The Academy did not stop at advising families to avoid raw dairy. It renewed its call for a ban on the sale and distribution of raw milk and raw milk products, including raw cheeses, arguing that their consumption increases the risk of life-threatening infections. The policy statement also directly confronts one of the most persistent marketing claims surrounding raw milk: that it offers superior health benefits compared with pasteurized products. According to the Academy, those claims are not supported by scientific evidence. Pasteurization, a process of heating and then cooling milk that has been in use for more than a century, dramatically reduces the risk of infection without stripping away the nutritional value that families rely on from dairy.

The numbers behind the Academy’s concern are striking. Lead author Adam J. Ratner, MD, MPH, FAAP, noted that nearly half of illnesses caused by raw dairy consumption occur in people under the age of 20, and that a significant share of those cases are in children under 5. These illnesses, he emphasized, can be severe and can lead to life-threatening complications. The vulnerability of young children is not incidental: their immune systems are still developing, their body weight is small relative to the dose of pathogen they may ingest, and complications such as severe dehydration from diarrheal illness or kidney failure from certain strains of E. coli can escalate quickly in pediatric patients.

Unpasteurized milk is a well-documented carrier of some of the most dangerous foodborne pathogens known to medicine. The policy statement lists Listeria, E. coli, Salmonella, Campylobacter, and Brucella among the serious organisms transmitted through raw dairy. Each of these bacteria can cause hospitalization, life-threatening illness, miscarriage, or death, and the risks are concentrated in young children, pregnant people, and individuals with weakened immune systems. Listeria monocytogenes is particularly formidable because it can grow even at refrigerator temperatures, meaning contaminated dairy stored properly in a home kitchen can still become more dangerous over time. Salmonella and Campylobacter are among the most common causes of bacterial gastroenteritis worldwide, while Shiga toxin-producing E. coli can trigger hemolytic uremic syndrome, a condition that destroys red blood cells and can cause kidney failure in children.

Pregnant people face especially high stakes from foodborne infection. The policy statement notes that the incidence of listeriosis is estimated to be 12 to 14 times higher during pregnancy than in the general population, a reflection of the immune changes that pregnancy induces. Listeria infection during pregnancy can result in miscarriage, stillbirth, premature delivery, or severe illness in newborns, outcomes that make even a low probability of contamination unacceptable from a public health standpoint. Because Listeria can cross the placenta, a mother may experience mild or even unnoticed symptoms while the fetus suffers devastating consequences. This asymmetry between maternal illness and fetal harm is a central reason obstetric and pediatric guidelines consistently single out unpasteurized dairy as a food to avoid entirely during pregnancy.

The most consequential update in the new statement concerns H5N1, the highly pathogenic avian influenza virus that has swept through poultry populations globally and, beginning with the 2024 United States dairy cattle outbreak, demonstrated an ability to infect cows. The Academy highlights emerging evidence that H5N1 may represent a new and potentially serious risk associated with raw milk. Research indicates the virus can be transmitted from infected dairy cattle into milk, where it can reach high concentrations and remain detectable in refrigerated raw milk for up to five weeks. That persistence is unusual and troubling: a virus surviving for more than a month in a chilled, nutrient-rich medium has ample opportunity to reach consumers, especially in distribution chains that lack pathogen testing.

During the 2024 U.S. dairy outbreak, infectious H5N1 virus was detected in nearly one-quarter of raw milk samples in affected areas. To date, there are no confirmed human cases of H5N1 infection resulting from the consumption of raw milk, and the Academy is careful to state this. Nevertheless, it characterizes the virus as a credible, emerging threat. The distinction between documented transmission and credible risk is important in virology: influenza viruses are capable of crossing species barriers, and the mammary gland infections observed in dairy cattle established a novel route by which a respiratory pathogen of birds could contaminate a staple food. Pasteurization, which inactivates influenza viruses effectively, closes that route for conventional dairy, but no such barrier exists for raw products.

The regulatory landscape in the United States remains fragmented. Despite the well-documented health risks, the sale and distribution of raw milk products remain legal in at least 27 states. Raw milk is defined as milk obtained from cows, goats, or sheep that has not undergone pasteurization, the heating process designed to eliminate harmful bacteria and other pathogens. Federal law prohibits the interstate sale of raw milk for human consumption, but intrastate sales fall under state jurisdiction, producing a patchwork in which a family’s exposure to raw dairy risk depends largely on geography. The Academy’s renewed call for a ban on sale and distribution is aimed squarely at this patchwork, arguing that voluntary warnings have not eliminated a preventable source of severe illness.

The scientific case for pasteurization rests on both microbiology and nutrition. The process typically involves heating milk to a temperature sufficient to inactivate vegetative bacterial pathogens and enveloped viruses, followed by rapid cooling to slow the growth of any surviving organisms. Decades of comparative studies have found no meaningful nutritional deficit in pasteurized milk relative to raw milk; the proteins, calcium, and vitamins that make dairy a dietary staple survive the treatment essentially intact. What pasteurization removes is the microbial load, including organisms that may be present even in milk from healthy-appearing animals, since udder infections and fecal contamination during milking can introduce pathogens without any visible sign. Co-author Mark R. Corkins, MD, FAAP, addressed the perception gap directly, saying that parents may choose raw milk because they have heard it is healthier or more natural, but that the scientific evidence tells a different story. Pasteurized dairy products, he said, provide the same essential nutrients without exposing children and families to preventable infections from dangerous bacteria and viruses, and for infants, children, and pregnant people they are clearly the safest choice.

The policy statement was developed through the Academy’s standard process, in which statements written by medical experts reflect the latest available evidence and undergo several rounds of peer review before approval by the AAP Board of Directors and publication in Pediatrics. It will be featured during a presentation on October 5 at the AAP 2026 National Conference and Exhibition in San Diego, where Dr. Ratner is scheduled to discuss the policy during a Meet the Red Book session at the San Diego Convention Center. For families navigating conflicting claims about raw dairy, the Academy has also published a consumer-facing resource, “Raw Milk: What Parents Need to Know About the Risk,” through its HealthyChildren.org platform. The core message of the updated guidance is unambiguous: whatever the appeal of raw milk on the shelf, the pathogens it can carry, from Listeria and E. coli to a potentially pandemic-capable influenza virus, are preventable hazards, and pasteurization remains one of the most effective and time-tested public health interventions in the food supply.

Subject of Research: Health risks of unpasteurized (raw) milk and dairy products for children and pregnant people, including emerging H5N1 avian influenza contamination

Article Title: American Academy of Pediatrics warns of dangers in consuming raw milk, dairy products

Article References: American Academy of Pediatrics warns of dangers in consuming raw milk, dairy products. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: raw milk, pasteurization, American Academy of Pediatrics, H5N1 avian influenza, foodborne illness, Listeria, E. coli, Salmonella, pregnancy, children's health, dairy cattle, public health policy

The study, titled Handgun and Long Gun Ownership and Storage in Families With Young Children, was conducted by Andrew Hashikawa, MD, MS, FAAP, a clinical professor of emergency medicine and pediatrics at the University of Michigan, together with senior author Alison L. Miller, PhD. The researchers questioned 843 U.S. parents who own firearms and who live with children between the ages of 1 and 5. Participants were recruited through a national online panel and were eligible if they were 18 or older, English-speaking, and living in a household with firearms. The survey was designed to be nationally representative of this population, and it was funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The central measurement in the study was storage security, and the researchers defined it in deliberately strict terms. A household was classified as practicing secure storage only if every firearm in the home was stored both locked and unloaded. If even one weapon was stored loaded, unlocked, or both, the household was counted as not secure. This all-or-nothing definition matters, because in a home with multiple firearms, a single unlocked and loaded weapon can undo the safety benefit of every other gun kept properly locked away. It is a standard that reflects how young children actually encounter firearms: they need access to only one unsecured weapon for a tragedy to occur.

By that standard, the results were sobering. More than three-fourths of the parents surveyed, 77 percent, reported storing at least one firearm unlocked and loaded, or both unlocked and loaded. In other words, only a minority of these households met the researchers’ threshold for secure storage of all firearms. At the same time, the survey illuminated the composition of household arsenals. More than 94 percent of the parents reported owning a handgun. Roughly half, 51 percent, owned handguns only, while 5 percent owned only long guns such as rifles or shotguns. About 44 percent owned both a handgun and a long gun, and at least 49 percent owned at least one long gun. On average, families in the survey owned just under three firearms.

When the researchers broke storage practices down by the type of firearms owned, a clear pattern emerged. Parents who owned handguns only were more likely to store their household firearms securely than parents who owned both handguns and long guns. Secure storage was reported by 41.5 percent of handgun-only households compared with 30.7 percent of households that owned both types, a difference the authors report as statistically significant. Even so, the more striking finding may be what the two groups share: in both categories, a majority of families reported storing at least one household firearm unlocked, loaded, or both. No ownership pattern in the survey was associated with consistently safe storage across the board.

Motivation for ownership emerged as another defining feature of these households. Protection was by far the most commonly cited reason for owning firearms, reported by 77 percent of the parents surveyed. This figure sits at the heart of the study’s central tension. Families acquire weapons, most often handguns, because they want to shield their loved ones from harm, yet the act of keeping a firearm accessible enough to serve as a ready means of defense is precisely what undermines the locked-and-unloaded storage practices that research links to child safety. The authors argue that this paradox demands injury prevention messaging that directly addresses the needs and concerns of protection-motivated owners rather than talking past them.

The stakes of these household practices are framed by the broader epidemiology of firearm injury in childhood. The authors note that firearm injuries are the leading cause of death among children in the United States, and that rates of unintentional firearm injury are increasing among children younger than 6 years. Most of these unintentional injuries involve household firearms that were stored loaded and unlocked. Handguns account for the majority of unintentional firearm deaths among young children, and prior work suggests they may be stored less securely than other firearm types. Given that more than nine in ten of the surveyed families owned a handgun, the overlap between the weapon most likely to be involved in a young child’s death and the weapon most commonly present in these homes is a critical focus for prevention.

Young children are a particularly vulnerable population for these exposures for developmental reasons that clinicians and safety researchers have long emphasized. Children between the ages of 1 and 5 are curious, mobile, and increasingly adept at climbing, opening drawers, and reaching surfaces adults assume are out of range, yet they lack the impulse control and understanding of danger needed to handle a firearm safely if they find one. A loaded, unlocked handgun on a nightstand or in an accessible closet is, from a child’s perspective, an object to be picked up and explored. This is why pediatric guidance consistently stresses that keeping every firearm in the home locked and unloaded, with ammunition stored separately, is an important part of keeping children safe.

That message was put plainly by the study’s lead author. We found that many children under age 5 live in homes where firearms are not stored securely, said Hashikawa. Families often own firearms to protect their loved ones, but leaving them unlocked can put young children at risk. Keeping every firearm locked and unloaded is an important part of keeping children safe. The quote captures the framing the researchers hope will guide future interventions: rather than treating gun-owning families as adversaries, prevention efforts can start from the shared goal of protecting children and work backward toward the storage behaviors that achieve it.

The authors conclude that firearm type and reasons for ownership should be important considerations in the design of injury prevention efforts. Because handgun-only families stored their firearms more securely than families with mixed arsenals, and because handguns pose a particular risk to young children, they argue it is critical to emphasize secure storage of handguns specifically. They also propose tailoring safety messages to household firearm type and ownership motivations, and they suggest a novel engagement strategy: partnering with families who already store securely could be a way to reach other families with young children and encourage them to adopt the same practices. In a country where most young children’s firearm deaths unfold inside their own homes, the survey’s message is that the gap between the intention to protect and the practice of secure storage remains wide, and that closing it may depend on meeting protection-minded parents where they are.

Subject of Research: Firearm ownership patterns and secure storage practices in U.S. households with young children

Article Title: Firearm-owning parents of young children often store at least one firearm without secure storage

Article References: Firearm-owning parents of young children often store at least one firearm without secure storage. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: firearm storage, child safety, handguns, long guns, secure storage, pediatrics, injury prevention, parenting, American Academy of Pediatrics, University of Michigan, unintentional firearm injury, gun ownership

The study, titled “Immigrant Family Access to Pediatric Health Care after Executive Order 14161 and Operation Midway Blitz,” examined ambulatory appointments at the unnamed referral center, a condition of the institution’s request to protect patient and family privacy. The researchers assembled a dataset spanning 2018 to 2025, capturing every outpatient visit scheduled at the center while excluding inpatient stays, emergency department encounters, telephone contacts, and electronic MyChart communications. This design focused the analysis squarely on scheduled, in-person ambulatory care, the kind of routine and specialty visits that depend on a family’s willingness to travel to a clinic and appear in person.

The enforcement context is central to understanding the findings. In January 2025, Executive Order 14161 was enacted, intensifying federal immigration enforcement and coinciding with a surge in activity by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE. One prominent example was Operation Midway Blitz, launched on September 6, 2025, which involved the arrest of thousands of immigrants living in the Chicago area. The researchers asked a straightforward question: did the rate of missed and canceled pediatric appointments change after this operation began, and if so, for whom?

To answer it, the team employed a methodologically elegant approach. For each of the appointments scheduled after Operation Midway Blitz, patients served as their own controls, allowing the investigators to compare each child’s rate of no-shows and cancellations before and after the enforcement operation using a two-sided t-test. A one-way analysis of variance then determined which demographic variables predicted changes in no-show and cancellation rates, with the researchers controlling for active ZIP code, age, insurance type, clinic type, clinic location, and the number of post-operation no-shows and cancellations. This within-patient comparison helps isolate the effect of the enforcement period from individual characteristics that might otherwise confound the results.

The scale of the dataset lends the findings considerable weight. Among 99,743 patients with appointments scheduled after Operation Midway Blitz, no-show and cancellation rates increased significantly across all groups studied. But the magnitude of the increase differed sharply by ethnicity, language, and neighborhood. Latine patients showed a greater rise in no-show rates than non-Latine patients, with a mean change of 4.2 percentage points compared with 1.5 percentage points. Spanish-speaking families fared worse still, with an 8.7 percentage-point increase versus 1.6 percentage points among non-Spanish speakers. And children living in ZIP codes with high ICE activity saw a 5.1 percentage-point increase, compared with 2.2 percentage points elsewhere in the service area.

The statistical confidence behind these differences is substantial. The comparison between Latine and non-Latine patients yielded a p-value below 0.00005, as did the comparison between Spanish-speaking and non-Spanish-speaking patients, while the ZIP code analysis reached p equals 0.0001. When the researchers controlled for other variables, the post-operation period showed a significant increase in no-show and cancellation rates among Spanish-speaking patients and among patients identifying as Latine. In a striking reversal, English-speaking patients actually showed a significant decrease in no-show and cancellation rates after the operation began, underscoring that the disruption was not a generalized phenomenon but one concentrated among specific communities.

The absolute numbers are sobering. The authors identified more than 1,258 missed appointments among Latine patients alone in the period following the enforcement crackdown, out of nearly 100,000 appointments scheduled overall. Each of those missed visits represents a child who did not receive a scheduled vaccination, a developmental screening, a chronic disease check, or a specialist evaluation at a referral center that serves children with complex medical needs. At a pediatric referral center in particular, appointments are often not easily replaced; families may have waited months for subspecialty slots, and a missed visit can push diagnosis and treatment further into the future.

The clinical stakes extend beyond individual children. Missed and canceled visits related to immigration enforcement may contribute to delays in preventive care and timely diagnosis, and the researchers note that these disruptions can negatively affect both individual and community health. Non-English-speaking and Latine patients, and patients living in neighborhoods targeted by enforcement actions, were significantly more likely to miss scheduled appointments than their counterparts, a pattern the authors say contributes to health care inequities. Preventive pediatric care depends heavily on continuity and timeliness; when entire communities disengage from scheduled care, the consequences accumulate quietly in the form of undetected conditions, delayed immunizations, and worsening chronic disease.

Behind the statistics are individual stories that shaped the research itself. “I took care of a girl on the oncology service whose parent was unable to come visit her due to fears of being taken by ICE,” said co-author Frances Ho, MD, a pediatric resident. “Her story stuck with me, and this project is a way to understand the scope of ICE’s impact on patient care in the city of Chicago.” Her co-author, pediatric resident Teresa “Tess” Trinka, MD, framed the broader implication: “When families fear leaving home, children miss more than appointments, they miss opportunities for both life-saving and preventive care. Our findings highlight the downstream impact of immigration policy on pediatric healthcare utilization in Chicago.”

The researchers conclude that health care systems and policymakers must consider the unintended health consequences of immigration enforcement and implement strategies to ensure equitable access to care. The study was presented during the Council on Health Equity sessions of the AAP conference, held October 2 through 6 at the San Diego Convention Center, with the authors scheduled to present on October 4, 2026. As enforcement activity continues to shape daily life in immigrant communities, the Chicago findings offer a quantitative warning: policies that make families afraid to leave their homes do not stop at the clinic door, and their costs are measured in the preventive care, timely diagnoses, and treatments that children never receive.

Subject of Research: The impact of intensified U.S. immigration enforcement on pediatric appointment attendance and health care access in Chicago

Article Title: Latine, Spanish-speaking patients missed pediatric appointments after immigration enforcement crackdown

Article References: Latine, Spanish-speaking patients missed pediatric appointments after immigration enforcement crackdown. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: immigration enforcement, ICE, pediatrics, health care access, Operation Midway Blitz, health disparities, no-show rates, Chicago, Executive Order 14161, Latine health, preventive care, American Academy of Pediatrics

The study, titled “Parent-Reported Household Tobacco and E-cigarette Exposure and Asthma Control in Children: A Cross-Sectional Study,” drew on electronic health record data from a large, diverse urban pediatric primary care network affiliated with Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. The research team examined encounters recorded between July 2023 and March 2026, a 33-month window in which parents of children aged one year or older with an asthma diagnosis completed two standardized instruments: a parent tobacco treatment platform that asked who in the family used combustible tobacco or e-cigarettes, and an asthma control tool that assessed symptoms, medication use, and healthcare utilization. By pairing these two data sources across tens of thousands of visits, the investigators were able to examine how different patterns of household nicotine use tracked with day-to-day asthma outcomes as reported by the people who know the children best.

The scale of the dataset is one of its distinguishing strengths. Among 48,118 eligible encounters, 48 percent involved children aged six to twelve years, 42 percent were female, 34 percent were Non-Hispanic Black, 43 percent were covered by Medicaid, and 30 percent came from neighborhoods rated as having very low opportunity by the Child Opportunity Index. Household use of both tobacco and e-cigarettes was reported in 5 percent of visits, or 2,500 encounters; tobacco-only use in 9 percent, or 4,238 encounters; and e-cigarette-only use in 3 percent, or 1,427 encounters. This diversity matters, because asthma burden and tobacco exposure are not evenly distributed across pediatric populations, and the study’s statistical adjustments were designed to account for exactly these sociodemographic differences.

To isolate the effect of household exposure from other factors that influence asthma control, the researchers used multivariable logistic regression, estimating adjusted odds ratios with 95 percent confidence intervals while controlling for child age, sex, insurance status, and the Child Opportunity Index of the child’s neighborhood. The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia institutional review board deemed the study exempt under the Common Rule. The statistical approach allowed the team to ask a deceptively simple question: after accounting for a family’s circumstances, does the presence of tobacco or e-cigarette use in the home still predict poorer asthma control? The answer, across multiple outcome domains, was yes.

Children exposed to both combustible tobacco and e-cigarettes in the home showed the broadest and strongest associations with poor asthma outcomes. Combined exposure was linked to more activity-related symptoms, with an adjusted odds ratio of 1.3; more nighttime symptoms, also 1.3; greater albuterol or rescue inhaler use, at 1.2; worse parent ratings of asthma control, at 1.3; lower parental comfort with asthma management, at 1.3; and hospital admissions in the past year, at 1.2. Children with combined exposure were also more likely to have poorly controlled asthma status, at 1.1, and were substantially more likely to have uncontrolled asthma, with an adjusted odds ratio of 1.4. In practical terms, this means more flares, more disrupted sleep, more missed activity, and more hospital stays for the children breathing air shared with the heaviest household nicotine users.

The most striking result, however, concerned e-cigarettes alone. E-cigarette-only exposure was independently associated with more asthma flares, with an adjusted odds ratio of 1.3, and more activity-related symptoms, at 1.4 — figures comparable to or exceeding those seen with combined tobacco and e-cigarette exposure. Tobacco-only exposure showed more modest but still significant associations across multiple domains. Not every measure moved in the same way: parent-reported emergency department or urgent care utilization and oral steroid use were not significantly associated with any exposure type after adjustment. But the pattern across flares, symptoms, and hospitalizations paints a consistent picture that vapor is not benign for asthmatic airways.

“There is no safe level of tobacco or e-cigarette exposure when it comes to children. Parents and caregivers who use any tobacco or nicotine products should make every effort to quit, using evidence-based options like varenicline, nicotine replacement therapy, and counseling,” said Brian Jenssen, MD, MSHP, FAAP, associate professor of pediatrics at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the study’s principal investigator. His message to families is blunt: the long-promoted idea that vaping indoors is a harm-reduction strategy for households with children does not survive contact with the data on pediatric asthma.

“Many parents believe e-cigarettes are a safer alternative to cigarettes, both for themselves and for their children’s health. Our findings suggest that assumption doesn’t fully hold up for kids with asthma,” Jenssen said. He also framed the results as a call to action for clinicians: “It reinforces the need for pediatric care teams to screen for all forms of household nicotine and tobacco use — not just cigarettes — and to offer cessation support for both, as part of routine asthma care.” In other words, the clinic visit for an asthma flare may itself be the most teachable moment to ask not only whether anyone in the home smokes cigarettes, but whether anyone vapes — and to have cessation resources ready for either answer.

The biological plausibility behind these associations is well established in the broader literature. Secondhand smoke worsens respiratory illnesses in children, and asthma is particularly sensitive to inhaled irritants, which provoke airway inflammation, mucus production, and bronchial hyperreactivity. E-cigarette aerosols contain nicotine, ultrafine particles, flavoring compounds, and thermal degradation products, several of which are known to irritate or damage respiratory epithelium. What has been lacking until now is large-scale, real-world evidence on how e-cigarette exposure alone affects asthma control in children — a gap this study helps fill by showing that vapor-only households still carry measurable risk for the asthmatic children living in them.

The authors are careful to note the study’s design: it is cross-sectional, capturing exposure and outcomes at the same point in time, so it demonstrates associations rather than proving causation, and it relies on parent-reported exposure and asthma control rather than objective biomarkers or clinical measures. Still, the sheer number of encounters, the diversity of the population, and the consistency of the adjusted associations across symptom, medication, and hospitalization domains give the findings considerable weight. The work was funded by the National Institutes of Health under grant R37-CA282153, with Jenssen as principal investigator. Jenssen is scheduled to present the research at 3:40 p.m. PT on Saturday, October 3, at the Marriott Marquis, for the conference’s Section on Nicotine and Tobacco Prevention and Treatment, and will participate in a press Soundbite Session on Sunday, October 4. For the estimated six million American children with asthma — and the many households where a parent vapes believing it protects their kids — the study’s core conclusion lands with force: when a child’s lungs are already inflamed, the air they breathe at home matters, whatever form the nicotine takes.

Subject of Research: Household tobacco and e-cigarette exposure and asthma control in children

Article Title: E-cigarettes, tobacco in-home exposure linked to children’s asthma flare-ups

Article References: E-cigarettes, tobacco in-home exposure linked to children’s asthma flare-ups. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: e-cigarettes, secondhand smoke, pediatric asthma, asthma control, tobacco exposure, nicotine, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, American Academy of Pediatrics, public health, smoking cessation, respiratory health, cross-sectional study

Positional plagiocephaly develops when sustained external pressure is placed on one area of a baby’s soft, still-forming skull. Because an infant’s cranial bones are pliable in the first months of life, repeated pressure on the same spot, most often the back of the head, can produce a visible asymmetrical flattening, usually involving the occipital bone at the rear of the cranium. That flattening can trigger compensatory shifts in anterior structures, including the orbits around the eyes and the middle ear, which is one reason pediatricians take the condition seriously even though it is often considered primarily cosmetic. The condition typically emerges in the first few months of life, when babies spend long stretches lying on their backs.

The prevalence of positional plagiocephaly rose dramatically after pediatricians began recommending that babies sleep on their backs, a public health campaign credited with saving lives by reducing the risk of sudden infant death syndrome. According to the researchers, the Back to Sleep campaign has been associated with a 600 percent increase in plagiocephaly prevalence and a corresponding surge in referrals for evaluation and treatment. One clinical trial cited in the abstract found plagiocephaly in 205 of 440 infants between 7 and 12 weeks of age, an incidence of roughly 46.6 percent. The researchers are careful to note that back sleeping remains essential for infant safety; the challenge is managing the skull flattening that can accompany it without compromising safe sleep practices.

Current management of positional plagiocephaly typically consists of conservative measures. Families are usually advised to try repositioning strategies, such as encouraging more tummy time while the baby is awake and supervised, and shifting the orientation of the infant’s head during sleep and feeding. Physical therapy may be recommended when muscle tightness in the neck, a common contributor to head turning preferences, appears to be driving the asymmetry. For infants with persistent or more severe deformity, helmet therapy, in which a custom-molded orthotic device is worn for many hours a day over months, remains an option for selected patients. Yet many families find helmets burdensome, expensive, or emotionally difficult, and repositioning alone does not always resolve the flattening.

That gap in options is what motivated the research team behind the OPT-IN trial, a two-arm, randomized cross-over clinical trial comparing osteopathic manipulative treatment with the standard of care of repositioning. Kimberly Wolf, DO, FAAP, FACOP, FAAPO, NABBLM-C, one of the study authors, said that families of infants with plagiocephaly often want treatment options that are gentle and non-invasive, and that the study demonstrates osteopathic manipulative treatment is safe, well accepted by families, and provides additional benefits for the baby’s health. She added that a flat head is a common reason parents bring their infants to the pediatrician in the first few months of life, yet until now families have had strikingly few choices for treatment, and the team wanted to find an option that works with the baby’s own body to improve head shape and address the root causes behind the flattening.

The interim analysis focused specifically on two questions: how safe and how feasible osteopathic manipulative treatment is for infants enrolled between birth and four months of age. Safety was assessed by tabulating and describing adverse events as reported by both families and the medical team. Feasibility was measured through adherence to the treatment schedule and through family satisfaction, which was captured in two ways: a feedback survey sent to caregivers upon completion of the eight-week intervention, and focus groups conducted with caregivers after the intervention ended. Importantly, all family satisfaction data were collected and analyzed by consultants unknown to the families, who de-identified the data before sharing results with the research team, a design choice intended to reduce bias in the reporting of subjective outcomes.

The preliminary results were striking in their consistency. Among the 67 families who completed the study, adherence reached 100 percent compliance across a total of ten visits per participant, comprising eight osteopathic manipulative treatment visits and two measurement visits. No serious adverse events occurred, leading the researchers to conclude that the treatment is safe and well tolerated by infants. The few concurrent symptoms that were reported, such as fussiness, were described as mild, not bothersome to the family, and quickly resolved. In a field where even minor adverse events can derail a pediatric intervention, a perfect completion rate across hundreds of visits is a notable feasibility finding in its own right.

Beyond the primary goal of improving head shape, parents whose infants completed the treatment visits reported a range of secondary benefits, including improvements in feeding, fussiness, reflux, and sleep. Parents also highlighted how important the therapy was as an alternative to helmets, which many families had been offered as a treatment option. In survey feedback summarized by the researchers, one parent described the experience as gentle, effective, and awesome. The survey results, drawn from 44 respondents, were described as very positive, showing that families viewed the hands-on approach as both a safe and a feasible option for treating plagiocephaly. Study author Kaur Sirjen is scheduled to present the research from 12 to 12:30 PM Pacific time on Sunday, October 4, and Dr. Wolf was among the highlighted abstract authors giving a brief presentation during a conference soundbite session.

The researchers conclude that osteopathic manipulative treatment should be considered for families seeking a non-invasive treatment option for managing positional plagiocephaly. Still, the usual scientific caveats apply. These are interim results from a safety and feasibility analysis, not the trial’s final efficacy verdict; the randomized cross-over design of the full OPT-IN trial is intended to compare the therapy directly against repositioning on head shape outcomes, and those comparative data will determine whether the enthusiasm generated by family satisfaction translates into measurable cranial improvement. The findings have been presented at a scientific conference rather than published in a peer-reviewed journal, meaning they have not yet undergone formal external review. Even so, for a condition affecting nearly half of infants in some cohorts, and for parents weighing months of helmet therapy against watchful waiting, the prospect of a gentle, hands-on treatment with a clean safety record and near-perfect family adherence is a development worth watching closely as the trial progresses.

Subject of Research: Safety and feasibility of osteopathic manipulative treatment for infant positional plagiocephaly

Article Title: Hands-on treatment studied as option in treating baby flat head syndrome

Article References: Hands-on treatment studied as option in treating baby flat head syndrome. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: positional plagiocephaly, osteopathic manipulative treatment, infants, flat head syndrome, pediatrics, helmet therapy, Back to Sleep campaign, randomized clinical trial, American Academy of Pediatrics, tummy time, safety, family satisfaction

The retrospective analysis examined the medical files of 84 patients aged 21 years or younger who were diagnosed with colorectal cancer between 2012 and 2023 across 34 institutions participating in the Pediatric Surgical Oncology Research Collaborative. Crucially, the investigators excluded patients with known colorectal cancer predisposition syndromes, including hereditary genetic syndromes and inflammatory bowel disease, before their cancer diagnosis. That exclusion is what makes the findings so striking: these were largely sporadic cases, cancers that arose in young people with no identifiable inherited risk, in a population that current screening guidelines essentially do not cover.

The demographic and tumor characteristics paint a sobering picture. The median age at diagnosis was just 16.5 years, with an interquartile range of 14.0 to 19.0, and 56 percent of the patients were male. Of the 84 cancers identified, 65, or 77.4 percent, were colon adenocarcinomas, while 19, or 22.6 percent, were rectal adenocarcinomas. Among the colon cancers, the most common locations were the sigmoid colon and the ascending colon, each accounting for 27.7 percent of cases, and the cohort included five appendiceal adenocarcinomas, an unusually rare tumor type in any age group.

Perhaps the most consequential finding concerns family history. Only 20.2 percent of the patients, 17 individuals, reported having a first- or second-degree relative with colorectal cancer. That means the overwhelming majority of these young patients had no family signal that might have prompted earlier vigilance. In older populations, family history is one of the key triggers for earlier and more frequent screening, and its absence in most adolescent cases removes one of the few practical warning flags clinicians currently rely on.

The symptom profile at presentation was dominated by complaints that are easily attributed to far more benign causes in teenagers. Back or abdominal pain was the most common symptom, reported by 73.8 percent of patients, followed by changes in bowel habits at 45.2 percent, weight loss at 42.9 percent, and rectal bleeding at 38.1 percent. Each of these can be, and frequently is, explained away in young patients as constipation, dietary issues, stress, sports-related strain, or hemorrhoids. The study quantified the cost of that attribution error: the median duration of symptoms before diagnosis was 12 weeks, and the median time to colonoscopy was 13 weeks, delays measured in months of tumor growth in a disease that often behaves aggressively.

By the time diagnosis was finally made, the disease had frequently already advanced. The majority of patients presented with Stage III disease, 51.0 percent, or Stage IV metastatic disease, 29.0 percent, meaning roughly four in five young patients arrived with locally advanced or metastatic cancer. Study author Erica Arnold, MD, a pediatric surgery research fellow, emphasized the distinct nature of the disease in this population. “Colorectal cancer is, unfortunately, becoming more common in adolescents and young adults and represents a different disease than colorectal cancer diagnosed in older adults,” she said. “When diagnosed, it is often aggressive, presenting with late-stage disease and associated with high rates of disease relapse and mortality.”

The pathological features of the tumors support that characterization. On histologic examination, 33.3 percent of the tumors had signet ring features, 39.3 percent had mucin production, and 41.6 percent were poorly differentiated, all features associated with more aggressive biological behavior and worse prognosis. Treatment data reflected the difficulty of managing such disease: 62 patients, or 73.8 percent, underwent upfront surgical resection, while 4 patients, 4.8 percent, underwent attempted resection that could only achieve ostomy creation because the disease was unresectable. Fifteen patients, 17.9 percent, received neoadjuvant chemotherapy before surgery, and 3 patients, 3.6 percent, received definitive chemoradiation.

Outcomes were grim. Thirty-one patients, 36.9 percent, experienced relapse of their disease at a median of 11 months after treatment, and 96.8 percent of those who relapsed had been diagnosed with stage III or IV disease. Statistical analysis identified clear predictors of relapse: patients whose cancer returned were far more likely to have positive lymph nodes at diagnosis, 90.3 percent versus 50.9 percent, poorly differentiated histology, 64.5 percent versus 28.3 percent, and signet ring features, 61.3 percent versus 17.0 percent. All of the patients who relapsed had received adjuvant chemotherapy, underscoring that current treatment intensification was not enough to prevent recurrence in a substantial fraction of cases. By the end of the study period, 38 patients, 45.2 percent, had died as a result of their colorectal cancer.

The genetic testing results add another layer of scientific interest. Forty-six patients, 54.8 percent, underwent germline testing, and among those tested, 8, or 17.4 percent, carried a mismatch repair mutation, 4, or 8.6 percent, had a TP53 mutation, and 2, or 4.3 percent, had an APC mutation. These findings suggest that even among patients without a known predisposition syndrome at diagnosis, a subset harbor heritable mutations that may only be uncovered after cancer develops, reinforcing the argument for broader genetic evaluation in young-onset colorectal cancer and for cascade testing of relatives when mutations are found.

The study’s authors argue that the findings demand a change in clinical mindset rather than an immediate change in screening policy. Given the increasing incidence of adolescent colorectal cancer, practitioners should include the disease in their differential diagnosis when adolescents present with symptoms such as abdominal pain and rectal bleeding without an alternative explanation, taking unexplained weight loss and rectal bleeding in younger patients seriously. As early-onset adult cancers increasingly appear in younger and younger patients, the researchers note that the logistical coordination between adult and pediatric care teams, and carefully tailored treatment regimens, are paramount. For now, the message to clinicians and families alike is one of heightened vigilance: in a teenager with persistent, unexplained abdominal or back pain, altered bowel habits, weight loss, or rectal bleeding, colorectal cancer may be rare, but the data show it is no longer rare enough to ignore.

Subject of Research: Epidemiology and clinical presentation of sporadic colorectal carcinoma in pediatric and adolescent patients

Article Title: Colorectal cancer on the rise in adolescent patients

Article References: Colorectal cancer on the rise in adolescent patients. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: colorectal cancer, adolescent health, pediatric oncology, early-onset cancer, cancer screening, diagnostic delay, signet ring carcinoma, germline testing, American Academy of Pediatrics, cancer epidemiology, rectal bleeding, abdominal pain

The study, presented under the title Tracking Pediatric Health Misinformation Clinicians Hear to Build an Institutional Response, describes a practical surveillance system built inside a large pediatric hospital. Rather than treating each misinformation encounter as an isolated event to be corrected on the spot, the CHOP team created a structured way to log those encounters, aggregate them, and analyze the patterns that emerged. The result is a feedback loop in which the questions and doubts voiced in exam rooms directly shape the educational materials the institution produces for patients, families, and its own clinicians.

The technical backbone of the system is a survey tracking tool built on REDCap, a widely used electronic data capture platform in academic medical research. The survey was distributed across CHOP clinical environments through fliers, emails, and a link embedded directly in the hospital’s electronic health record system, Epic, making it easy for busy clinicians to report misinformation they encountered during routine care. Respondents were asked what misinformation they had heard, which category it fit into, whether they felt prepared to address it, what strategies they used, and whether or not their approach worked, along with additional demographic questions about the respondent.

To make the collected data actionable, the researchers paired the survey with a Qliksense dashboard that provides real-time insights into survey entries. A multidisciplinary team, including a pediatrician, a neonatologist, public relations and marketing specialists, a data analyst, and a journalist, meets monthly to review the trending topics and decide which ones warrant new patient education content or internal clinician training. This combination of lightweight data collection, live analytics, and regular cross-disciplinary review is what transforms scattered anecdotes into an institutional response capable of keeping pace with rapidly shifting misinformation trends.

Between May 2025 and March 2026, the tracking tool recorded 234 entries from clinicians across the hospital. The single largest category was vaccine misinformation, which accounted for 53.8 percent of all entries, confirming that immunization remains the dominant battleground for pediatric health myths. Trending keywords included aluminum, acetaminophen, ADHD, and antibiotics, reflecting the specific concerns circulating in the community the hospital serves. Beyond vaccines, the topics ranged across categories such as distrust in healthcare, supplements, miracle cures, and unnecessary interventions, illustrating how broad and varied the misinformation landscape confronting pediatric clinicians has become.

The survey also yielded revealing data about how prepared clinicians feel when confronting misinformation, and how effective they actually are. On a scale of 1 to 100, respondents reported a median preparedness score of 77 in responding to misinformation from patients. Yet only 28 percent reported that their approach actually worked in changing a patient’s or family’s perspective. That gap between confidence and effectiveness is one of the study’s most striking findings, and it underscores a problem familiar to communication researchers: simply knowing the science is often not enough to counter a belief that is emotionally or socially anchored.

Experience, interestingly, cut in both directions. Median preparedness scores increased with years of practice, suggesting that seasoned clinicians feel more comfortable engaging with misinformation. However, more years in practice was associated with lower chances that their approach actually worked. The findings hint that the communication techniques that come naturally to experienced physicians may not be the ones best suited to changing minds, and that formal training in misinformation response could benefit clinicians at every career stage. It was precisely this kind of insight that informed the internal education initiatives the hospital subsequently developed.

The practical output of the tracking system has been substantial. The entries have driven the creation of new patient education and public health social media content on 28 topics, including videos and blog posts, along with seven corresponding opinion editorials published in the Philadelphia Inquirer. The external-facing component is a website called Pediatric Health Chat, which contains educational information specifically designed to debunk the misinformation families reported encountering in their everyday lives. In addition, the team launched a weekly educational email on vaccine communication skills, which has run for ten weeks and counting of clinician education content informed directly by the REDCap entries.

Katie Lockwood, MD, MEd, FAAP, study author and pediatrician at CHOP, framed the approach as a way of listening to families more systematically. Looking at these trends allowed the team to see in real time what was worrying the families they care for and to give them the most up-to-date science on topics of interest, she said. Addressing pediatric health misinformation is vital to protecting the health of children, she added, and as trusted messengers, children’s hospitals have an obligation to respond. The research showed that systematically tracking the misinformation families encounter can turn clinicians’ real-world questions into effective, targeted education, even when individual corrective conversations fall short.

The implications extend well beyond a single institution. Although fewer than one-third of survey respondents said their own responses worked, the aggregated findings gave providers a clearer understanding of families’ concerns and helped guide materials for patients, families, and other clinicians. The researchers state that the approach could be replicated in other hospitals and care settings to help build trust with patients and caregivers and provide them the information they need most to keep children healthy. In an era when misinformation spreads faster than any press release, the CHOP model offers a template for meeting families where their worries actually are, using the clinical encounter itself as a sensor for the information environment surrounding children’s health.

Subject of Research: Tracking pediatric health misinformation in clinical encounters to build institutional patient education responses

Article Title: Monitoring online health misinformation can help create useful patient education content

Article References: Monitoring online health misinformation can help create useful patient education content. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: health misinformation, pediatrics, vaccine misinformation, patient education, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, American Academy of Pediatrics, clinical communication, REDCap, clinician training, public health messaging, social media, Pediatric Health Chat

Generative AI refers to a class of machine learning systems, typically built on large neural networks trained on vast text, image, or multimodal datasets, that can produce new content such as clinical summaries, draft documentation, differential diagnosis suggestions, or patient education materials. In adult medicine, these tools have already moved into electronic health record interfaces, ambient documentation systems, and clinical decision support workflows. Pediatrics, however, presents a fundamentally different computational and clinical problem. Children are not small adults: their physiology changes dramatically across developmental stages, dosing is weight- and age-dependent, growth trajectories and vaccination schedules follow strict temporal logic, and rare congenital conditions appear with a frequency that standard adult-trained models have rarely encountered. A model that performs well summarizing adult internal medicine notes may fail in ways that are subtle but clinically consequential when applied to a newborn or a teenager.

This is precisely the gap the AAP statement targets. According to the Academy, most generative AI tools are trained on datasets in which children are underrepresented, and very few have been rigorously evaluated in pediatric populations specifically. The consequence is a class of systems whose outputs in pediatric settings carry an unquantified error profile. The policy statement therefore calls on developers to prioritize the ethical and safe incorporation of pediatric datasets, to actively address bias in training data, and to implement strong data privacy and security safeguards that recognize children’s developmental differences and the family-centered nature of pediatric care. In practical terms, that means models must be able to reason appropriately across age bands, must be tested against pediatric-specific benchmarks, and must be audited for performance disparities before they are trusted at the bedside.

Equity is a second pillar of the guidance. The AAP explicitly encourages the development of AI tools that represent diverse races, ethnicities, languages, abilities, and socioeconomic statuses, warning that poorly designed systems risk exacerbating existing health disparities rather than reducing them. The technical logic behind this concern is well established in the machine learning literature: when training corpora underrepresent particular populations, models tend to perform worse for those groups, and when such systems are deployed in clinical settings, those performance gaps translate directly into unequal quality of care. For children, whose developmental windows make delayed or inaccurate care especially costly, the stakes of algorithmic inequity are amplified. The Academy’s position is that equity cannot be an afterthought bolted on after deployment; it must be engineered into data collection, model training, and evaluation from the outset.

Privacy and security receive equally emphatic treatment. Pediatric data is uniquely sensitive, encompassing not only medical information but also developmental, behavioral, educational, and family-context details that follow a child for decades. The statement places patient privacy and security at the forefront of any clinical AI implementation, a demand that carries particular weight given that children cannot legally consent on their own behalf and that family-centered care often involves multiple stakeholders in a single record. The guidance effectively establishes a precondition: no generative AI tool should enter pediatric clinical use without safeguards commensurate with the heightened sensitivity of childhood health data.

Human oversight forms the third major theme. Lead author Srinivasan Suresh, MD, MBA, FAAP, framed the opportunity and the caution together. Artificial intelligence in healthcare, he said, offers extraordinary opportunities to improve workflow, offer clinical decision support, documentation, and education across pediatric subspecialties, yet the AAP recognizes the need to step into this new world with thoughtfulness and intention, noting that there will be a need for rigorous human oversight and accountability. In other words, the Academy is not calling for a moratorium on clinical AI; it is calling for a governance model in which pediatricians remain the accountable decision-makers and AI functions as a supervised instrument rather than an autonomous authority.

That framing reflects an unusual dynamic in the current technology cycle, one that co-author R. Brandon Hunter, MD, FAAP, described candidly. Generative AI, he said, is already providing real value to pediatricians and improving at an incredible pace, but what makes this moment in healthcare so interesting and unusual is that adoption is often moving faster than the evidence on how to use these tools effectively is being produced. He expressed the hope that the statement gives pediatricians a framework for thinking about AI implementation as that evidence catches up. This evidence-adoption gap is a recurring pattern in health informatics: tools diffuse into practice on the strength of perceived efficiency gains, while validation studies lag months or years behind, leaving clinicians to improvise standards in real time. The AAP statement is an attempt to close that gap by giving clinicians a structured set of questions to ask vendors, institutions, and themselves before deployment.

The scope of the new guidance is carefully bounded. It addresses only the use of generative AI to support the clinical care of pediatric patients by clinicians; it does not address direct use of AI by children, adolescents, and families, an area the Academy is handling through separate guidance, including its earlier policy statement on digital ecosystems for children and adolescents. The statement itself was developed by the AAP Council on Clinical Information Technology and the AAP Section on Innovation in Therapeutics and Technology, and followed the Academy’s standard process: drafting by medical experts, reflection of the latest available evidence, multiple rounds of peer review, and final approval by the AAP Board of Directors. The method of research underpinning the statement is a literature review, and its subject of research is people, specifically the pediatric population whose care it seeks to protect.

Dr. Hunter will carry the practical message directly to conference attendees in a session titled 5 Things Every Pediatrician Should Know About Generative AI, presented on Sunday, October 4, with two opportunities to attend: from 7:30 to 8:30 a.m. PDT in Room 24 of the San Diego Convention Center, and repeated from 3:30 to 4:30 p.m. PDT in Room 6B. The dual presentation underscores the Academy’s assessment that AI literacy is rapidly becoming a core clinical competency rather than a niche technical interest. For practicing pediatricians, the immediate takeaway is a checklist mentality: know what data a tool was trained on, whether it was validated in children, how it handles privacy, where its known failure modes lie, and who is accountable when it errs.

Beyond the clinic walls, the statement sketches a collaborative model for the technology’s future. The AAP argues that clinicians, developers, researchers, and families can work together to ensure generative AI tools are thoughtfully designed and implemented, and that an interdisciplinary approach will help align innovation with real-world pediatric needs. Dr. Suresh closed the loop with a reminder of what the technology can and cannot do: it will never be able to replace the trusting partnership between families and physician, he said, describing AI as an evolving tool that, when used properly as a support, will help pediatricians give more of their attention to their patients. That final formulation captures the Academy’s overall posture toward generative AI in pediatrics: neither resistance nor enthusiasm, but a disciplined insistence that the tools serve the child, the family, and the clinician, in that order, and that the evidence base be allowed to catch up with the speed of adoption before the technology becomes indispensable.

Subject of Research: Clinical guidance for the safe, equitable, and effective use of generative artificial intelligence in pediatric care

Article Title: American Academy of Pediatrics provides guidance on safe, equitable and effective use of generative artificial intelligence for clinicians

Article References: American Academy of Pediatrics provides guidance on safe, equitable and effective use of generative artificial intelligence for clinicians. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: generative AI, pediatrics, American Academy of Pediatrics, clinical decision support, health equity, data privacy, AI governance, pediatric datasets, algorithmic bias, human oversight, health informatics, policy statement

The research team, led by Jessica Visone, a second-year medical student at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, with contributions from Kathryn Whitehill, MD, and medical students Shivani Srivastava and Katherine Poole, conducted a cross-sectional audit of 65 public Instagram accounts between September 22 and November 15, 2025. The sample was deliberately constructed to capture the organizations families trust most: the top children’s hospitals for pediatric and adolescent behavioral health, professional medical societies, and the state health departments serving the largest pediatric populations in the country. The starting date was not arbitrary. On September 22, 2025, the White House issued messaging linking prenatal acetaminophen use to autism, a claim made despite the absence of causal evidence, and the resulting controversy spread rapidly across platforms. The researchers used the American Academy of Pediatrics as a benchmark, measuring time to first relevant post, the proportion of controversy-related content, and the quality of that content.

The headline finding was stark. Only 14 of the 65 institutions, or 21.5 percent, posted any content addressing the controversy or correcting the false claims about acetaminophen and autism. The American Academy of Pediatrics was the clear outlier in responsiveness: it posted on Day 1 of the study window and published 10 relevant posts across the period. At the other end of the spectrum, none of the state health departments posted any relevant content at all, and children’s hospitals that did respond lagged as long as 51 days behind the AAP’s first post. In practical terms, that means a family scrolling Instagram in late September could have encountered viral claims connecting a common fever and pain medication to autism, with no corrective message from their state health authority or their children’s hospital for weeks, if ever.

Perhaps the most revealing aspect of the audit is what it says about why the silence occurred. The researchers found that non-responding institutions were not inactive. Some of the organizations that never addressed the acetaminophen controversy published more than 100 posts on unrelated topics during the same study period. That detail, the authors argue, suggests the institutional silence reflected an administrative choice rather than a limitation of capacity or staffing. The infrastructure to communicate existed and was actively being used; it simply was not activated in response to a public health misinformation crisis. Visone framed the finding as a matter of institutional responsibility, noting that major health organizations have a duty to communicate with the populations they serve during times of increased health misinformation, and that at such moments there is nothing more powerful than the truth when it comes to population health.

The quality analysis added a second layer of concern. Among the 26 relevant posts that were published across all institutions, 85 percent used plain-language formatting and myth-busting framing, techniques that communication researchers generally consider best practice for countering misinformation. Myth-busting framing typically involves explicitly naming the false claim, warning readers that it is false, and then substituting the correct information, an approach designed to avoid reinforcing the misconception. Yet even the posts that followed these conventions fell short on accessibility. The average reading level of the relevant posts, measured using the Flesch-Kincaid grade level formula, was grade 11.4, well above the average 8th-grade reading level of adults in the United States. The researchers also assessed readability using the SMOG index, alongside checks for multilingual availability and accessibility features.

That reading-level gap matters because readability formulas estimate the years of education needed to comprehend a text. Content written at an 11th-grade level is effectively inaccessible to a substantial share of the adult population, including many of the pregnant patients and parents of young children most directly targeted by the acetaminophen claims. Compounding the problem, the audit identified no multilingual content across any of the institutions studied, meaning Spanish-speaking families and other non-English speakers had no institutionally produced corrective content in their own languages. For a misinformation event that specifically concerned decisions made during pregnancy, the absence of accessible, translated guidance represents a significant equity gap in the digital public health response.

The study’s methodology reflects a growing effort to bring quantitative rigor to the evaluation of health communication. All analyses were conducted in R version 4.5.3, and the team coded posts for format, content framing, emotional tone, and accessibility features. One of the study’s figures visualizes the timeline of institutional responses as horizontal bars measuring the number of days from September 22, 2025, to each institution’s first relevant Instagram post, with point sizes indicating the total number of relevant posts each institution published. State health departments are absent from that figure entirely, because they had no posts to depict. A second figure breaks down the prevalence of content quality and accessibility features across the 26 relevant posts, grouped by format, framing, tone, and accessibility, providing a template other researchers could apply to future controversies.

The authors argue that the findings point to a gap in administrative infrastructure and policy, not merely in content creation. Their proposed remedy is concrete: pediatric health systems should develop standardized rapid-response protocols that include pre-approved messaging templates written at or below an 8th-grade reading level, multilingual versions of those templates, and clear internal processes for activating effective and accessible communication when emerging controversies arise. The AAP’s Day 1 response demonstrates, the researchers contend, that rapid, high-quality digital communication is achievable even during a fast-moving health controversy. The problem is not that the standard is unreachable; it is that most organizations in the sample never attempted to meet it, leaving families without institutional guidance during an active misinformation event.

The broader significance of the audit extends beyond the acetaminophen controversy itself. As social media grows in popularity as a source of medical information, the pathways by which families encounter health claims have fundamentally changed, and institutional communication strategies have not kept pace. A misinformation event can now reach millions of users within hours, while the audit shows institutional responses arriving on a timescale of weeks or months, if at all. Visone is scheduled to present the abstract during the Oct. 2-6 conference in San Diego, with a poster presentation for the Section on Administration and Practice Management and a featured appearance at a press Soundbite Session. The study offers a practical framework for evaluating and strengthening institutional communication capacity, and its central lesson is likely to resonate with health communicators well beyond pediatrics: in the modern information environment, the speed, readability, and language accessibility of official responses are not secondary concerns but core determinants of whether accurate health information reaches the public at all.

Subject of Research: Institutional responsiveness of pediatric health organizations to acetaminophen-autism misinformation on Instagram

Article Title: Social media analysis finds health institutions delayed or did not respond to false claims inking autism to acetaminophen use during pregnancy

Article References: Social media analysis finds health institutions delayed or did not respond to false claims inking autism to acetaminophen use during pregnancy. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: acetaminophen, autism, health misinformation, social media, Instagram, pediatrics, American Academy of Pediatrics, health communication, children's hospitals, state health departments, readability, public health

The conference’s opening session on Saturday, October 3, will pair AAP President Andrew Racine, MD, PhD, FAAP, with a keynote speaker whose reach dwarfs that of most medical journals. Mikhail Varshavski, D.O., known to his audience of more than 30 million people as “Doctor Mike,” has built one of the largest physician-led platforms on social media, using short-form video and long-form commentary to counter medical misinformation. His presence at the podium signals a deliberate strategic choice by the Academy: rather than treating viral health content as a rival to clinical authority, the organization is bringing its most successful practitioners of that medium inside the tent.

That theme continues in a panel discussion featuring pediatricians who have cultivated substantial followings across different platforms, including Tommy Martin, MD, FAAP; Ari Brown, MD, FAAP; and Leah Rappaport, MD, FAAP. Paul Tran, MD, FAAP will moderate an audience-driven discussion and question-and-answer session, with the panelists available to take questions from both attendees and the media. According to the Academy, the panel is designed to provide practical guidance for physicians who want to communicate more effectively with families, covering how health messaging must be adapted to the distinct formats, algorithms and audience expectations of different social media platforms.

The underlying problem these sessions address is well documented in the communication research literature. Health misinformation spreads faster and farther on social networks than corrective content, in part because false or emotionally charged claims generate more engagement than nuanced clinical guidance. Parents searching for answers about vaccines, nutrition, screen time, sleep safety or developmental concerns frequently encounter content produced by non-experts before they encounter advice from credentialed clinicians. Pediatricians who build authentic followings occupy a rare position in that ecosystem: they combine formal medical training with the fluency in platform conventions that determines whether content is seen at all.

Elizabeth Murray, DO, FAAP, who chairs the AAP national conference steering committee, framed the meeting’s communication focus as an extension of pediatricians’ core professional duties rather than a departure from them. “Today, more than ever, it’s important to provide clear, accurate health information in our roles as pediatricians, family partners and patient advocates,” Murray said in the Academy’s announcement. “We look forward to learning and sharing our best guidance for caring for families and for each other.” The remark captures the dual mandate that has come to define contemporary pediatric practice: delivering evidence-based care in the clinic while also meeting families in the digital spaces where their health questions actually arise.

Beyond its communication programming, the conference functions as the Academy’s principal annual vehicle for disseminating new pediatric research and continuing education. The scientific program spans a wide range of pediatric topics, with sessions presented both in person and through a virtual poster hall, alongside a comprehensive library of on-demand sessions that extends access to attendees who cannot travel or who wish to revisit material after the live meeting. Abstracts scheduled for presentation at the conference will be published on the conference website at 6 a.m. PDT on Friday, October 2, giving journalists and researchers a structured preview of the findings to be discussed. Embargoed news releases will be available through EurekAlert! and on request, following the embargo conventions that govern major biomedical meetings.

The meeting’s format reflects broader trends in how large medical societies structure their flagship events. Hybrid delivery, combining in-person attendance with livestreamed and on-demand content, has become standard practice since the pandemic reshaped expectations for professional conferences. For an organization representing 67,000 primary care pediatricians, pediatric medical subspecialists and pediatric surgical specialists, the hybrid model serves a practical purpose: pediatricians practice in settings ranging from academic medical centers to small community clinics, and continuing education must reach all of them. The on-demand library in particular allows time-pressed clinicians to engage with research presentations on their own schedules, an accessibility consideration that increasingly determines the reach of scientific meetings.

The San Diego program also extends beyond the convention hall into community engagement, a longstanding feature of AAP national meetings. On Friday, October 3, beginning at 9:30 a.m., pediatricians will join “I Love a Clean San Diego,” an environmental organization that has worked to keep the city clean since 1954, for a beach clean-up at Fiesta Island. Shuttles will transport volunteers to the island for the outdoor event, which will include a game of Trash Bingo, and the collected trash will be weighed at the end to quantify the group’s impact. The activity pairs the conference’s scientific agenda with a visible demonstration of the environmental health concerns, from pollution to climate exposure, that pediatricians increasingly address as part of child well-being.

Physical activity gets its own showcase on Monday, October 5, when the annual AAP Friends of Children Fund 5K Fun Run & Walk takes participants along the historic boardwalk bordering San Diego Bay. The run begins at Marina Terrace at the Marriott Marquis San Diego Marina, with a warm-up at 6:45 a.m. PDT and the event running from 7 to 9 a.m. Such events serve a dual function at medical conferences: they raise money for the Academy’s Friends of Children Fund, which supports child health initiatives, and they model the kind of healthy behavior that pediatricians counsel families to adopt. For an organization dedicated to the health, safety and well-being of infants, children, adolescents and young adults, the symbolism of thousands of physicians running together along the waterfront is not incidental.

For journalists, the Academy has established clear access procedures for the meeting. Reporters planning to attend in person or virtually must review the AAP Media Guidelines and seek credentials in advance of the conference, with press credentials also required for the Fiesta Island clean-up. Media inquiries can be directed to Lisa Robinson at lrobinson@aap.org or Alex Hulvalchick at ahulvalchick@aap.org. Conference information, including the full program, is available on the AAP Experience website. As the meeting opens, the Academy’s bet is that the credibility of pediatric medicine, accumulated over decades of clinical practice and research, can be extended into the attention economy, one carefully crafted post, panel and keynote at a time.

Subject of Research: Pediatric medical communication and social media engagement at the American Academy of Pediatrics annual conference

Article Title: American Academy of Pediatrics hosts national conference in San Diego, welcomes pediatrician influencers

Article References: American Academy of Pediatrics hosts national conference in San Diego, welcomes pediatrician influencers. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: American Academy of Pediatrics, pediatrics, medical conference, Doctor Mike, health misinformation, social media, physician influencers, San Diego, medical education, child health, science communication, continuing medical education