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OBJECTIVES: To examine if intergenerational transmission of parent weight talk occurs, the contextual factors prompting weight talk, and whether parent weight talk is associated with child weight, dietary intake, psychosocial outcomes, and food parenting practices. STUDY DESIGN: Children aged 5-9 years and their families (n = 1307) from 6 racial and ethnic groups (African-American, Hispanic, Hmong, Native American, Somali/Ethiopian, White) were recruited for a longitudinal cohort study through primary care clinics in Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota from 2016 through 2019. Parents filled out surveys at 2 time points, 18 months apart. Adjusted regression models examined associations of interest. RESULTS: Intergenerational transmission of parent weight talk was observed. In addition, significant associations were found between parent engagement in weight talk and higher weight status and poorer psychosocial outcomes in children 18 months later. Parent engagement in weight talk was also associated with more restrictive food parenting practices 18 months later. CONCLUSIONS: Parents' exposure to weight talk as children increased the likelihood of engaging in weight talk with their own children and had harmful associations over time with parent restrictive feeding practices, child weight, and psychosocial wellbeing in children. Health care providers may want to consider both modeling positive health-focused conversations and educating parents about the potential harmful and long-lasting consequences of engaging in weight talk with their children.

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OBJECTIVE: To investigate whether prenatal exposure to nicotine has an impact on several reading skill outcomes in school age children. STUDY DESIGN: Using a longitudinal sample of 5119 school age children in the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children, this study investigated specific reading skill outcomes in the area of speed, fluency, accuracy, spelling, and comprehension in relation to prenatal nicotine exposure, after adjusting for potential mediators and confounders. Prenatal nicotine exposure was divided into 3 categories: high (>17 mg per day), low (≤17 mg per day), and no exposure. RESULTS: We found that prenatal nicotine exposure was associated with increased risk of underperformance in specific reading skill outcomes after adjusting for potential mediators and confounders (P = .006). The effect of poor performance in decoding single words was most pronounced among children with prenatal exposure to high levels of nicotine in conjunction with a phonological deficit. Overall, the results showed that maternal smoking has moderate to large associations with delayed or decreased reading skills of children in the Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children. CONCLUSIONS: High prenatal nicotine exposure has a negative association with reading performance in school age children. In addition, modeling showed that environmental factors significantly moderated the interaction between prenatal nicotine exposure and reading skill outcomes.

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Boiling is the most common means of treating water in the home and the benchmark against which alternative point-of-use water treatment options must be compared. In a 5-week study in rural Guatemala among 45 households who claimed they always or almost always boiled their drinking water, boiling was associated with a 86.2% reduction in geometric mean thermotolerant coliforms (TTC) (N = 206, P < 0.0001). Despite consistent levels of fecal contamination in source water, 71.2% of stored water samples from self-reported boilers met the World Health Organization guidelines for safe drinking water (0 TTC/100 mL), and 10.7% fell within the commonly accepted low-risk category of (1-10 TTC/100 mL). As actually practiced in the study community, boiling significantly improved the microbiological quality of drinking water, though boiled and stored drinking water is not always free of fecal contaminations.

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Clinical observations and some studies suggest that dengue virus infection is more severe among children with better nutritional status. We examined the nutritional status of children in El Salvador and its relationship between this and the severity of dengue infection. Z-scores for weight-for-age, height-for-age, and body mass index (BMI)-for-age of children with dengue fever (66), dengue hemorrhagic fever (62), and healthy controls (74) were compared. There were no differences in weight-for-age or BMI-for-age Z-scores between the three groups. Children with dengue fever had a greater height-for-age than healthy controls but no significant differences in rates of stunting. There was no difference in height between children with dengue fever and dengue hemorrhagic fever. Excess nutrition does not appear to be a risk factor for severe forms of dengue infection in El Salvador, nor does malnutrition appear to be predictive of good outcomes.

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