Meeting Coverage > AAP
Pediatric Meeting Opens with Focus on Health Disparities
by Todd Neale, Senior Staff Writer, MedPage Today October 19, 2012
NEW ORLEANS -- The American Academy of Pediatrics is kicking off its annual meeting with a half day devoted to health disparities in the nation's youngest patients.
Those who attend the session will hear about ways to improve cultural sensitivity, how to better work with community agencies to meet the various needs of children, and how to face some of the social problems affecting children, including hunger, homelessness, and poverty, according to Robert Cicco, MD, a neonatologist at Western Pennsylvania Hospital in Pittsburgh and program chair for the meeting.
Speaking to his specialty, he said the disparity with the most dramatic impact is the racial difference in pregnancy outcomes, which will be the topic of one of the several plenary sessions at the meeting beginning here this weekend. Compared with the white population, the black population has a rate of premature birth that is two to three times higher, and that, in turn, results in a higher infant mortality rate.
Eliminating health disparities in areas including access to healthcare, immunization rates, and obesity will be a common thread throughout the meeting, Cicco said in an interview.
The AAP meeting will also take a big tent approach to pediatric medicine featuring presentations that will cover a wide range of topics and include many "meetings within a meeting."
Topics that garner interest crossing the pediatric subspecialty lines will command the main stage at plenary sessions.
One topic that fits this big picture track is concussion in kids sports and making the call about when the injured player can return to the active list. And concussion is not the only injury that can be difficult to manage -- sprains and breaks from a wide range of activities also require pediatric input to guide recovery.
"Pediatricians are often times put in the position of trying to evaluate some of these orthopedic injuries or head trauma injuries and making decisions about them," Cicco said. "And I think there's more and more literature coming out in terms of how you need to evaluate these kids before they return to whatever activity they were doing before."
Another important topic that will be featured is posttraumatic stress disorder stemming from emotional or physical trauma among children.
"You read a lot about the whole concept of posttraumatic stress disorder for adults, but we need to understand the effect this has on children too, and the relationship that that has with the development of various mental health issues that children might have," Cicco said.
Among the other topics that will be featured at the meeting are drug shortages and their effects on patient care, the genetic basis of autism, molecular-informed therapy for various pediatric diseases, the use of acid-suppressing medications in infants and children with reflux, and anesthesia neurotoxicity.
Beyond issues directly related to patient care, there will be sessions and other information about how pediatricians can best organize and manage their practices to remain viable in the current healthcare system and about how they can become better informed about the need to address children's health issues in the public policy arena, Cicco said.