Daily Rounds: Steward Quits MHA; Formula Probe Deepens; Exploring Middle Childhood; Obesity And The Brain

Steward Health Care chain quits Mass. hospital group - Business - The Boston Globe (bostonglobe.com) "Steward decided to leave the industry association because the company had quickly transformed itself into a health care provider that looks and acts differently than most other hospitals, a spokesman said. “At this point in the evolution of health care reform, and of Steward itself, we feel we can make a greater contribution as a single coherent voice with a unique constituency: a fully integrated community based accountable care organization,’’ the company said in a statement." Mead Johnson confirms FDA visits in Enfamil probe (Reuters) "U.S. health inspectors this week visited an Enfamil baby formula factory run by Mead Johnson Nutrition Co as part of an investigation into the cause of bacterial infections that killed one infant and sickened another, a company spokesman said on Wednesday."

Now We Are Six - The Hormone Surge of Middle Childhood - NYTimes.com "Yet as new findings from neuroscience, evolutionary biology, paleontology and anthropology make clear, middle childhood is anything but a bland placeholder. To the contrary, it is a time of great cognitive creativity and ambition, when the brain has pretty much reached its adult size and can focus on threading together its private intranet service — on forging, organizing, amplifying and annotating the tens of billions of synaptic connections that allow brain cells and brain domains to communicate." (nytimes.com)

Could Obesity Change The Brain? : Shots - Health Blog : NPR "Now some provocative research suggests that a part of the problem might be that obesity could change the area of the brain that helps control appetite and body weight. And those changes might start within a day of eating a high-fat meal, according to scientists who are trying to figure out why it's so hard to lose weight. They report seeing changes in the brain after just one day on a fatty diet." (npr.org)