Fear not the pacifier...

Writing in The Archives of Paediatric & Adolescent Medicine, researchers say they found no good evidence of a link between pacifier use and nursing.
"Pacifiers have traditionally been thought to interfere with optimal breast-feeding," wrote the researchers, at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. In the 1980s, health officials discouraged their use. But in recent years, researchers have found evidence that babies who use pacifiers when they sleep may be less susceptible to sudden infant death syndrome. The American Academy of Paediatrics now recommends that pacifiers be used for that reason.
For doctors, this means there have been two seemingly competing needs: to encourage breast-feeding, which is healthiest, but to reduce the risk of SIDS.
For the study, the researchers reviewed 29 studies from 12 countries that looked at pacifiers and breast-feeding. The lead author was Dr Nina R. O'Connor, now with the Chestnut Hill Family Practice Residency Program in Philadelphia. The researchers did find that women whose babies used a pacifier seemed to stop breast-feeding earlier than other women. But it did not appear that the pacifiers were the reason.  The senior author of the study, Dr Fern recommended that pacifiers be given when the baby is 3 to 4 weeks old.

Prelude to memory trouble

Even before they begin to have serious problems with their memory overall, people in the earliest stages of Alzheimer's disease appear to have trouble making good decisions about what to remember, a new study reports.
Writing in Neuropsychology, researchers say these patients seem to have trouble determining which pieces of information are more important than others.
The researchers, led by Alan D Castel of the University of California, Los Angeles, based their conclusions on a study of 109 people with an average age of 75. Some were in early stages of Alzheimer's, while others were cognitively healthy. The volunteers were asked to memorise a series of words, each of which had a point value associated with it. The higher the value of the word, they were told, the more important it was to remember it. Later, the participants were given 30 seconds to recall as many of the highest-scored words as they could. The goal was to earn the most points.
While the Alzheimer's and non-Alzheimer's volunteers alike remembered more higher-point words than lower-point ones, those with the disease were not as good at maximising their scores. The researchers said it might be that in early Alzheimer's the brain was already becoming less efficient at learning. They added that it might be possible to train patients to improve memory strategies