Reading journal articles can be a long and laborious process sometimes. You get some that are a few pages long, but then you sometimes need to make your way through tens of pages. Yes, you could find and read just the abstracts, but The Journal of Pediatrics has done some of that for you. In each issue, you can find a section in which they’ve selected evidence from a variety of journals, summarised them and then added a commentary to each. Naturally, it’s not just about occupational therapy, but there are definitely relevant articles for paediatric OTs.

For instance, David Ingram and Megan Moreno, two doctors, have summarised the following (open access!) article:

Merry SN, Stasiak K, Shepherd M, Frampton C, Fleming T, Lucassen MF. The effectiveness of SPARX, a computerised self help intervention for adolescents seeking help for depression: randomised controlled non-inferiority trial. BMJ 2012;344:e2598-606.

You can find the summary here:

A computerized self-help intervention is as effective as face-to-face counseling for adolescents seeking help for depression

You can access these without a subscription or payment, which I think is very noble of them.

If you do have access, you can find the latest studies that haven’t even been printed yet in their ‘Articles in the Press’ section online. Here are a few that look quite interesting and relevant to OTs working in paediatrics:

• Exercise Improves Behavioral, Neurocognitive, and Scholastic Performance in Children with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder by Matthew B. Pontifex, Brian J. Saliba, Lauren B. Raine, Daniel L. Picchietti, Charles H. Hillman
• Patterns of Altered Neurobehavior in Preterm Infants within the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit by Roberta G. Pineda, Tiong Han Tjoeng, Claudine Vavasseur, Hiroyuki Kidokoro, Jeffrey J. Neil, Terrie Inder (a news article about this by Jim Dryden, posted 08/11/12, can be found here)
• Parent and Child Self-Reports of Dietary Behaviors, Physical Activity, and Screen Time by Jenifer E. Thorn, Nailya DeLellis, Judy P. Chandler, Korey Boyd
• School Attendance in Childhood Cancer Survivors and Their Siblings by Amy E. French, Elena Tsangaris, Maru Barrera, Sharon Guger, Robert Brown, Stacey Urbach, Derek Stephens, Paul C. Nathan
• Healthy Newborns’ Neurobehavior: Norms and Relations to Medical and Demographic Factors by Nadine S. Fink, Edward Tronick, Karen Olson, Barry Lester