Harvard Health Content API

Even parents who use booster seats for their children don’t always insist on using the seats for carpooling, a new survey finds. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends booster seats for kids who are too big for a child car seat. Typically this occurs about age 4. The academy says kids are not protected enough by standard seat belts until they are about 4 feet, 9 inches tall. Most children reach this height between ages 8 and 12. Many states require booster seats up to age 8. The new study surveyed 671 U.S. parents. All of them had children who were 4 to 8 years old. About 3 out of 4 parents said they used booster seats for their children in their own cars. But these same parents did not always use booster seats for carpooling. About 1 out of 5 did not insist that their child use a booster seat when riding in a carpool with another parent.

People with diabetes are much less likely to lose a limb or a toe because of the disease, new research shows. The study found that the amputation rate for diabetics has dropped by more than half since the mid-1990s. Researchers from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did the study. It was based on hospital discharge records. Amputations are most common among people with diabetes who are elderly or have had the disease for at least 10 years. So the study focused on people age 40 and older. The amputation rate was 11.2 per 1,000 people in 1996. By 2008, the number of Americans with diabetes more than tripled. But the amputation rate dropped to about 4 per 1,000. Researchers said this drop probably was the result of better treatments. The journal Diabetes Care published the study. The Associated Press wrote about it January 25.

Avoiding certain health problems in middle age dramatically improves your lifetime chances of preventing a heart attack or stroke, a new study finds. The study included about 250,000 people. It looked at a person’s lifetime risk based on their health at certain ages. Researchers put together the numbers from 18 prior studies. To gauge health, they focused on the standard factors that most strongly increase the risk of heart attack or stroke. They are smoking, high cholesterol, high blood pressure and diabetes. The study found that people with none of these risk factors at mid-life had very little chance of a heart attack or stroke in the rest of their lives. An example would be a 45-year-old male nonsmoker with ideal cholesterol and blood pressure, and no diabetes. His chance of ever having a heart attack or stroke would be 1.4%, researchers said.

Two women with very limited vision appeared to improve after treatment with embryonic stem cells, researchers report. These cells are removed from human embryos. They can grow into many types of cells. Both women had some vision but were legally blind. Both had macular degeneration. This disease causes loss of central vision. One woman had the common “dry” form. The other woman had a rarer type. Each woman was injected in one eye with embryonic stem cells. Four months later, they showed some improvement in eye tests. For example, both could read more letters on vision charts. Doctors said the treatment appeared to be safe. The women had no signs of rejection or abnormal growths. The journal Lancet published the study online January 23. The Associated Press wrote about it.