AP - Health officials say roughly 1 in 25 adolescents in the United States are taking antidepressants.

(MedPage Today) -- Doing surgery on adults with congenital heart disease doesn't disproportionately eat up pediatric hospital resources, but paying attention to factors like depression could help cut down on pricey admissions, researchers found.

HealthDay - (HealthDay News) -- Doctors frequently order bed rest during pregnancy to protect the mother's health and that of the developing baby.

HealthDay - WEDNESDAY, Oct. 19 (HealthDay News) -- Obese children need special attention when they undergo anesthesia, two new studies suggest.

HealthDay - WEDNESDAY, Oct. 19 (HealthDay News) -- Three leading U.S. cancer groups have proposed new guidelines for cervical cancer testing for women, including when to start screening for sexually active young women, extending intervals between screenings and in some cases, supplementing the traditional Pap test with human papilloma virus (HPV) testing.

HealthDay - WEDNESDAY, Oct. 19 (HealthDay News) -- Although pregnant women who have high blood pressure face a higher risk that their baby will be born with birth defects, new research indicates that the medications typically used to treat the condition will not raise that risk any further.

For years doctors have struggled to identify Down Syndrome in pregnant women, giving expectant mothers the opportunity to abort the full term. Now a new blood test promises to change all that with several new products coming to market that aim to provide accurate results in the 8th to 12th weeks. Until these tests become commonly used and proved, women have to rely on an ultra sound that gives only risk indications...

Premature infants who are exposed to their parents voices in the NICU (neonatal intensive care unit) tend to have better vocalizations at 32 and 36 weeks gestational age, researchers from the Department of Pediatrics, Women and Infants Hospital, Providence, Rhode Island reported in the journal Pediatrics. For a baby, vocalizing (uttering sounds) starts with the first cry. The mother, parents or caregivers start the communication process by responding to their baby's vocalizations...

New Guidelines from the American Academy of Pediatrics say that children as young as four can be diagnoses and treated for ADHD. The previous research was more than a decade old and covered children from 6 to 12, but with more research and understanding of the issues surrounding ADHD in children, the upper limit was also expanded to include teenagers to age 18. Dr. Mark Wolraich, lead author of the report released Sunday at the AAP National Conference in Boston. "There is now enough evidence to address this broader age range," he said...

BOSTON (MedPage Today) -- The frequency of pediatric urolithiasis more than doubled over an 8-year period at a large children's hospital and the pediatric urologists have yet to find a reason for the increase.

AP - Annual cancer tests are becoming a thing of the past. New guidelines out Wednesday for cervical cancer screening have experts at odds over some things, but they are united in the view that the common practice of getting a Pap test every year is too often and probably doing more harm than good.

Reuters - The playground of Aden's al-Haqqani school should be filled with squealing children at this time of year -- instead, goats pick through the brittle grass as young men doze atop crumbling school desks strewn across the yard.

(MedPage Today) -- Hospital readmission risk prediction models, both administrative and clinical, generally perform poorly, a systematic review showed.

(MedPage Today) -- A highly accurate molecular test for Down syndrome is now commercially available, and it requires only a sample of a pregnant woman's blood in the first or second trimester, according to the test's developer.

A study published on bmj.com shows that male bowel cancer patients have a high probability of suffering from erectile dysfunction (ED) after their treatment yet in spite of this, the majority of patients does not receive sufficient information about the condition. Approximately 38,000 people in the UK are diagnosed with bowel cancer each year, with half of these patients surviving longer than five years after treatment. According to the study these numbers are set to increase...

A report in this week's BMJ Dr Paquita de Zulueta argues that asylum seekers and undocumented migrants must retain access to primary care, calling on her colleagues to "overcome bureaucratic barriers and register patients irrespective of their residential status...

According to a new study, young genes that appeared after the primate branch split off from other mammal species are more likely to be expressed in the developing human brain. The correlation, published online on October 18 in the open access journal PLoS Biology, suggests that evolutionarily recent genes may be responsible for constructing the uniquely powerful human brain...

ORLANDO (MedPage Today) -- Bypassing superovulation steps and proceeding directly to in vitro fertilization technology appears to improve pregnancy outcomes for older women who have unexplained infertility, researchers reported here.

A study conducted by researchers at the University of Leeds has discovered that, even though hospital death rates for heart attack patients across all age groups have been reduced considerably, there are still concerns regarding the inequalities in heart attack management for elderly individuals. The study was funded by the British Heart Foundation (BHF) and published in the European Heart Journal. The research revealed that between 2003 and 2010 the risk of heart patients across all age groups dying in hospital was reduced by almost fifty percent...

According to an investigation published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, immunotherapies and targeted therapies (anti-neoplastic agents) specifically target signaling pathways in cancer cells. However, in about 20% to 50% of cancer patients they are linked to thyroid dysfunction which can result in adverse effects on patients' quality of life. New antineoplastic agents that prevent specific cellular processes to restrict the growth of cancer cells have been introduced over the past twenty years...