Enhancing home visiting with mental health consultation.

Home visiting programs have been successful in engaging and enrolling families who are at high risk for stress, depression, and substance abuse. However, many of these mothers may not be receiving mental health services because home visitors lack the knowledge and skills to identify mental health or determine how to appropriately address these problems. In response, a growing number of home visiting programs are expanding their capacity by integrating a mental health provider into their ongoing operations.

Prenatal and infant exposure to thimerosal from vaccines and immunoglobulins and risk of autism.

Objective: Exposure to thimerosal, a mercury-containing preservative that is used in vaccines and immunoglobulin preparations, has been hypothesized to be associated with increased risk of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This study was designed to examine relationships between prenatal and infant ethylmercury exposure from thimerosal-containing vaccines and/or immunoglobulin preparations and ASD and 2 ASD subcategories: autistic disorder (AD) and ASD with regression.

Methods: A case-control study was conducted in 3 managed care organizations (MCOs) of 256 children with ASD and 752 controls matched by birth year, gender, and MCO.

Early thimerosal exposure and neuropsychological outcomes at 7 to 10 years.

Background: It has been hypothesized that early exposure to thimerosal, a mercury-containing preservative used in vaccines and immune globulin preparations, is associated with neuropsychological deficits in children.

Methods: We enrolled 1047 children between the ages of 7 and 10 years and administered standardized tests assessing 42 neuropsychological outcomes. (We did not assess autism-spectrum disorders.

Pattern identification in biogeography.

Identifying common patterns among area cladograms that arise in historical biogeography is an important tool for biogeographical inference. We develop the first rigorous formalization of these pattern-identification problems. We develop metrics to compare area cladograms.

The "quality " of early care and education settings: definitional and measurement issues.

There is a widespread belief that high-quality early care and education can improve children's school readiness. However, debate continues about the essential elements of a high-quality experience, about whether quality means the same things across different types of care settings, about how to measure quality, and about the level of quality that might make a meaningful difference in outcomes for children. Are the aspects of the child care environment that researchers measure the ones that are most strongly related to children's development? This article argues that the ways in which researchers currently measure early care environments are flawed and that the conclusions drawn about the relationship between these measures and outcomes for children are frequently incorrect or overstated.