By The Defender Staff
When Teens Get Colorectal Cancer, It’s Often an Aggressive Form of the Disease
Jo Henderson was 17 when she was diagnosed with advanced colorectal cancer. It came after months of symptoms — stomach pain, bloating, constipation — and months of testing.
“I was expecting a gluten allergy, lactose intolerance,” said Henderson, now 18, of Seekonk, Massachusetts. “Literally anything but cancer.” Colorectal cancer in people younger than 20 is exceptionally rare: People like Henderson are about one in a million, and account for fewer than 100 cases per year in the United States.
But a new study found that most cases of colorectal cancer in kids and teenagers are aggressive, and often diagnosed at advanced stages.
HHS Sec. Kennedy Launches Presidential Fitness School Innovation Challenge
Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has launched a nationwide fitness challenge to help get children healthy again. During a Thursday announcement at Westlake High School in Austin, he said the goal behind the Presidential Fitness School Innovation Challenge is to encourage kids to “get active and build healthy habits for life.”
“Getting America healthy starts with getting our children moving again,” said Kennedy in the announcement. “President Trump brought back the Presidential Fitness Test to restore a culture of strength, fitness, and healthy competition for America’s youth. Now we are challenging schools and communities across the country to put that vision into action, reward the best ideas, and spread what works so every child has the opportunity to build healthy habits that last a lifetime.”
Childhood Fitness Linked to Lower Risk of Adult Depression
Fitter kids are less likely to develop depression as adults, according to research led by the University of Tasmania’s Menzies Institute for Medical Research in collaboration with Adelaide University. Using data from the Childhood Determinants of Adult Health study, spanning more than 30 years, researchers found children and adolescents with better cardiorespiratory fitness had a lower risk of developing depression in adulthood. The work is published in the Journal of Affective Disorders.
Menzies Institute researcher Dr. Brooklyn Fraser said the research found that childhood cardiorespiratory fitness showed the strongest and most consistent association with later depression risk.
“The data collected over 30 years have given us a rare opportunity to examine how early-life fitness relates to mental health later in life,” Fraser said. “We found that children and adolescents with better cardiorespiratory fitness had a lower risk of developing depression as adults.
Maternal Depression Tied to Higher Risk of Special Educational Needs in Kids
Children whose mothers had depression during pregnancy are at higher risk of having special educational needs that can’t be attributed solely to antidepressant exposure, according to a study led by researchers from the University of Glasgow and published yesterday in PLOS Medicine.
Antidepressant use during pregnancy is on the rise, though the long-term effects of these drugs on child development is unclear. At the same time, having untreated depression during pregnancy carries its own risks, making it challenging for women to make informed decisions about medication use during pregnancy.
For the study, the researchers analyzed the health and education records of more than 167,000 children born in Wales from 2009 to 2016 and followed through 2022. They looked for indications of special educational needs, including learning and communication difficulties, autism, and behavioral or emotional difficulties, as well as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. They also examined maternal depression diagnoses and antidepressant prescriptions.
More New Moms Are Starting GLP-1 Drugs
Starting a GLP-1 receptor agonist after giving birth is becoming more common, an analysis of claims data showed. The percentage of women who initiated a GLP-1 medication within 6 months of delivery rose more than 20-fold, from 0.08% in early 2018 to 1.9% by early 2025, reported Sih-Ting Cai, PhD, of the Schaeffer Center for Health Policy & Economics at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and colleagues.
This was particularly prevalent among women with type 2 diabetes, whose rate of initiation rose from 2.3% to 16.9% during that time, they reported in a research letter in JAMA.
More recently, however, most initiators were outside the type 2 diabetes group, they found. In the second half of 2024, 40.4% of initiators had overweight or obesity, 20.7% had no pre-delivery diagnosis, 20.6% had gestational diabetes mellitus, and only 18.3% had type 2 diabetes.
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