Babies ‘smoke’ when parents doNEW YORK (Reuters Health) — Babies with at least one parent who smokes have five times as much cotinine, a nicotine byproduct, in their urine than infants whose parents are non-smokers, UK researchers report.“Our findings clearly show that by accumulating cotinine, babies become heavy passive smokers secondary to the active smoking of parents,” Dr. Mike Wailoo of the University of Leicester and colleagues write in the Archives of Disease in Childhood.

“This is the first time we’ve got direct information on the effect of smoking in homes on babies,” Wailoo told Reuters Health. “It clarifies and I think it firms up information that we all thought we had.” He added that cotinine is just one of thousands of potentially harmful nicotine byproducts that can accumulate in infants’ bodies.

Parental smoking is a leading risk factor for sudden infant death syndrome, Wailoo and his colleagues note in their report.

To better understand how harmful products of cigarette smoke might accumulate in babies’ bodies, the researchers measured the amount of cotinine in the urine of 104 12-week-olds, 71 of whom had parents who smoked.

On average, children with at least one smoking parent had 5.58 times as much cotinine in their urine as babies living in non-smoking homes.

Infants who slept with their parents tended to have higher cotinine levels, which may have been because they had greater exposure to parents’ smoke-contaminated clothing, Wailoo and his team note.

The temperature in an infant’s room also influenced cotinine levels, with lower temperature tied to higher amounts of the nicotine metabolite.Computer time ups aches and painsNEW YORK (Reuters Health) — The more time college students spend on the computer on a particular day, the more likely they are to suffer from musculoskeletal problems during that 24-hour period, a new study shows.However, because of the small size of the study — just 27 students participated — it was not possible to determine whether particular patterns of usage or postures made musculoskeletal problems more likely.

Musculoskeletal symptoms of the upper parts of the body are common among college and university students, especially female undergrads, college seniors, and engineering grad students, Dr. Jack Tigh Dennerlein of the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston and colleagues report in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine.

Given that heavy computer use is a major risk factor for such symptoms, Dennerlein and his team measured undergraduate students’ computer time with usage-monitoring software to determine if daily time spent on a computer was related to musculoskeletal symptoms experienced on a particular day.

During the study, which was conducted during three one-week periods during the spring semester, 96 percent of the students reported some type of musculoskeletal problem at least once.

About half the time, pain involved the neck, while the lower back, upper back and shoulders were the next most common pain sites.Diabetes poses health risks early onCHICAGO (Reuters) — Diabetes is dangerous even before the disease becomes full-blown, boosting the risk of death from heart disease in its earliest form, Australian researchers said.Before most people develop Type 2 diabetes, they have trouble metabolising sugar, a problem known as pre-diabetes that affects 56 million people in the United States.

Elizabeth Barr of the International Diabetes Institute in Melbourne, Australia, said that a large study found people with pre-diabetes had more than double the risk of death from heart disease after five years.

Type 2 diabetes is linked with obesity, poor diet and lack of exercise and is becoming a growing problem in many parts of the world. It can lead to blindness, limb loss, heart disease and early death.

Barr and colleagues studied 10,429 Australians age 25 or older for about five years. Patients were considered pre-diabetic if they had abnormal blood glucose levels after fasting.

These patients have a 2.5 times higher risk of death from heart problems than those who metabolized glucose normally, said the researchers, whose work was published in the journal Circulation.

“This study confirms the clinical importance of pre-diabetes, and suggests the need to target glucose abnormalities with lifestyle interventions,” Barr said in a statement.

Studies have shown that people with pre-diabetes can prevent Type-2 diabetes through dietary changes and increased physical activity.Headaches, fatigue tied to kids’ painNEW YORK (Reuters Health) — Children who often suffer headaches or daytime drowsiness may be at heightened risk of developing unexplained body aches and pains, a study has found.Researchers found that of more than 1,000 children they followed for one year, those who said they had weekly headaches or bouts of sleepiness were more likely to develop “non-traumatic” pain in their muscles or joints.

No one knows exactly why some children suffer non-traumatic pain, which refers to pain not caused by a specific injury, like an ankle sprain or strained muscle. However, psychological factors do play a role, according to Dr. Ashraf El-Metwally, the lead author of the new study.

Both frequent headaches and daytime tiredness can be psychosomatic — that is, brought on by psychological distress — and in this study, both were risk factors for the development of unexplained bodily pain.

The findings suggest that by asking children just a few questions about psychosomatic symptoms, doctors can spot those at risk of developing non-traumatic pain, explained El-Metwally, a researcher at the University of Aberdeen.

More importantly, they can then try to find out why these children are feeling distressed, and help them with ways to deal with their problems, El-Metwally told Reuters Health.

He and his colleagues report the findings in the online journal BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders.

The study included 1,113 children who were free of muscle and joint pain at the outset, when they were 11 years old, on average.