Courtesy Nationwide Children. For years teenager Kyle Brust suffered painful stomach aches. He had a condition known as functional abdominal pain. Today, Kyle is pain-free.

As students settle back into their desks for another school year, parents, school nurses and pediatricians respond to increased complaints of stomach pain. Many of these seasonal belly-aches are dismissed as nothing more than a case of the back-to-school blues. However, in many instances the pain kids feel is the result of a complicated and often misdiagnosed medical condition that researchers at Nationwide Children’s Hospital now believe could be helped with the use of medications typically used to treat depression. [continue reading…]

In a paper published in the August issue of the journal Pediatrics, Dartmouth researchers document the alarming numbers of young adolescents age 10-14 who are exposed to graphic violence in movies rated R for violence. They found that these extremely violent movies were seen by an average of 12.5 percent of an estimated 22 million children age 10-14. One R-rated movie, Scary Movie, was seen by an estimated 10 million children, or about 48 percent of 10-14 year olds. [continue reading…]