Pediatrics

On May 27, 2025, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will no longer include the COVID-19 vaccine on the list of immunizations it recommends for healthy children and pregnant women.

While breastfeeding has many benefits for a mother and her baby, it has one major drawback: It’s incredibly difficult to know how much milk the baby is consuming. To take the guesswork out of breastfeeding, an interdisciplinary team of engineers, neonatologists and pediatricians at Northwestern University has developed a new wearable device that can provide clinical-grade, continuous monitoring of breast milk consumption.

Physical activity in early childhood, especially taking part in organized sports, may ward off several mental health disorders in later childhood and adolescence, suggests research published online in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.

A combined team of roboticists from CREATE Lab, EPFL and Nestlé Research Lausanne, both in Switzerland, has developed a soft robot that was designed to mimic human infant motor development and the way infants feed.

In a recent study of a population of infants, published online May 6 in Pediatrics, 72% of infants were found to be immunized against respiratory syncytial virus (RSV).

Alarming trends show that colon—or bowel—cancer is increasing in younger people. If the rise continues, colorectal cancer is projected to become the leading cause of cancer-related deaths among young adults globally by 2030.

A new study led by The University of Texas at Arlington, University of California Los Angeles, University of Sherbrooke, and Harvard University links metal exposure to digestive issues in children.

In a new clinical study published in JAMA Pediatrics, researchers at the University of Chicago Medicine found that a low-intensity program that “prescribes” community resources to every parent or other primary caregiver of a hospitalized child reduced the use of acute care for children of food-insecure families in the following year, saving potentially thousands of dollars in health care expenditures while demanding little more than minutes of staff time per family.

Adverse situations experienced by the mother during childhood—such as neglect or physical, psychological or sexual violence—can trigger excessive weight gain in male children as early as the first two months of life. This was shown in a study that followed 352 pairs of newborns and their mothers in the cities of Guarulhos and São Paulo, Brazil. The results were published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Unvaccinated children and adolescents were up to 20 times more likely to develop long COVID than their vaccinated peers, according to new research led by a team from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. However, the analysis they performed also indicated that protection afforded by the vaccine primarily comes from preventing infection in the first place, rather than offering special protection against long COVID itself.