1.9 Cases of Leukemia per 10,000 CT Scans in Children

In the breakdown of results, the study authors from Group Health Research Institute and University of California, Davis note that the risk of developing leukemia was highest from head scans for kids under age 5 with a rate of 1.9 cases per 10,000 CT scans. Younger children and girls seemed more susceptible to solid cancers than older kids and boys. Every 300 to 390 scans of a girl’s abdomen or pelvis was associated with the development of one solid cancer. The study estimates that 4,870 fut...

 Lego Letter About Gender

To Parents The urge to create is equally strong in all children. Boys and girls. It’s the imagination that counts. Not skill. You build whatever comes into your head, the way you want it. A bed or a truck. A dolls house or a spaceship. A lot of boys like dolls houses. They’re more human than spaceships. A lot of girls prefer spaceships. They’re more exciting than dolls houses. The most important thing is to put the right material in their hands and let them create whatever appeals t...

 Testosterone's Effect on Memory

Like many other areas of development, memory generally matures more rapidly in girls than boys. Beginning in the womb, female fetuses are known to habituate to auditory stimuli about two weeks earlier than males. After birth, they are more advanced at visual habituation. Toward the end of the first year, girls are about a month ahead in tests of short-term, explicit memory, like remembering, after a few seconds' distraction, where they just saw a toy being hidden. Girls also outperform boys o...

 Circumcision Increases an Infant's Sensitivity to Pain

Glover’s findings are supported by research on the effects of pain experienced by infants after birth. Anna Taddio, a pain specialist at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, noticed more than a decade ago that the male infants she treated seemed more sensitive to pain than their female counterparts. This discrepancy, she reasoned, could be due to sex hormones, to anatomical differences—or to a painful event experienced in this part of the world by many boys and no girls: circumcisio...

 China and India Aborting Millions of Fetuses

Williamson’s wise advice went unheeded. In the years after her study was published in 1978, ultrasound became increasingly available in Singapore and other countries in South and East Asia. The introduction of this technology enabled a new and brutal form of sex selection: if the sonogram shows it’s a girl, abort. Researchers’ estimates of the number of female fetuses aborted over the past twenty years are mind-boggling: ten million in India, twenty million in China. Because of this pra...

 Hormones on the Brain

At school, boys are fidgety, difficult, inattentive, and slow to learn, compared to girls. Nineteen out of every twenty hyperactive children are boys. Four times as many boys as girls are dyslexic and learning disabled. "Education is almost a conspiracy against the aptitudes and inclinations of a schoolboy," wrote psychologist Dianne McGuiness, a sentiment to which almost every man with a memory of school will raise a hearty cry of assent. But another fact begins to emerge at school. Girls a...