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Abstract

Hans Asperger is best known for Asperger syndrome, but has been accused of knowingly referring patients to a Viennese children's home notorious for murdering disabled children during the Nazi occupation. Two of the 13 children he referred there died. Tatzer et al.1 assessed original documents and found no evidence that Asperger was aware of the ‘euthanasia’ programme when he referred them. Czech strongly criticises the paper and says Asperger must have known about the ‘euthanasia’ programme early on, because he worked with the doctor responsible for the murders.2 Gillberg shares his thoughts on Asperger and meeting his daughter.3 A review by de Boer et al.4 looks at parents' perspectives about making prenatal decisions regarding treatment for babies born at the limit of viability. It is accompanied by a perspective, where the parents of an infant born at 24 weeks of gestation share their experiences5 after an unexpected pregnancy was discovered at 18 weeks. They faced the risk of an extremely premature birth at 22 weeks and agreed with the physicians to initiate intensive care treatment if their infant was born in the grey zone. Poor sleep has been associated with poor physical and mental health, including increased risks of heart disease and type 2 diabetes and higher levels of symptoms of depression and anxiety. Balfour et al.6 looked at the parent-reported sleep trajectories of 1192 young Australians from 5 to 17 years of age and the subject's self-reported sleep problems. They found no relationships between these sleep-related reports and measures of epigenetic age acceleration at 17 years of age, after adjusting for depressive symptoms. Størksen et al.7 reviewed the literature on Internet-based interventions that aim to support the parents of young children aged 0–5 years. They found that more interventions focused on mental health than somatic health, with developmental disorders and obesity being the most frequently studied conditions in those respective categories. Several gaps were identified, such as the need for more research outside English-speaking countries. The authors suggest that program developers should consider using more audio-visual technology to avoid reinforcing social inequalities in access to healthcare. Holter comments on the findings.8 Researchers in many medical fields are increasingly reporting outcomes that are important to patients who have shared their lived experiences with their illnesses. Thivierge et al.9 explored the pulmonary outcomes that were important to parents after extremely preterm birth and created a list that could be considered by future respiratory outcome studies. These reflected outcomes during the infants' neonatal intensive care hospitalisation and after discharge. The 285 parents described numerous important pulmonary events, but the authors were interested to note that bronchopulmonary dysplasia was not on the list, despite being the main respiratory outcome investigated in neonatology. Figure 1: Alamy, Figure 2-5: Istockphoto