Blogs / Discoblog

A British woman correctly identified a baby’s eye cancer from 4,300 miles away, all because of some white-eye.

Madeleine Robb, a woman from Manchester, U.K., had been exchanging baby pics with another new mom, Megan Santos from Florida, after the two became friends online. But what Robb saw in the picture alarmed her: Santos’ daughter Rowan had a white glare in her eye, similar to the red glare people often have in photographs. But the white version can be a warning sign for retinoblastoma, a rare kind of eye cancer in kids under 5.

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While the science behind the placebo effect is still unclear, a new study may have found a group for whom it’s especially effective: children.

Kids’ tendency to be more open to the power of suggestion than adults appears to spill over into medicine. French pediatricians reviewing data from many different studies of children and adults receiving either anti-epilepsy medication or a sugar pill found that while children actually responded worse to the drugs than adults, they responded 50 percent better to a placebo, with one in five of the kids seeing a serious reduction in their seizure rates.

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The Telegraph published an article this weekend headlined, “Sugary Snacks Help School Children Concentrate.”

Really?

Here’s what actually happened: In a study of 16 kids, researchers gave them fruit juice containing either artificial sweetener or glucose—the natural sugar that acts as the body’s main energy source. The kids who drank the juice with glucose scored better on memory tests than the ones who ate artificial sugar, and appeared to have longer attention spans as well. Study leader David Benton’s main conclusion, then, was that children might perform better in school if they ate occasional snacks, rather than one big meal, and that a snack with some sugar might not be such a bad thing for them.

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