American Academy of Pediatrics, Sept. 26-30

The annual meeting of the American Academy of Pediatrics was held this year from Sept. 26 to 30 in Denver and attracted participants from around the world, including primary care pediatricians, pediatric medical subspecialists, pediatric surgical specialists, and other health care professionals. The conference featured scientific sessions that focused on the latest advances in the care of infants, children, adolescents, and young adults.

In one study, Angeli Sirilan, a medical student at the University of Arizona College of Medicine in Phoenix, and colleagues found that abortion-related videos on TikTok stand out as a notable source of misinformation and provide unsafe guidance, despite most sexual health information on TikTok being accurate.

The authors established a TikTok account representing a 15-year-old and evaluated the top 10 videos that appeared using keywords associated with sexual and reproductive health. The researchers found that more than half of the videos were produced by health care professionals (58 percent) and were generally accurate (71.5 percent). Abortion-related content, however, had significantly higher rates of inaccuracy and unsafe recommendations (25 percent) compared with all other reproductive health topics, including pregnancy, urinary tract infections, and condom use (4.3 percent). Only abortion and HIV/sexually transmitted infection categories promoted unsafe behaviors.

“This highlights a critical gap in digital sexual health education and the need for targeted interventions,” Sirilan said. “Clinicians should proactively ask adolescents where they get sexual health information and provide trustworthy resources to counteract online misinformation.”

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In another study, Hadi Berbari, M.D., of Cincinnati Children”s, and colleagues found that the number of planned out-of-hospital births has doubled since the COVID-19 pandemic, with a shift seen toward younger, more highly educated mothers.

The authors assessed out-of-hospital births locally and found that planned out-of-hospital births increased from 1.5 to 3.0 percent of total births after the declaration of the COVID-19 pandemic. Significant changes to the maternal sociodemographic and risk profiles were seen in the post-COVID-19 pandemic group.