Maternal and Child Health Library

This and past issues of the MCH Alert are available at http://www.mchlibrary.info/alert/archives.html

October 9, 2009

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Special Notice: The 15th Annual Maternal and Child Health Epidemiology Conference invites maternal and child health (MCH) professionals to share experiences, enhance knowledge, and generate new ideas for improved MCH data use and informed policymaking. The conference will be held on December 9-11, 2009, in Tampa, Florida, and will feature keynote speaker, David Barker, M.D., Ph.D., F.R.S., pioneer of the fetal origins hypothesis. The annual national scientific conference is sponsored by the Maternal and Child Health Epidemiology Program, a collaborative effort between the Health Resources and Services Administration's Maternal and Child Health Bureau and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Division of Reproductive Health. More information is available at http://www.cdc.gov/reproductivehealth/MCHEpi/2009/AboutConference.htm.

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1. RESOURCE SERVES CHILDREN'S HEALTH COMMUNITY IN INTEGRATING INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY INTO PROMOTING CHILD HEALTH AND WELL-BEING

Health IT for Children Toolbox provides resources for a diverse group of stakeholders to support information technology (IT) in children's health promotion and disease prevention. The toolbox was developed by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) in conjunction with Nemours Health and Prevention Services, the California HealthCare Foundation, and the California Endowment as a resource for those who are seeking knowledge about how health IT can be used to promote children's health and well-being. Three of seven toolbox modules are currently available. Contents include a general introduction to the heath IT landscape and a specific view of health IT for children within that landscape, an overview of federal and state initiatives on health IT for children, resources for those interested in learning about and implementing cross-sector coordination and data sharing-initiatives, and resources for those interested in learning about enhancing collaboration and the use of health IT to ensure that eligible children are enrolled in public health insurance programs. Relevant resources from other HRSA toolboxes, such as the Health IT Adoption Toolbox, are also incorporated. The toolbox is available at http://www.hrsa.gov/healthit.

Readers: More information is available from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality National Resource Center for health IT at http://healthit.ahrq.gov.

• The prevalence of involvement in bullying others, being bullied, or both (within the last 2 months) was 20.8 percent for physical, 53.6 percent for verbal, 51.4 percent for relational, and 13.6 percent for cyber.
• Compared with girls, boys were more likely to be involved in physical (bullies, victims, or bully-victims) and verbal forms (bully-victims), but less likely to be involved in relational forms (victims or bully-victims). For cyber bullying, boys were more likely to be bullies, whereas girls were more likely to be victims.
• Compared with white adolescents, African-American adolescents were more involved in bullying perpetration (physical, verbal, and cyber), but less involved in victimization (verbal and relational).
• More parental support was negatively associated with involvement in bullying across all four forms.
• Number of friends was related to involvement in all three traditional forms (physical, verbal, relational) but was not related to cyber bullying. For physical, verbal, and relational bullying, adolescents with more friends were more likely to be bullies but less likely to be victims, and, with the exception of physical bullying, they were also less likely to be bully-victims.

• Approximately 17 percent of the sample were determined to be low achievers in reading, math, or both: math only, 9.5 percent; reading only, 3.7 percent; and both reading and math, 3.3 percent.
• Two of the 10 APQ questions (one about reading and one about math) were uniquely predictive of low achievement.
• Inclusion of additional APQ questions that showed a trend toward being predictive of low achievement did not improve the area under the curve or psychometric properties.

• Of the 42,412 children eligible for analysis, 10, 178 (25 percent) were under age 2.
• CTs were obtained on 14,969 (35.5 percent) of the children, of whom 780 (5.2 percent) had TBIs on CT.
• Of 42,412 children, 376 had ciTBIs, with similar percentages in both age groups and in derivation and validation populations. Of the 376 children with ciTBIs, 60 (15.9 percent) underwent neurosurgery, and 8 were intubated for more than 24 hours for TBI.
• In the validation group for children under age 2, the prediction rule (normal mental status, no scalp hematoma except frontal, no loss of consciousness for 5 seconds or more, non-severe injury mechanism, no palpable skull fracture, and acting normally according to the parent) had a negative predictive value of 100 percent and sensitivity of 100 percent.
• In the validation group for children ages 2 and older, the prediction rule (normal mental status, no loss of consciousness, no history of vomiting, non-severe injury mechanism, no clinical signs of basilar skull fracture, and no severe headache) had a negative predictive value of 99.95 percent and sensitivity of 96.8 percent.