing Type 2 diabetes when compared with women.

Excess body iron accumulation is a known risk factor of Type 2 diabetes in hereditary hemochromatosis -- a disorder that causes the body to absorb too much iron from the diet.

However, the study showed that even mildly elevated body iron contributes to the prevalence and incidence of Type 2 diabetes.

This excess iron was found to disturb the glucose metabolism in the body. On the other hand, moderate iron stores were found safer than depletion toward iron deficiency.

Iron depletion toward deficiency did not offer protection against Type 2 diabetes.

The type of association between iron stores and the risk of Type 2 diabetes showed that the risk was lowest on moderate levels, the researchers said.

"This study provides a new body of evidence that mildly elevated body iron is an important risk factor of glucose metabolism derangement, which contributes to the increase in the prevalence and incidence of Type 2 diabetes," Aregbesola said, in the paper published in the journal Annals of Clinical Biochemistry.

(With IANS inputs)

A new colour-coding tool has been developed by scientists that can help them track live blood stem cells clones that plays a role in blood disorders and cancers like leukemia.

People are born with a certain number of blood stem cells and rely on them for life. Various blood disorders and cancers rises when a mutant clone of an original blood stem cell starts to dominate.

But what actually happens with blood stem cells over time has been hard to pin down.

Leonard Zon, Director of the Stem Cell Research Programme said, "There's significant interest in determining how a stem cell clone expands, what makes one clone dominant, and why that predisposes you to cancer and blood disorders".

For the study, the researchers have used the new tool on a specially bred zebrafish called Zebrabow that has multiple copies of genes for red-blue-gene fluorescent protein scattered through its genome.

This technique yields, in theory, about 80 different colours based on the cell's overall proportions of each fluorescent protein -- each colour representing a different clone or variety of blood stem cell, the researchers said.

Thus, with the new technique, the researchers could isolate the cells by colour, and then look at what genetic factors are involved in their expansion.

Until now, this has been hard to analyse, since no one knew how many blood stem cells we start out with.

Based on the zebrafish data, the researchers estimate that blood stem cells make up about 20 per cent of all blood cell progenitors at the time they are formed.

The study provides a starting point for exploring, for example, why and how a particular blood stem cell clone may begin to expand as people age, posing a risk for leukemia, or how cancer chemotherapy can sometimes transform tumour cells as well as help improve bone marrow transplant for a variety of childhood and adult disorders.

The study appears in the journal Nature Cell Biology.