Bubble Wrap PLUS – May 2025

Can’t get enough of Bubble Wrap? The Bubble Wrap Plus is a monthly paediatric Journal Club reading list from Professor Jaan Toelen (University Hospitals Leuven) and Dr Anke Raaijmakers (Sydney Children’s Hospital). 

This comprehensive list is developed from 34 journals, including major and subspecialty paediatric journals. We suggest this list can help you discover relevant or interesting articles for your local journal club or allow you to keep a finger on the pulse of paediatric research.

As May Day, Labour Day, or Workers’ Day commemorates the struggles and gains made by workers worldwide, we have been hard at work on that day compiling the new list for the journal club.

In this edition of Pediatrics, Li et al. discuss the rise in measles infections in the USA, a trend that is also true for Europe and Australia. It is likely fuelled by decreasing vaccination rates and rising vaccine hesitancy. The current generation of physicians is unfamiliar with this disease. The article is worth reading as it educates on presentation, clinical course, and outcomes. A prompt diagnosis cannot lead to a treatment, but it can help with infection control to prevent further transmission. Although ‘forgotten’ by vaccine-hesitant parents, measles is associated with complications, including pneumonia and central nervous system involvement,, which may result in morbidity and mortality.

The letter to the editor of a colleague sharing a personal experience on the impact of measles complications is a worthy read, too. Those of us in the fourth and fifth decades may want to check their measles titers, as not all countries were swift to introduce the vaccine, and there may be many paediatricians out there without protective antibodies.

Should we be worried that by discussing suicide with teenagers, we may trigger some of them? Hennefield et al. asked themselves this question and investigated suicide-risk screening in preadolescents. They tested the iatrogenic consequences of repeated suicide-risk screening by examining correlations between screen completion rates and positive screens, changes in positive screens over time, and whether previous screen completion predicted a positive future screen in two groups. In the lower-risk group, positive screens were rare (<2%), with no significant increases over time. Even in the higher-risk group (7% positive screens), frequent screening did not trigger suicidal thoughts. It seems that the benefits outweigh the risks.

Schumacher et al. investigated the readiness of paediatric trainees for unsupervised practice. Over the years, readiness assessment has evolved from single appraisals to evaluating acquired milestones in the core aspects of our discipline. In the current study, only a third (!) of graduating paediatric residents were deemed ready for unsupervised practice across all milestones in the USA system. Many of us remember our first unsupervised on-call, wondering in the morning if the child with fever we sent home in the early evening would prove to be a missed meningococcal infection. Even experienced physicians should wonder if they are really up-to-date in their knowledge and skills and are not slowly lagging behind. We should always remain ready to acknowledge our imperfections (even after decades of practice) and strive to be a better doctor.

We hope that you enjoy the list!

You will find the list is broken down into four sections:

If we have missed out on something useful or you think other articles are absolutely worth sharing, please add them in the comments!