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Multiple Sclerosis is one of the most common neurological disorders leading to disability. Many cases of Multiple Sclerosis are diagnosed late especially in young patients because providers are not considering it early in their assessment and differential diagnosis. This book will provide an additional resource to health care providers working with children and adolescents to facilitate increased awareness and earlier diagnosis and treatment.

Pain in a newborn, child, or adolescent is a complex phenomenon that can be acute or chronic, mild or severe, and invoke complex reactions in the patient, family, and clinician. Pain is a feeling that humans find very unpleasant, seek to ameliorate and even stop as soon as possible. Individuals come to their clinicians seeking the cause of their pain and request ways to deal with their discomfort. Clinicians have not always been well-trained to appreciate or prevent pain in their patients, and this seems especially true for young pediatric patients. The underlying theme in this publication is to consider causes and management of pediatric pain. The authors look at different perspectives of pain including fibromyalgia, peripheral neuropathies, sports-related pain, pelvic pain, recurrent headaches, recurrent abdominal pain, dermatologic pain, oncologic pain, and psychosomatic pain. These reflections offer unique and beneficial perspectives for clinicians as they seek to ameliorate pain in their pediatric patients and offer an improved quality of life.

This book is based upon experiences from the'Stop Youth Suicide Campaign'(SYS), a community-based youth suicide prevention program, led by the Division of Adolescent Medicine at the University of Kentucky Children's Hospital, Lexington. This program raises awareness and educates government agencies, teachers, parents, and students about the high risk behaviors that can lead to youth suicide. It provides education for medical care agencies to recognize and screen for adolescent depression and suicide, connects youth, parents, citizens, caregivers, and professionals with appropriate support services. The'Stop Youth Suicide Campaign'is a holistic suicide awareness campaign. In other words, the program seeks to provide appropriate information and assist all stakeholders, e.g. individuals, communities and governments/policy makers to make informed decisions. In Kentucky, the campaign has been successful in changing some laws, introducing suicide education and training at schools, and provides interventional services as well as prevention strategies throughout Kentucky. A measure of success is a sustained drop in suicide rates over time, correlated to when the'Stop Youth Suicide Campaign'started. In this book, you will find an overview of youth suicide, and several chapters looking at suicide from different points of view to create a holistic approach to this public health issue.

Adolescence is the critical period or rather process in human development, where the individual leaves the dependency of childhood and enters a period in which dramatic changes occur, eventually resulting in what society identifies as adulthood. It is a complex developmental time involving sociological, psychological and physiological issues that starts with puberty and ends sometime in the third decade of life with central nervous system maturation (parents would want this period to be much quicker and shorter). The goal of adolescence is to develop an autonomous adult, who is capable of functioning at intellectual, sexual, and vocational levels acceptable to society. Prevention and management of health problems in children and adolescents can prevent considerable morbidity in adults. Working with adolescents is difficult, frustrating and very rewarding at the same time. In this book, we have gathered international research to show you a picture of health issues in adolescence and during the school period of human development.

Human sexuality involves sexual attraction to another person, which for the most part is to the opposite sex (heterosexuality), some to the same sex (homosexuality) or some having both (bisexuality) or not being attracted to anyone in a sexual manner (asexuality). Human sexuality is determined by many factors, like cultural, political, legal and philosophical aspects of life, but also morality, ethics, theology, spirituality and religion. Sexuality is as old as mankind and interest in sexual activity is very much related to the onset of puberty and the period of schooling. In this book, we have gathered papers from around the world in order to discuss issues of sexuality from an international perspective.

Adolescent violence is a very visible violence in our modern society, where you just have to open the newspaper or the television and you find yourself right in the middle of it. In order to understand the scope of the problem, we need to look at the epidemiology of global violence. Each year, more than 1.6 million people worldwide lose their lives to violence and for every person who dies as a result of violence, many more are injured and suffer from a range of physical, sexual, reproductive and mental health problems. Violence places a massive burden on national economies in health care, law enforcement and lost productivity. We are talking about a major public health problem. Programs for intervention have been researched and long-term follow-up indicates that early intervention is working and even if such programs would seem to demand a substantial economic investment, they have been proven cost-effective in the long run. In this book, we have gathered presentations on bullying, aggression, violence, suicide and prevention from an international perspective.

Rural and urban residents accustomed to seeing fire engines racing with sirens wailing and lights flashing are unaware of the problem of juvenile-set fires. Firesetting behaviors among children and adolescents are serious and have associated with it, serious individual and societal costs. Every year, several thousand children and adolescents aged 14 years and younger in the United States alone are injured or killed. Firesetting, pyromania and arson are topics that have existed in the literature since Sigmund Freud explained firesetting through his psychoanalytic model. Helen Yarnell's studies during the 1940s and 1950s were the first, however, to focus on the behavior of youth firesetting. Her study in 1940 found that over 70% of adult incarcerated arsonists and institutionalized pyromaniacs had firesetting histories beginning in their childhood. She also introduced the concept of the ego triad: firesetting, enuresis and cruelty to animals as predictors of violence. The psychoanalytic view of firesetting continued to pervade the juvenile firesetting research through the 1970s. Beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a shift occurred in the study of juvenile firesetting and also in the number of studies being conducted on the topic. Researchers began to analyze juvenile firesetting from multiple perspectives of a child's life. The social learning and dynamic-behavioral models developed by these researchers gave clinicians a more thorough framework for understanding children who set fires and assessment tools to use in diagnosis and treatment planning. In this book, we discuss recent research on firesetting in childhood and adolescence.