Yakkin' on the cell: Bad for baby?
Over the weekend, some U.K. newspapers broke the news about a UCLA study coming out this summer that is bound to make headlines Stateside: it shows that pregnant women who use cell phones increase the likelihood that their children will have behavioral problems.
According to the Independent article, the study will say that using a cell phone 2-3 times a day can lead to babies being hyper and having emotional problems by the time they hit school. Possible reason? Radiation has been shown in experiments to change brain structure in animals.
Giving the kids cell phones to use before they're 7 apparently heightens the risk.
The study followed about 13,000 Danish kids, and is especially interesting because one of the lead authors used to think that cell phones carried no serious health risks.
So non-ionizing radiation is not my forte, but if the baby is affected by cell phone use, I wonder what's happening to Mom, who's actually putting the phone against her head?
Study's supposed to come out in the July issue of Epidemiology.
Thanks, Noel

Were you a feet-first baby?
There are a passel of questions that people who are having a baby together ask each other:
Such as, who's going to be the primary caretaker?
Or, do we want to know if it's a boy or a girl?
Maybe they should add another to the list: "Were you born feet first?"
A new study out of Norway suggests that genes play a strong role in determining whether a baby will be a risky breech delivery.
Scientists from the University of Bergen studied nearly 400,000 births in Norway between 1967 and 2004, and found that babies were two times as likely to be breech deliveries if either or both parents were born feet first.
The researchers say knowing the parents' history could help prevent breech births, which make up an estimated 5 percent of births and put the baby at higher risk of death and injury than babies born head first.
There are different exercises pregnant women can do to help turn the baby head-down. Or the doctor could try to manually move the baby from outside the abdomen. Like this:


