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Adding a patient's photo to an X-ray could cut the rate of medical errors caused by mix-up, a new study finds.

Although it’s relatively rare, mix-ups of patients’ X-rays can lead to dire consequences.

One way to get around the problem of such “wrong patient” errors is to take a photo of the patient’s face at the same time the X-ray is shot, a new study suggests.

If a doctor is looking at the wrong X-ray, the fallout could be catastrophic, said Dr. Srini Tridandapani, the author of the study presented at the annual meeting of the American Roentgen Ray Society.

“The patient could be diagnosed with cancer and then get an operation he shouldn’t have while the patient who should have gotten the cancer diagnosis isn’t getting the surgery. So you could be affecting two patients,” said Tridandapani, an assistant professor of radiology and imaging sciences at Emory University.

No one knows exactly how many times patients are matched with the wrong X-ray each year, said Tridandapani, who conducted the study jointly with the Georgia Institute of Technology. But it’s estimated that these kinds of identification errors occur in 1 out of every 10,000 patients.

While that may seem like a small number, companies like Motorola aim to have no more than one chip in a million fail, Tridandapani noted.

“I think human beings are more precious than chips, so I don’t accept a rate of 1 in 10,000,” he added. “I think we need to get beyond 1 in a million.”

Tridandapani came up with the idea of adding patient photos to X-rays after he answered a call and the image of the caller appeared on his phone.

“It occurred to me that we should be adding a photograph to every medical imaging study,” he said. 

Errors could be reduced simply by adding photos to patient X-rays, he thought.  To test his theory, Tridandapani rounded up 200 pairs of X-rays (one pair per patient) that he gave to 10 radiologists to read.

Each radiologist got 20 pairs of X-rays. Each set of X-rays contained a few pairs that were actually from different patients. The first time he ran his experiment, the radiologists got only the X-rays. The second time, the X-rays came with photos of the patients.

When there was no photo, the group of radiologists caught only three out of 24 mismatches – about 13 percent.  When photos were included with the X-rays, they caught 16 out of 25 errors – or 64 percent.

Part of the problem is that doctors don’t expect to get the wrong X-ray and they often don’t recognize the mistake when it happens, Tridandapani said. They might try to explain away disparities instead of recognizing the errors.

Dr. Albert Wu, who has studied near-misses in medicine, said the new method might, indeed, avoid some dangerous mix-ups.

“This study, on its face makes a lot of sense to me,” said Wu, a professor of health policy and management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and an attending physician at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. 

“If you have the wrong films for someone about to have a procedure you could have a terrible result,” Wu said.

Still, Wu said, there are possible downsides.  When you add photos, radiologists might take longer to read X-rays. And there’s also a question of privacy -- people might not want photos of themselves included in their medical files. Overall, he said, the added safety probably outweighs these concerns.

“I think it’s a pretty neat way to improve patient safety,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, a professor of health policy at the Harvard School of Public Health. “I see very little downside to it, other than the possibility that a physician might read the X-rays differently if it was a man or a woman  -- and I think in general that’s unlikely.”

Even though Dr. Mitchell Schnall believes that the new method makes sense, he’s not sure that his colleagues will jump at the chance to implement it. 

“There’s a lot of pressure on radiology in terms of efficiency,” said Schnall, a professor and chair of the department of radiology at the University of Pennsylvania. “Anything that adds to the workload gets looked at with some skepticism.”

Schnall said radiologists will worry that the addition of photos will mean that each case will take longer to analyze.  But, he added, the photos might actually speed things up.

“For example,” Schnall said, “when you’ve got a patient in the ICU setting there are many tubes and wires in the patient, an external photo would help us know whether those are internal or external.”

Related stories: 

• Why patients don't report medical errors
• Cancer doctor reveals the very dark side of medical mistakes

Low levels of melatonin, a hormone involved in the regulation of sleep, may boost the risk of diabetes, a new study suggests.

Over a 12-year period women, with the lowest levels of melatonin were more than twice as likely to develop type 2 diabetes, compared to those with the highest levels of the hormone, according to a report published in the Journal of the American Medical Association Tuesday.               

While the researchers expected to find some association between melatonin and diabetes risk, they were surprised by the magnitude of what they saw, said the study’s lead author, Dr. Ciaran McMullan, a research fellow at Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

“What we don’t yet know is whether you can change the risk of diabetes by increasing melatonin secretion,” McMullan said.

For the new study, researchers compared 370 diabetic women to 370 women without the disorder. The women came from a larger, ongoing project known as the Nurses’ Health Study. At the beginning of that study, all participants filled out surveys that questioned them about lifestyle habits, including diet, exercise, smoking history, and sleep patterns. The women were also asked to submit a urine sample, which provided a baseline melatonin level. None of the women had type 2 diabetes at the beginning of the study.

Even after the researchers accounted for lifestyle factors, including hours of sleep, women with the lowest melatonin levels were 2.2 times as likely to develop diabetes compared to those with the highest levels.

Although melatonin was found to be a predictor of diabetes risk independent of number of hours of sleep, the hormone does have an impact on the body's daily rhythms, peaking right before a person falls asleep and declining during the night. 

It's unknown whether low melatonin levels actually caused diabetes, but other research suggests that might be the case, McMullan said. Studies have shown that melatonin supplements given to diabetes-prone rats can help stave off the disease, while also improving cholesterol and triglyceride levels. 

Receptors for melatonin are found all over the body, including the pancreas, which makes insulin, he added. The presence of the hormone receptors in the pancreas suggests melatonin might have an impact on insulin production, as well as insulin resistance, McMullan said.

Still, more research is needed before recommending melatonin supplements for people with high blood sugar levels, McMullan said.

It’s entirely possible that the melatonin levels are simply an indicator of how well a person’s internal clock is working, said Dr. Mitchell Lazar, a professor of medicine and director of the Institute for Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

“We’ve increasingly realized that aspects of our sleep-wake cycle, our behavioral and circadian rhythms are environmental factors that contribute to the risk for diabetes,” Lazar explained. “For example, it’s been shown in many studies that people on shift work have an increased incidence of diabetes.

“Now it could be that low melatonin causes diabetes, but it could also be possible that diabetes causes low melatonin.”

The melatonin connection to diabetes is important, “but it’s just one piece of the puzzle,” Lazar said.

Related:

'Amazing' results for diabetes patients after surgery

A new study adds to years of research showing that childhood vaccines do not cause autism, despite worries among a growing number of parents that their young children receive “too many vaccines.”

Researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concluded that even when multiple inoculations are given on the same day, children are at no higher risk of developing autism, according to the report published in the Journal of Pediatrics Friday.

“This study looked into the concern that receiving too many vaccines at one doctor’s visit or too many vaccines during the first two years of life may be linked to the development of autism,” the report’s lead author, Dr. Frank DeStefano told NBC chief medical editor Dr. Nancy Snyderman. “We found they’re not related.” 

The CDC researchers conducted the study by reviewing the vaccination histories collected between 1994 and 1999 of 256 children with autism and 752 children who did not have the disorder. They calculated the number of antigens – the substances in a vaccine that stimulate disease-fighting antibodies – that infants are exposed to either on one doctor’s visit or overall during the first two years.

“We did not find any relationship between the number of antigens and the risk of autism,” said DeStafano, Director of the Immunization Safety Office at the CDC.

The CDC study comes amidst reports that increasing numbers of parents are delaying or skipping childhood inoculations, fearing side effects or the risk of autism and other learning disabilities.

A 2012 study, which examined medical records for 97,711 Portland, Oregon children, found an almost four-fold increase between 2006 and 2009 in the percentage of parents who delayed or skipped vaccinations, researchers reported in the journal Pediatrics. Experts say that by delaying certain vaccinations, parents may be putting their children -- and those of others -- at a far greater risk of contracting deadly diseases, such as pneumonia and whooping cough, also known as pertussis. In 2012, the US experienced the worst epidemic of whooping cough in 50 years

That’s a real concern for Dr. Tanya Altmann, an assistant clinical professor at Mattel Children’s Hospital at UCLA.

“Some parents ask about waiting on vaccines and using an alternative or delayed schedule,” because of worries about autism, Altmann told Snyderman.

Altmann tries to remind parents that while they may worry about the unknown, there are real risks to skipping vaccinations or delaying them: outbreaks of severe, sometimes deadly, illnesses.

“The bottom line for parents is that these outbreaks are real and they will come back,” Altmann said.  “These are serious illnesses, meningitis, whooping cough. This study is just one more piece of evidence to reassure parents that vaccines are safe.”

Although inoculation contents and schedules have changed since the study data was collected, Snyderman sees the findings as applicable to today's children since CDC researchers tallied the total amount of antigens  -- bits of protein in a vaccine that spark an immune response -- that each child was exposed to.

“While the CDC now recommends more vaccinations than it did in the 90s, the level of antigens in today’s vaccines is markedly lower than it was when this data was collected,” Snyderman said.

DeStefano hopes the new research will convince parents that it’s safe to follow CDC vaccination schedules.

“The number of vaccines in the current immunization schedule is what’s needed to protect children,” he said. “It’s not too many for a child’s immune system.”

 Related:

Despite evidence, parents' fears of HPV vaccine grows

This year's flu kills at least 110 children; most weren't vaccinated

Quality prekindergarten programs can boost children’s school skills whether the kids come from poor or well-off homes, a new study shows.

While most previous studies had focused only on kids from underprivileged backgrounds, in the new study Harvard researchers found that regardless of family income children who got a year of quality prekindergarten did better in reading and math than kids who spent the year in daycare, with relatives, or in some other kind of preschool, according to the report which was published in Child Development. 

As a further benefit, the kids who spent a year in preschool developed better “executive functioning.”

That means is that they had developed the skills needed to take advantage of what is being taught in school, said the report’s lead author Christina Weiland, a researcher at Harvard when the study was done and currently an incoming assistant professor at the University of Michigan.

“For example, they’ve learned that they need to raise their hands before yelling out an answer,” she explained. “They’ve gotten better at keeping numbers in their heads when doing a math problem and remembering the teacher’s instructions. They’ve gotten better at shifting their attention from a distracting peer to what the teacher is saying.”

Those kinds of self-regulatory behaviors are highly predictive of how well you do later in life, Weiland said. 

There were some kids who benefited more than others from prekindergarten: Latino children, and to a lesser extent, Asian and African American children.

Weiland was able to study the impact of preschool in a sort of “natural” experiment. In Boston, kids qualify for a free, full-day preschool program during the school year if they turn 4  by Sept. 1.

Children born after that date must wait a year before they are eligible.

For the study, Weiland tested 969 kids who'd finished a full school year of preschool in 2008-2009 and compared them 1,049 kids who weren't quite old enough to have made the previous year's cutoff and so were just starting preschool. (Many of them had spent that year in daycare and being cared for by relatives or in other preschool programs.)

Experts unaffiliated with the new research welcomed the new report.

“I think this is a very important study since the effects weren’t just in children at a lower economic level,” said Patrick Tolan, a professor in the Curry School of Education and director of the Youth-Nex Center at the University of Virginia. “Just as important, though, is the implication that the boost in skills may very much depend on having high quality staff and using programs that have been empirically tested.”

Matia Finn-Stevenson, a research scientist and associate director of the Zigler Center in Child Development and Social Policy and director of the School of the 21st Century at Yale University, agreed that the quality of the program is all important.

“In this study the children were in a high-quality educational environment with teachers with masters degrees, teachers receiving coaching, etc.,” she said. “I know parents who are not satisfied with their PreK and they have told me they simply have to look the other way and not make waves because they have no alternatives.”

How can parents figure out whether their PreK program is good?

Finn-Stevenson suggests that “parents should look for a place that allows parents to come in at any time to see the PreK in action. Look for staff continuity – how long have they been at the school/program? How often and in what ways do they interact with the children? What is the overall atmosphere? How are the children interacting?”

One thing that’s unclear at this point is whether the gains in PreK will carry over into later years. That’s a topic that still needs to be researched, Tolan said.

Most mothers may be starting their infants on solid foods months sooner than specialists recommend, mistakenly believing their children are old enough to graduate from breast milk or formula – but many say they’re simply following doctors’ orders, according to a study published today.

Parents should wait until their little ones are at least 6 months old before offering them solid foods, say many child-nutrition experts, including the American Academy of Pediatrics.

But researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – who surveyed 1,334 new moms – discovered that almost 93 percent of those women had introduced solid foods to their infants before 6 months, that 40 percent did it before the 4-month mark, and that 9 percent had offered solids to their babies before they were even four weeks old, according to the study, published today in Pediatrics.

“Fifty percent said that their health care provider told them it was time to introduce solid food,” said Kelley Scanlon, a co-author of the study and lead epidemiologist in the nutrition branch in the division of nutrition, physical activity and obesity at the CDC.

“That, for us, indicates that health care providers need to provide clearer guidance and really support women in carrying out the recommendation,” Scanlon said.

Physicians' groups settled on the 6-month cut-off after earlier research determined that children who get solid food at too early might be at a greater risk for developing chronic diseases, such as diabetes, obesity, eczema and celiac disease, Scanlon said.

The mothers who volunteered for the CDC study filled out food diaries and questionnaires designed to ferret out their opinions on why and when solid foods should be offered.

Among the moms offering solid foods to infants younger than 4 months, the most commonly cited reasons for doing so included: “My baby was old enough;” “My baby seemed hungry;” “I wanted to feed my baby something in addition to breast milk or formula,” “My baby wanted the food I ate;” “A doctor or other health care professional said my baby should begin eating solid food;” and “It would help my baby sleep longer at night,” researchers reported.

What’s more, moms who fed their babies formula were far more likely to start solids too early versus those who exclusively breast-fed (53 percent versus 24 percent), the study showed.

One food expert unaffiliated with the CDC study suggested that some health-care providers may simply be unfamiliar with current baby-feeding recommendations.

“I think this is worrisome,” said Ann Condon-Meyers, a pediatric dietician at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh. “I think it may show that word isn’t getting out that … it is 6 months before solid foods should be offered.”

Still, the study’s findings didn’t surprise Condon-Meyers, who added: “I work in pediatrics and we see a lot of early introduction of solid foods when we do patient histories.”

In addition to possibly boosting, a child’s risk for contracting certain chronic diseases, introducing solid foods too early often means babies don’t drink an adequate amount of breast milk or formula, and that can translate into poorer nutrition, Condon-Meyers said.

Breast milk and formula have all the nutrients and vitamins a baby needs and in the right proportions, Condon-Meyers said.

“If you start giving solid food too early then you are diluting the nutritional intake,” she said. “You’re getting more calories, but less of the nutrients a baby needs to grow.”

Related:

Most parents don't follow doctors' orders
Peanuts, eggs and milk OK for young babies, report claims
Child food allergies may be twice as common as thought

In a sign that experts are taking sports concussions more seriously, new guidelines released today suggest that players be pulled from games even if there is only a suspicion that there’s been a head injury. Further, updated  American Academy of Neurology guidelines state that an athlete shouldn’t be allowed to return to play until a specialist gives the OK.

“The message we’re sending is that any time a concussion is suspected, even if you’re not sure, you should sit that player out until there has been an evaluation by a medical provider with concussion expertise,” said the guidelines’ lead author, Dr. Christopher Giza, an associate professor of pediatric neurology and neurosurgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine and the Mattel Children’s Hospital at the University of California, Los Angeles.

“We say:  ‘If in doubt, sit them out’.”

Olivia Brandy and her family certainly wish that those guidelines had been in effect when she suffered her first concussion. It happened back when Olivia was a high school freshman soccer player.

Brandy family

Olivia Brandy, now 19, suffered her first concussion during a soccer game when she was a freshman in high school. Now an elite player, she has had five concussions, but continues to play under a doctor's care. New guidelines say players should be pulled from play at the first sign of head injury.

“The problem started when I hit heads with a girl going up for a ball in a game,” said Olivia, now 19. “I remember feeling totally different when I got up, like somebody had tied a rope around my waist and was holding me back as I ran. I had no idea what the problem was. I just pushed through it and at the end of the game I was in severe pain.”

It took a week before anyone diagnosed the Pittsburgh-area teen with a concussion and that delay cost her six months of school and playing time -- which came as a shock to her parents.

“My husband’s a physician and I’m a nurse and though we knew about concussions, we didn’t appreciate how serious they were, or how much they could affect a young person’s life,” said Trina Brandy, 50. “We had our eyes opened by this.”

The guidelines also take into account new research showing that it’s almost impossible to immediately to predict how long concussion symptoms will plague a player. Earlier guidelines released by the AAN in the late 90s contained a concussion grading system that linked the severity of the hit with suggested recovery times.

Over the past two decades, however, researchers have learned that hard hits don’t necessarily correlate with long recovery times, Giza said. “We have all seen players knocked flat and unconscious who are able to pass our tests in a week,” he explained. “Others may hit their heads on the locker door and be out for weeks.”

What may be most important is the kind of symptoms kids experience right after the hit, Giza said.

Dr. Micky Collins, a specialist unaffiliated with the new guidelines  -- and Olivia Brandy’s doctor --  agreed.

“Concussions are like snowflakes -- each one is different,” said Collins, program director of the Sports Medicine Concussion Program at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. “What we’ve learned is that seemingly mild ones can become severe and severe ones can turn out to be mild. Players who have a loss of consciousness may not have any worse outcome. Dizziness on the field seems to be the only symptom that predicts poor outcome.  Players who experience dizziness are more likely to have a month or more of recovery time.”

Symptoms aside, the biggest factor controlling recovery time, both Giza and Collins agree, is quick diagnosis and proper management  --  which means rest for the recuperating brain.

That’s certainly been the case for Olivia. She’s experienced more concussions since the one that disabled her for six months during her freshman year. Recovery time has been much shorter for the most part, which she believes is due to her realization that play must stop as soon as she feels any symptoms.

She advises other kids, “If you feel different in any way [after a hit] you should come right out. The problem of post-concussion syndrome comes when you keep pushing yourself hard and your brain can’t handle it. That’s when you really hurt your brain.”

Even after five concussions, Olivia has continued to play soccer at the elite level because it’s her passion. This summer she’ll head off to Penn State where she’s already got a commitment for a spot on the school’s top-ranked soccer team.

But she says she’ll not only keep a close eye out for concussion symptoms, but she’ll also try to play smarter. “I’ve learned from my mistakes and I’m not a foolish player,” she said. “If I don’t think I’m going to win that 50-50 ball, I’m not going to go up for it.”

While happy for her daughter’s success, Trina Brandy has mixed feelings about playing with the continued threat of more concussions. Not long ago she asked her daughter’s doctor straight out: “I think it’s time for us to talk to her about quitting, don’t you?” But, she said, Collins said, “It’s not time yet.”

From Collins' perspective, with proper care, kids can continue to enjoy the sports they love. While some do need to be “retired,” when it looks like they’ve reached a point where the next concussion might throw them into long term, if not permanent, symptoms, most can keep playing.

 “My message to parents is that concussions can be managed safely,” Collins said. “Sports are a wonderful thing for kids.”

Related stories: 

• Second concussion can be devastating, even after clear CT scan
• Contact sports leave pattern of brain injuries, study finds
• Opinion: Youth hockey injuries border on child abuse

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Women who take a regular dose of aspirin may get a side benefit – a reduction in their risk of melanoma, a new study suggests. 

And the more years women take the over-the-counter-medication, the lower the risk, according to the study which was published online today in Cancer.

“We think our results are very exciting and that they add to the growing body of evidence suggesting that aspirin may have some real anti-tumor and anti-cancer properties,” said study co-author Jean Tang, an assistant professor of dermatology at Stanford University.

Tang and her colleagues scrutinized data from 59,806 Caucasian women who were taking part of the Women’s Health Initiative study. The women, who were between 50 and 79 years old at WHI’s outset, were followed for an average of 12 years. The researchers chose to concentrate on Caucasian women because melanoma is much more common among them.

At the beginning of the study, the women were asked which medications they were taking, what they ate and what activities they participated in. 

The women in the asprin group took a dose of aspirin at least twice a week at baseline. When they were asked about aspirin use again three years later, 60-70 percent of the group were still taking it at least twice a week, Tang says.

Overall, women who used aspirin had a 21 percent lower risk of melanoma compared to those who eschewed the medication. The longer women used aspirin, the lower the rate of the potentially fatal skin cancer. So, those who had used aspirin for one to four years had an 11 percent reduction in risk, as compared to 30 percent among those taking aspirin for five or more years.

In their calculations, the researchers took into account numerous melanoma risk factors, including differences in pigmentation, tanning practices, sunscreen use.

The researchers don’t know how aspirin lowers melanoma risk, but they’ve got some theories.

“Aspirin reduces inflammation,” Tang said. “Cancer cells with a lot of inflammation grow more and are more aggressive." Tang added that cancer cells tend to produce in excess the very same substance that aspirin and other NSAIDs knock back. 

The researchers failed to find a reduction in risk with other NSAIDs, however.

The new study, coupled with earlier evidence, makes a good case for aspirin’s anti-cancer properties, experts said.

Still, the effect may not be strong enough to counter aspirin’s possible side effects for people who have been told they shouldn't take the medication, said Dr. Robert Stern, a professor of dermatology at Harvard Medical School and chief of dermatology at the Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital. Stern co-authored a study published in 2011 that also found that aspirin reduced melanoma risk by 50 percent.

But for those who are sitting on the fence as to whether they should take aspirin for prevention of heart disease, this new research might be enough to push them over the edge since the benefits would now potentially be two-fold.

“I think it is too early to tell women to change their behavior, unless they would be taking it for the cardiovascular benefit also,” said Dr. Jenny Kim, an associate professor of dermatology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Before we can recommend that patients start taking aspirin to prevent melanoma we need to have some randomized controlled trials.”

 Related:

Daily aspirin may protect against melanoma

 Colonoscopy isn't just for high-risk people

If all the coughing and sneezing associated with this year’s severe flu season have you worried you’ll catch the bug, consider boosting the humidity in the rooms around you.

Moderate to high humidity can actually reduce the ability of the flu virus to infect folks, according to a new study published in the journal PLOS One. Maintaining relative indoor humidity at 43 percent or higher could cut the bug’s threat to about 15 percent, researchers found.

The flu is often spread through the air, said John D. Noti, team leader of the infectious disease transmission program at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. When we cough or sneeze, bits of virus hitch a ride on droplets of mucous or water, explained Noti, the report’s lead author.

While the large droplets hit the floor and other surfaces fairly quickly, the smallest ones can remain in the air for hours -- just waiting for you to breathe them in.

“Typically they stay in the air for an hour or so, but we have caught them as long as five hours out,” Noti says. “If you’re a health care worker in a room full of coughing patients there could be a lot of them.”

Earlier studies had suggested that the flu virus might be sensitive to humidity. So Noti and his colleagues set up an ingenious experiment, one that simulated a real-life situation, but exposed no humans to the nasty virus.

The researchers put two manikins about six feet apart in a closed-off room. One of the manikins was designed to “cough” flu particles into the air, while the one on the other side of the room “breathed” them in.

Noti and his colleagues collected samples from the inhaling manikin every few minutes and then deposited them in a cell culture to see if the virus particles would be able to infect the tissue cells.

The researchers ran their experiment at varying levels of humidity.

They found that when the humidity was less than 23 percent, the virus retained between about 71 percent of its ability to infect. When the humidity was boosted to 43 percent or higher, the infectivity dropped to about 15 percent.

And that drop-off in infectivity happened fast -- within 15 minutes of the initial cough.

The experiment may explain why we see so much more flu in the fall and winter months, Noti says. “In the winter months when the heat is on, the air is really dry,” he says. “It’s often down around 10 percent or less. So that may be what is driving all that February activity.”

The new study might offer interesting insight into the biology of the virus itself, says E. John Wherry, director of the Institute for Immunology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.

“There are lots of theories as to why the flu seasonally cycles: More people are inside, the weather is colder, mucous membranes might be more sensitive because of the dry conditions inside,” says Wherry. “But this suggests that humidity influences the virus itself rather than making our mucous membranes more susceptible.”

The researchers don’t address what happens to the virus, Wherry says. “But this virus is not very hardy. Changes in humidity, concentrations of salt or protein could have a major impact on it. The next step might be to look at what features of the virus change when the humidity is high. Those might offer targets for intervention. If you can show the weak point of the virus, that might be more broadly useful.”

In the meantime, it might make sense for folks to invest in a humidifier for their homes.

“Given that there’s very little downside to humidifying houses in the winter -- that looks like a good idea based on their data.”

Related stories: 

• CDC says flu vaccine barely worked in over-65s this year
• Nasty flu season sparks spotty vaccine shortages

In just 10 years the number of children diagnosed with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, rose dramatically, a  large new study suggests.

Overall, about 5 percent of nearly 843,000 kids ages 5 to 11 were diagnosed between 2001 and 2010 with the condition that can cause impulsive behavior and trouble concentrating. But during that time, rates of new ADHD diagnoses skyrocketed 24 percent – jumping from 2.5 percent in 2001 to 3.1 percent in 2010.

That’s according to a comprehensive review of medical records for children who were covered by the Kaiser Permanente Southern California health plan.  Rates rose most among minority kids during the study period, climbing nearly 70 percent overall in black children, and 60 percent among Hispanic youngsters, according the study published in JAMA Pediatrics. Among black girls, ADHD rates jumped 90 percent.

Rates remained highest in white children, climbing from 4.7 percent to 5.6 percent during the study period.

The biggest factor driving this increase may be the heightened awareness of ADHD among parents, teachers, and pediatricians, says the study’s lead author Dr. Darios Getahun, a scientist with Kaiser Permanente. For kids who need help, that’s a good thing, Getahun says.

“The earlier a diagnosis is made, the earlier we can initiate treatment which leads to a better outcome for the child,” he says.

Unlike previous studies in which researchers relied on reports from parents and teachers to say whether a child had ADHD, the new study tracked kids who were diagnosed according to ADHD medical codes entered by child and adolescent psychiatrists, developmental and behavioral pediatricians, child psychologists and neurologists.

ADHD is one of the most commonly diagnosed childhood disorders. Experts estimate that anywhere from 4 percent to 12 percent of school-age children are affected, many of whom continue to suffer from the disorder into adulthood.

Rates of diagnosis in the new study were greater in families with higher incomes, with nearly three-quarters of kids with ADHD coming from families that earned more than $50,000 a year.

“Higher rates of ADHD observed in affluent, white families likely represent an effort by these highly educated parents to seek help for their children who may not be fulfilling their expectations for schoolwork,” Getahun and his co-workers write.

Boys still outnumber girls 3 to 1 in ADHD diagnoses, but the gap appears to be closing among black girls.

“The increasing rate of ADHD among girls is an interesting finding and could represent an effort by parents to get more help for their daughters,” the authors say.

There was no change in the rate among Asian kids, but Getahun suspects this may have something to do with culture. Asians, as a rule, have been less likely to use mental health services and are more likely to discontinue therapy despite having equal access to care, Getahun says.

A child development specialist unaffiliated with the new study says he suspects that increased awareness of ADHD may have contributed to the increasing rate of diagnosis.

“Heightened professional awareness in general and improved efforts to detect ADHD exert an influence, but we cannot tell the magnitude of that,” says Alan Kazdin, the John M. Musser Professor of Psychology and Child Psychiatry at Yale University.

With all the coverage of the condition in the media, parents and teachers now have a better sense of what signs to look for, Kazdin says.

“Heightened awareness in the media, by parents and by teachers, too, may play a role. A child who in previous years just was said not to be able to control himself might now be more finely described.”

Related stories: 

• Childhood ADHD may limit adult achievements
• ADHD overdiagnosed in youngest kids in class
• Number of women on ADHD meds soars