Children’s Health

Why kids don’t like to eat veggies

A new study has revealed that children tend to dislike vegetables because they may be programmed to avoid plants as part of a survival strategy left over from our days in the wild.

Psychologists at Yale University found that young children didn’t like to pick natural things, like plants, when given an option with plastic or metal objects, News.com.au reported.

According to researchers Dr Annie Wertz and Dr Karen Wynn, this behaviour was programmed into children from birth to avoid them being harmed or poisoned by flowers or plants.

The researchers said that throughout human evolution, plants have been essential to human existence. Yet, for all of these benefits, plants have always posed very real dangers.

Source: News Track India

 

Brain stem abnormalities linked to SIDS, study shows

brain abnormaltiesUnderlying brain stem abnormalities may be responsible for the onset of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), a condition that causes babies to die unexpectedly in their sleep, Counsel and Heal reported.

In a study published in the journal Pediatrics, researchers reviewed the cases of 50 infants who died of SIDS. Though some of the infants studied were sleeping in unsafe environments – such as in a face-down position– the researchers discovered that regardless of sleep conditions, all of the babies studied showed abnormalities in their brain stem chemicals.

The researchers believe that these abnormalities prevented the infants from waking up when they experienced trouble breathing. However, the researchers said parents should still make every effort to ensure that their infants sleep in a safe environment.

“We have to find ways to test for this underlying vulnerability in living babies and then to treat it. Our team is focused now upon developing such a test and treatment,” said study author Dr. Hannah Kinney, a neuropathologist at Boston Children’s Hospital. “Safe sleep practices absolutely remain important, so these infants are not put in a potentially asphyxiating situation that they cannot respond to.”

Source: News.nom

Childhood music lessons boost adulthood cognitive skills

The study unveils that playing a musical instrument during childhood leaves benefits in brain that lasts long even into adult life, according to the findings published in the Journal of Neuroscience.

 The research scientists monitored the brains of 44 people in their 50s, 60s and 70s at the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University in Illinois, US.

The participants had to listen to a synthesized speech syllable, “da”, while researchers measured electrical activity in the spot of the brain that is responsible for processing sound information known as the auditory brainstem.

The observation unraveled that though none of the volunteers had music practice for nearly 40 years, their brain responses were totally different.

Those who had music training between four and 14 years early in life showed a faster response to the speech sound than those ones who never had music lessons.

Experts suggest “musical training particularly with an emphasis on rhythmic skills can exercise the auditory-system.”

“As people grow older, they often experience changes in the brain that compromise hearing. For instance, the brains of older adults show a slower response to fast-changing sounds, which is important for interpreting speech,” researchers clarified.

“Being a millisecond faster may not seem like much, but the brain is very sensitive to timing and a millisecond compounded over millions of neurons can make a real difference in the lives of older adults,” said Michael Kilgard from the University of Texas, who was not involved with the research.

An earlier study conducted by scientists from Concordia University and the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital at McGill University also revealed the positive effects of music practice on the brain.

The study demonstrated that “musical training before age 7 is linked with more white matter in the corpus callosum part of the brain, as well as better performance on visual sensorimotor synchronization tasks compared with people who started music training after age 7.”

Source: Press TV

 

A baby’s gaze may signal autism, study finds

When and how long a baby looks at other people’s eyes offers the earliest behavioral sign to date that a child is likely to develop autism, scientists are reporting.

In a study published Wednesday, researchers using eye-tracking technology found that children who were found to have autism at age 3 looked less at people’s eyes when they were babies than children who did not develop autism.

But contrary to what the researchers expected, the difference was not apparent at birth. It emerged in the next few months, and autism experts said that might suggest a window during which the progression toward autism can be halted or slowed.

The study, published online in the journal Nature, found that infants who later developed autism began spending less time looking at people’s eyes between 2 and 6 months of age and paid less attention to eyes as they grew older. By contrast, babies who did not develop autism looked increasingly at people’s eyes until about 9 months old, and then kept their attention to eyes fairly constant into toddlerhood.

“This paper is a major leap forward,” said Dr. Lonnie Zwaigenbaum, a pediatrician and autism researcher at the University of Alberta who was not involved in the study. “Documenting that there’s a developmental difference between 2 and 6 months is a major, major finding.”

The authors, Warren R. Jones and Ami Klin, both of the Marcus Autism Center and Emory University, also found that babies who showed the steepest decline in looking at people’s eyes over time developed the most severe autism.

“Kids whose eye fixation falls off most rapidly are the ones who later on are the most socially disabled and show the most symptoms,” said Jones, director of research at the autism center.

“These are the earliest known signs of social disability, and they are associated with outcome and with symptom severity. Our ultimate goal is to translate this discovery into a tool for early identification” of children with autism.

The eye-tracking differences are not something parents and pediatricians would be able to perceive without the technology and expertise of an autism clinic, Jones said. “We don’t want to create concern in parents that if a child isn’t looking them in the eyes all the time, it’s a problem,” he said. “It’s not. Children are looking all over the place.”

Autism therapies have not yet been developed for young babies, but there are efforts to adapt intensive behavioral therapy for use with children as young as 12 months, Jones said.

Diagnoses of autism have increased, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, from one child in 150 in 2002 to one in 88 in 2008. The reasons are unclear, although some factors could be greater awareness of the disorder and a growing number of older fathers.

Jones and Klin, who directs the autism center, studied two groups of babies. One group was at high risk for autism, with a 20 times greater likelihood of developing it because they had siblings with the disorder. The other group was at low risk, with no relatives with autism.

The researchers assessed 110 children, from 2 months to 2 years of age, 10 times while watching videos of friendly women acting like playful caregivers. Eye-tracking technology traced when the babies looked at the women’s eyes, mouths and bodies, as well as toys or other objects in the background. At age 3, the children were evaluated for autism. Ultimately, researchers used data from 36 boys, 11 of whom developed autism. (They excluded data from girls, because only two developed autism.)

While the number of children studied was small – and the researchers are now studying more children – experts not involved in the study said the results were significant because of the careful and repeated measurements that were not just snapshots, but showed change over time.

“It’s well done and very important,” said Dr. Geraldine Dawson, director of the Center for Autism Diagnosis and Treatment at Duke University. She said it was notable that “early on these babies look quite normal; this really gives us a clue to brain development.”

She said a possible explanation was that, early in life, activities like looking at faces are essentially reflexes “controlled by lower cortical regions of the brain that are likely intact” in children with autism. But “as the brain develops, babies begin to use these behaviors in a more intentional way. They can look at what they want to look at. We think that these higher cortical regions are the ones that are not working the same” as in typical children.

The researchers found that children who developed autism paid somewhat more attention to mouths and sustained attention to bodies past the age when typical children became less interested. Even more noticeable was that children who developed autism looked more at objects after the first year, while typical children’s interest in objects declined.

“We’re measuring what babies see, but more importantly we’re measuring what they don’t see,” Jones said.

Source: NDTV

Worried that your baby sick? Let good microbes grow

Here’s possible solace for parents who are up at night with a baby who gets sick all the time: There appears to be a good reason why infant immune systems don’t fight off germs.

A newborn’s immune system is deliberately not doing battle with every germ that comes along so that “good” microbes have a chance to settle in, researchers say. That explanation is at odds with the widely held belief that those new immune systems are just too weak to do the job.

Evidence has been mounting that most of the trillions of bacteria, fungi and other microbes that inhabit the human body are actually helpful. They seem to perform crucial functions, such as helping fight off pathogens and teaching our immune systems how to function properly in the long term.

Babies start acquiring their personal collection of microbes at birth. But it seems to take a few years for what scientists call our microbiome to fully form. That’s where this research comes in.

In a paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature, Dr. Sing Sing Way, a specialist in infectious disease in babies, and his colleagues at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital report that the immune systems of newborns are actively suppressed.

The experiments, which were done in a lab with mice and blood samples from human infants’ umbilical cords, show that certain red blood cells, known as CD71 cells, rein in the newborn immune system. That could create a welcoming environment for beneficial microbes, the researchers say, in a way that an adult immune system can’t.

Unfortunately, the scientists didn’t look at how long immune system suppression might last in actual babies. But most parents know that eventually their child won’t get sick as often. And that could be when the immune system strikes a balance between allowing good microbes to thrive while fighting off the bad ones.

Source; npr

Childhood Maltreatment Can Leave Scars In The Brain

Maltreatment during childhood can lead to long-term changes in brain circuits that process fear, researchers say. This could help explain why children who suffer abuse are much more likely than others to develop problems like anxiety and depression later on.

Brain scans of teenagers revealed weaker connections between the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus in both boys and girls who had been maltreated as children, a team from the University of Wisconsin reports in theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Girls who had been maltreated also had relatively weak connections between the prefrontal cortex the amygdala.

Those weaker connections “actually mediated or led to the development of anxiety and depressive symptoms by late adolescence,” says Ryan Herringa, a psychiatrist at the University of Wisconsin and one of the study’s authors.

Maltreatment can be physical or emotional, and it ranges from mild to severe. So the researchers asked a group of 64 fairly typical 18-year-olds to answer a questionnaire designed to assess childhood trauma. The teens are part of a larger study that has been tracking children’s social and emotional development in more than 500 families since 1994.

The participants were asked how strongly they agreed or disagreed with statements like, “When I was growing up I didn’t have enough to eat,” or “My parents were too drunk or high to take care of the family,” or “Somebody in my family hit me so hard that it left me with bruises or marks.”

There were also statements about emotional and sexual abuse. The responses indicated that some had been maltreated in childhood while others hadn’t.

All of the participants had their brains scanned using a special type of MRI to measure the strength of connections among three areas of the brain involved in processing fear.

One area is the prefrontal cortex, which orchestrates our thoughts and actions, Herringa says. Another is the amygdala, which is “the brain’s emotion and fear center,” he says, and triggers the “fight or flight” response when we encounter something scary.

Herringa says messages from the amygdala to the prefrontal cortex are often balanced by input from a third area, the hippocampus, which helps decide whether something is truly dangerous. “So, for example, if you’re at home watching a scary movie at night, the hippocampus can tell the prefrontal cortex that you’re at home, this is just a movie, that’s no reason to go into a full fight or flight response or freak out,” Herringa says.

At least that’s what usually happens when there’s a strong connection between the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex, and the fear circuitry is working correctly.

But Herringa says brain scans showed that in adolescents who had been maltreated as children, the connection with the hippocampus was relatively weak. He says in girls who had been maltreated, the connection with the amygdala was weak, too.

That suggests the fear circuitry wasn’t working the way it should, Herringa says. The result seems to explain something he sees in many young patients with anxiety and depression and a history of maltreatment. “These kids seem to be afraid everywhere,” he says. “It’s like they’ve lost the ability to put a contextual limit on when they’re going to be afraid and when they’re not.”

The finding that girls have weaker connections to two areas of the brain, not just one, could help explain why they seem to be more sensitive than boys to maltreatment, Herringa says.

The results of the new study are important because they suggest better ways to diagnose and treat mental problems related to maltreatment, says Greg Siegle, a psychologist at the University of Pittsburgh.

“Maltreatment is a disorder where often people are not even aware of the extent of their symptoms,” Siegle says. So having an objective test would be “a significant advance,” he says.

The study also shows that brain researchers are making some progress in their quest to make mental health care more like physical health care, where objective tests confirm a diagnosis and measure the effectiveness of treatment, Siegle says.

“In psychiatry, in psychology, we very rarely have those tests because we just don’t know the biological and brain mechanisms,” he says. “This study is starting to get at what mechanisms we should be looking at.”

Source: npr.org

Obesity linked to early onset of puberty in girls

The earlier onset of puberty in some girls is linked to obesity, U.S. researchers say.

In Monday’s issue of the journal Pediatrics, researchers found the onset of puberty in terms of breast development varied by body mass index and race among more than 1,200 girls in the study.

“The obesity epidemic appears to be a prime driver in the decrease in age of onset of breast development in contemporary girls,” Dr. Frank Biro of the adolescent medicine division at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital and his team concluded.

The findings suggest that the ages for both early and late maturation in girls may need to be redefined, the researchers said.

The biological impact of early maturation includes greater risk of breast, ovarian and endometrial cancer as well as obesity and hypertension, the study’s authors said. The picture isn’t clear though, since obese children also often become obese adults.

As part of the study, doctors observed and measured breast development of 1,239 girls in San Francisco, Cincinnati and New York City who were aged six to eight when the study began. The girls were examined at least once a year from 2004 to 2011.

Trend observed in Canada

Breast buds started at 8.8 years of age for African-American girls, 9.3 for Hispanic girls, and 9.7 for white non-Hispanic and Asian girls, the researchers found. The onset of breast development in white girls was four months earlier than a previous U.S. study from 15 years ago.

Overall, the findings likely reflect what is happening in Canada and doctors are observing the same trend at clinics in this country, said Dr. Jean-Pierre Chanoine, a pediatric endocrinologist at British Columbia’s Children’s Hospital.

“It’s really the parents who are anxious,” Chanoine said. “It’s not like it’s huge breast development, they just notice it and then they come to the clinic.”

While the results may seem scary to parents, the age of menarche or first menstrual cycle is quite stable, Chanoine noted. In the study, it went from 12.5 years to 12.3 years, which suggests earlier breast development is not associated with earlier full-blown changes of puberty.

Chanoine said there are many potential implications of early puberty, such as an increased breast cancer risk, changes in bone development, or behaviour such as developing an interest in boys at an earlier age. But these are all still open questions that haven’t been proven, he noted.

While the study participants were diverse in racial/ethnic and socio-economic terms, they were not nationally representative, the study’s authors said.

A journal commentary accompanying the study said the factors involved in earlier puberty are complex.

“This article adds to studies providing the unsettling findings that the age of onset of breast development, in synch with, though not entirely explained by the ‘obesity epidemic,’ has continued to drop,” Marcia Herman-Giddens of the University of North Carolina said in the commentary.

Herman-Giddens said low fibre diets, preschool diets high in meat, dairy products are also associated with earlier development. Again, these haven’t been proven.

Biro’s team is investigating whether endocrine-disrupting chemicals, such as plasticizers, are involved.

The study was funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

Source: http://bit.ly/1helBzL

Kids Who Get More Sleep May Consume Fewer Calories

Getting adequate sleep may not just ward off attention and behavioral problems in kids — a small new study suggests it could also affect the amount they eat.

 Researchers from Temple University found that when kids slept more than their usual amount for a week, they consumed fewer calories, had lower fasting levels of the hunger- and weight-regulating hormone leptin, and even weighed less.

“Given all of its documented benefits, in many ways, you can’t lose in promoting a good night’s sleep,” study researcher Chantelle Hart, an associate professor of public health at the university’s Center for Obesity Research and Education, said in a statement.

The three-week study, published in the journal Pediatrics, involved 37 kids between ages 8 and 11, about a quarter of whom were obese or overweight. For the first week, all the kids were asked to sleep their normal amount each night. For the second week, kids were assigned to either sleep 1.5 hours more than their normal amount, or 1.5 hours fewer than their normal amount. In the third week, the kids who were assigned to sleep less in the second week were asked to sleep more, while kids assigned to sleep more in the second week were asked to sleep less. Their sleep time was measured using wrist actigraphs.

Researchers found there was a difference of two hours and 21 minutes of sleep time between the “sleep less” condition and the “sleep more” condition. During the week the kids slept more, they consumed 134 fewer calories a day, on average, and also weighed half a pound less than the week when they slept less. They also had lower fasting levels of leptin during the week they slept more.

“Most of the difference in kcal intake occurred during the additional three hours that children were awake during the decrease condition with children reporting 103 kcal/day more during this time,” the researchers noted in the study.

According to the National Sleep Foundation, school-aged children (ages 5 to 12) should get between 10 and 11 hours of sleep a night. Younger children need even more shuteye; preschoolers, for instance, should get 11 to 13 hours a night, and toddlers need 12 to 14 hours of sleep per 24-hour period.

Source: http://huff.to/1cGGkGl

Docs tell parents to limit kids’ texts, tweets and computer use

Doctors 2 parents: Limit kids’ tweeting, texting & keep smartphones, laptops out of bedrooms.

The recommendations are bound to prompt eye-rolling and LOLs from many teens but an influential pediatricians group says parents need to know that unrestricted media use can have serious consequences.

It’s been linked with violence, cyberbullying, school woes, obesity, lack of sleep and a host of other problems. It’s not a major cause of these troubles, but “many parents are clueless” about the profound impact media exposure can have on their children, said Dr. Victor Strasburger, lead author of the new American Academy of Pediatrics policy

“This is the 21st century and they need to get with it,” said Strasburger, a University of New Mexico adolescent medicine specialist.

The policy is aimed at all kids, including those who use smart phones, computers and other Internet-connected devices. It expands the academy’s longstanding recommendations on banning televisions from children’s and teens’ bedrooms and limiting entertainment screen time to no more than two hours daily.

Under the new policy, those two hours include using the Internet for entertainment, including Facebook, Twitter, TV and movies; online homework is an exception.

The policy statement cites a 2010 report that found U.S. children aged 8 to 18 spend an average of more than seven hours daily using some kind of entertainment media. Many kids now watch TV online and many send text messages from their bedrooms after “lights out,” including sexually explicit images by cellphone or Internet, yet few parents set rules about media use, the policy says.

“I guarantee you that if you have a 14-year-old boy and he has an Internet connection in his bedroom, he is looking at pornography,” Strasburger said.

The policy notes that three-quarters of kids aged 12 to 17 own cellphones; nearly all teens send text messages, and many younger kids have phones giving them online access.

“Young people now spend more time with media than they do in school – it is the leading activity for children and teenagers other than sleeping” the policy says.

Mark Risinger, 16, of Glenview, Ill., is allowed to use his smartphone and laptop in his room, and says he spends about four hours daily on the Internet doing homework, using Facebook and YouTube and watching movies.

He said a two-hour Internet time limit “would be catastrophic” and that kids won’t follow the advice, “they’ll just find a way to get around it.”

Strasburger said he realizes many kids will scoff at advice from pediatricians – or any adults.

“After all, they’re the experts! We’re media-Neanderthals to them,” he said. But he said he hopes it will lead to more limits from parents and schools, and more government research on the effects of media.

The policy was published online Monday in the journal Pediatrics. It comes two weeks after police arrested two Florida girls accused of bullying a classmate who committed suicide. Police say one of the girls recently boasted online about the bullying and the local sheriff questioned why the suspects’ parents hadn’t restricted their Internet use.

Mark’s mom, Amy Risinger, said she agrees with restricting kids’ time on social media but that deciding on other media limits should be up to parents.

“I think some children have a greater maturity level and you don’t need to be quite as strict with them,” said Risinger, who runs a communications consulting firm.

Her 12-year-old has sneaked a laptop into bed a few times and ended up groggy in the morning, “so that’s why the rules are now in place, that that device needs to be in mom and dad’s room before he goes to bed.”

Sara Gorr, a San Francisco sales director and mother of girls, ages 13 and 15, said she welcomes the academy’s recommendations.

Her girls weren’t allowed to watch the family’s lone TV until a few years ago. The younger one has a tablet, and the older one has a computer and smartphone, and they’re told not to use them after 9 p.m.

“There needs to be more awareness,” Gorr said. “Kids are getting way too much computer time. It’s bad for their socialization, it’s over stimulating, and it’s numbing them.

Source:

Kids may need breaks in school, after concussion

Athletes who experience concussions aren’t allowed to compete again right away so the brain can recuperate. A concussion expert at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis cautions that children with concussions may not be ready to go back to the classroom right away, either.

In a clinical report presented in Orlando at the American Academy of Pediatrics National Conference and Exhibition, the researchers recommended that accommodations be made in the classroom for children and adolescents recovering from concussions. The report represents the Academy’s official position and is designed to provide guidance for clinicians who treat young patients who have suffered concussions.

“We focus so much on getting these kids back onto the field that we don’t always think about the challenges associated with getting back into the classroom,” said Mark E. Halstead, MD, a Washington University sports medicine specialist at St. Louis Children’s Hospital. “In addition to physical rest, children recovering from a concussion also need cognitive rest. They can struggle in school and often have difficulty focusing and concentrating for several days or weeks.”

Halstead, an assistant professor of pediatrics and orthopedics, is the lead author of the report “Returning to Learning Following a Concussion,” presented Oct. 27 at the conference. The report will be published in the journal Pediatrics.

Research shows that most school-aged children recover from a concussion in about three weeks. But Halstead emphasized that is only an average. Many children have symptoms such as headaches, blurred vision, neck pain or sadness that last longer. Individual children, he explained, need to be monitored, and how quickly they return to full participation in the classroom must be tailored to how they feel.

Halstead said more research is needed on the effects of cognitive rest as kids with concussions return to learning, but he explained that using available tools, teachers, parents and health professionals can get a good idea of what adjustments in school a child might need in the days and weeks following brain injury.

“Some kids may not be able to handle a full classroom period,” said Halstead. “Or they may need a shortened school day. Others may need rest periods in the school nurse’s office.

“The goal is to keep symptom flare-ups to a minimum and make sure children are not exacerbating symptoms by trying to do too much,” he added. “Not resting the brain could prolong the length of time it takes to recover fully.”

The clinical report calls for a collaborative approach in helping students return to the classroom after a concussion. It should include the child’s pediatrician, family members and school staff responsible for both academics and physical activity.
A checklist could be used to help evaluate what symptoms the student is experiencing and how severe they are. And Halstead explained, one of the most important things caregivers can do is to ask recovering children or adolescents how they feel.

“It is impossible to know if they have blurry vision or trouble comprehending what they’re reading,” he said. “We have to rely on that child or adolescent to tell us.”

More research needs to be conducted on how concussions affect learning, Halstead said. He and the other authors based their clinical report and recommendations on expert opinions and a concussion management program developed at the Rocky Mountain Hospital for Children, Center for Concussion in Denver.

Source: