Stuttering Tied to Brain Changes in Speech, Attention Regions

A new study links stuttering to changes in brain circuits that control speech production, as well as circuits that support attention and emotion.

For the study, researchers at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA) used proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) to look at brain regions in adults and children who stutter.

Consistent with past functional MRI studies, the findings demonstrate neuro-metabolite alterations across the brain, according to the researchers.

Developmental stuttering is a neuropsychiatric condition. Its origins in the brain are only partly known.

To measure an index of neural density related to stuttering in circuits and brain regions suspected to be affected, the scientists performed proton shift imaging of the brain in 47 children and 47 adults. The study included subjects with and without stuttering.

The research team found that affected brain regions included major nodes of the so-called Bohland speech-production network (associated with the regulation of motor activity); the default-mode network (involved in the regulation of attention); and the emotional-memory network (responsible for regulating emotion.)

“That stuttering is related to speech and language-based brain circuits seems clear,” said Bradley S. Peterson, M.D., director of the Institute for the Developing Mind at CHLA, and director of the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California.

“Attention-regulating portions of the brain are related to control circuits that are important in governing behavior. People with changes here are more likely to stutter and have more severe stuttering. And emotions like anxiety and stress also tend to make stuttering worse, likely because this network interacts with language and attention control circuits.”

The initial MRS study of stuttering confirmed that disturbances in neuronal or membrane metabolism contribute to the development of stuttering, he noted.

Looking at a combination of children and adults to detect the effects of stuttering, independent of life-stage, revealed differences between children and adults within both the stuttering and control samples. This suggests different metabolic profiles in children versus adults who stutter, according to the researchers. Few sex-specific effects of stuttering on brain metabolites were observed, they added.

The study was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

Source: Children’s Hospital Los Angeles

Parents’ Confidence Can Play Role in Kids’ Sleep Duration

Children’s sleep duration may be influenced by how confident their parents are in their abilities to help their kids get enough sleep, according to a new survey-based study.

Longer sleep for kids was also associated with how long the parents slept themselves.

The findings suggest that efforts to address poor sleeping habits among children may be more effective with family-based interventions.

According to the survey, 57 percent of parents reported feeling “very” or “extremely” confident that they could help their child get enough sleep. Children of parents with greater confidence got approximately 0.67 more hours of sleep per day. The results remained after controlling for other factors such as child age, gender, race/ethnicity, and parent education.

The study also found that child sleep duration was 0.09 hours per day longer for each one hour increase in parent sleep duration.

“Our study suggests that educating parents about their own sleep health and promoting increased confidence in their ability to help their children get enough sleep are potential areas of intervention to increase child sleep duration, either through formal programs or in a pediatrician’s office,” said lead author Corinna Rea, M.D., instructor in pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and attending physician at Boston Children’s Hospital.

Children between the ages of six and 12 years should sleep nine to 12 hours per 24 hours on a regular basis to promote optimal health, according to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. Habitually sleeping fewer than the number of recommended hours is associated with attention, behavior, and learning problems, and it increases health and safety risks.

The researchers also investigated other potential links between child sleep duration and parent behaviors and practices, including screen time, physical activity, and limits placed on child TV viewing. Surprisingly, after adjustment for demographic characteristics, these factors were not significantly associated with child sleep duration.

“Our results also may suggest that individual parent behaviors do not reflect a ‘family lifestyle,’ but rather that parental sleep is directly linked to child sleep irrespective of others behaviors,” said Rea.

The research involved 790 parents with a mean age of 41 years and their children, between the ages of six and 12 years, who were participating in a randomized controlled obesity trial. Trained research assistants administered a survey to parents over the phone. About 92 percent of the respondents were mothers. Average daily sleep duration was 6.9 hours for parents and 9.2 hours for children.

The authors note that there are several parental behaviors that can play into the link between parent and child sleep duration. For example, parents may influence child sleep duration by serving as role models, encouraging and supporting their child’s healthy choices, or establishing a family bedtime.

Study results are published in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine.

Source: American Academy of Sleep Medicine

Mom’s Support in Early Number Play Helps Boost Future Math Scores

Young children whose mothers support them during math play — such as helping them label how many items are in a set — tend to have better math achievement at ages 4-½ and 5 years, according to a new study conducted by researchers at Boston College.

Their findings are published in the journal Child Development.

Early exposure to math is just as important as early literacy for children’s future academic achievement. In fact, research has shown that early math skills predict later school success better than early reading skills, and can even predict income in adulthood.

Until now, however, there has been little research directly examining how parents’ support of early math play helps develop children’s future math skills.

For the study, researchers developed ways to assess mothers’ support of their children’s math skills by examining how moms supported and guided their 3-year-olds’ learning as they played with a toy cash register and blocks.

They applied these new assessments to previously videotaped 10-minute free-play interactions between 140 mothers and children in Boston who were part of the Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). The participants were economically and ethnically diverse.

Mothers supported their children’s math skills in a variety of ways: helping their children count objects, identify written numbers, or label the size of sets of objects.

In particular, children whose parents supported them in labeling quantities of small sets performed better on math tests in preschool than children whose parents didn’t support them in this way. These children also did better on addition and subtraction problems as late as first grade.

“Many young children can count from 1 to 10 without understanding the meaning of the numbers they’re counting,” said study leader Beth Casey, professor emeritus of applied developmental and educational psychology at the Lynch School of Education at Boston College.

“What may be particularly important at around age 3 is for parents to present their children with small groups of one, two, or three objects, and tell them how many objects there are — for example, by saying at the grocery store, ‘See, there are two apples in our bag.’”

“It’s also important for parents to encourage and help children label how many objects there are, for example, by asking, ‘Can you give me three cups?’ or ‘Now that you’ve counted them, can you tell me how many flowers there are?'”

The researchers suggest that helping children learn how to label set sizes may support their development of a crucial concept in math knowledge — understanding that the last number stated when counting a set of objects represents the quantity of the whole set. Such understanding may provide a foundation for developing more complex number skills.

“Our results suggest that early maternal support of numerical skills may have lasting and strong connections to children’s math achievement, at least through first grade, which is three years after mothers were observed,” said Eric Dearing, professor of applied developmental and educational psychology at the Lynch School of Education at Boston College, who was also part of the study.

“These connections were strong and persisted even when we ruled out the potential role of demographics — including mothers’ education — the more general level of learning stimulation mothers provided, and both mothers’ and children’s intelligence.”

Source: Society for Research in Child Development

Eating Walnuts May Improve Mood in Young Men

New research suggests walnuts could be the key for a happier state-of-mind among college students.

Experts note that college can be a stressful time for young adults as they figure out how to manage intense daily routines that include work, study and play. Eat well, exercise and get plenty of sleep is a familiar mantra to alleviate this stress.

A new study by a University of New Mexico professor now suggests walnuts can also contribute to mental health.

In this first intervention study in humans, nutrition professor Dr. Peter Pribis measured the effect of walnut consumption on mood.

“In the past, studies on walnuts have shown beneficial effects on many health outcomes like heart disease, diabetes and obesity,” said Pribis. “Our study was different because we focused on cognition, and in this controlled randomized trial (CRT) we measured mood outcomes in males and females.”

The participants of the study were 64 students between the ages of 18-25. They represented most ethnic groups: Caucasian, African-American, Hispanic and Asian.

The participants were asked to eat three slices of banana bread every day for sixteen weeks — eight weeks of banana bread with walnuts and eight weeks without walnuts.

The nuts were finely ground into the dough so the two banana breads were similar in taste and appearance. While eating banana bread with walnuts the participants consumed half a cup of walnuts daily.

The mood of the students was measured at the end of each eight-week period.

“We used a validated questionnaire called Profiles of Mood States (POMS),” said Pribis. “It is one of the most widely used and accepted mood scales in studies on cognition. The test has six mood domains: tension, depression, anger, fatigue, vigor, confusion and also provides a Total Mood Disturbance score (TMD). The lower the TMD score the better the mood.”

In this double-blind, randomized, placebo controlled, cross-over feeding trial with walnuts for eight weeks, Pribis observed a significant improvement in mood in young, healthy males.

“There was a meaningful, 28 percent improvement of mood in young men,” said Pribis. “However we did not observe any improvement of mood in females. Why this is we do not know.”

Researchers explain that there are several nutrients in walnuts — alpha-linolenic acid, vitamin E, folate, polyphenols or melatonin — that could be responsible for the improved mood like. However, this was a whole food study, so in the end it was the synergy and interaction of all the nutrients in the walnuts combined.

For Pribis, the lesson learned from this food study is clear, “Eat more walnuts. This is an easy intervention. They’re not only good for your mood, but overall health as well. The recommended amount is one handful per day.”

With this knowledge in hand, and walnuts in the other, young men can better tackle life’s daily stresses.

Source: University of New Mexico/EurekAlert

Autistic Toddlers May Miss Significance of Eye Contact

Less eye contact is a signal symptom of autism; early screening protocols and diagnostic instruments rely heavily on it. But why kids with autism look less at other people’s eyes has not been known.

New research from Marcus Autism Center, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, and Emory University School of Medicine finds that young children with autism do not avoid eye contact on purpose. Instead, they miss the significance of social information in others’ eyes.

“This is important because we’re disentangling very different understandings of autism,” said Jennifer Moriuchi, a graduate student at Emory University.

“Depending on why you think children with autism are making less eye contact, you might have different approaches to treatment and different ideas about the brain basis of autism. Drug treatments and behavioral interventions are already being developed and tested on the basis of these different explanations.

“By clarifying which explanation is correct, we can make sure that we’re addressing the correct underlying concern.”

Two explanations for reduced eye contact have been proposed. One explanation holds that children with autism avoid eye contact because they find it stressful and negative. The other explanation holds that children with autism look less at other people’s eyes because the social cues from the eyes are not perceived as particularly meaningful or important.

The new research used eye-tracking measures and was conducted on the day children were first diagnosed; it shows that young children with autism do not actively avoid eye contact, and it confirms that other people’s eyes are not aversive to young children with autism.

Instead, young children with autism look less at the eyes because they appear to miss the social significance of eye contact.

Together with Drs. Ami Klin and Warren Jones, Moriuchi studied how 86 two-year-old children with and without autism paid attention to other people’s eyes. Children with autism watched a series of carefully made videos.

“Before each video, we flashed a small picture to capture the child’s attention, and when they looked to where the picture had been, they found that they were either looking directly at another person’s eyes or looking away from the eyes,” said Moriuchi.

“When we did this repeatedly, we found that young children with autism continued to look straight at the eyes. Like their peers without autism, they didn’t look away from the eyes or try to avoid the eyes in any way.”

However, when varying levels of socially meaningful eye contact were presented, children with autism looked less at other people’s eyes than their peers without autism.

“These results go against the idea that young children with autism actively avoid eye contact,” said Jones.

“They’re looking less at the eyes not because of an aversion to making eye contact, but because they don’t appear to understand the social significance of eye contact.”

The researchers studied eye gaze responses in young children with autism at the time of their initial diagnosis in order to have clearer evidence about the initial underlying reasons for reduced eye contact.

Some adults and older children with autism have reported feeling anxious in response to eye contact. “Our results aren’t meant to contradict these personal experiences,” emphasized Jones.

“For children with autism, social signals can be confusing. And as children grow up to be adults, those signals can become even more challenging to understand. This research highlights the opportunity to target the right underlying concerns as early as possible.”

“Studies like this one help advance our understanding of autism and improve the way scientists and clinicians develop new treatments,” said Lisa Gilotty, Ph.D., chief of the Research Program on Autism Spectrum Disorders at the National Institute of Mental Health.

The study was reported in the American Journal of Psychiatry.

Source: Emory University

Parents Impact Kids’ Cognition More But Social Policies Still Matter

A new study of the factors that influence childhood cognition has found that the role of parents is more important than far-reaching public policies — but that public policies can make a difference.

“We looked at the effects of parental characteristics on the cognition of children in the U.S. and Great Britain,” said Dr. Toby Parcel, a professor of sociology at North Carolina State University and corresponding author of the study. “Basically, we wanted to see whether the welfare state in Great Britain gave its children an advantage.”

He noted that an earlier work by the researchers looked at children’s home environments and behavioral problems across the two countries.

“We found that parents were equally important in both places,” Parcel said. “In this study we looked at three things: pre-reading skills and scores of reading and mathematics achievement.”

For the new study, researchers at NC State and California State University, Northridge, analyzed two sets of data: A representative sample of 3,439 children between the ages of five and 13 in the U.S.; and a representative sample of 1,309 children in Great Britain across the same age range.

“We were able to do this study because the two data sets are comparable — same age range, same timeframe, and same measures of key variables,” Parcel explained.

The researchers discovered that parental characteristics were equally important in both countries in supporting stronger child cognition. However, there were some exceptions.

For example, the researchers found that children of single-mother families were at a disadvantage for verbal facility in the U.S., but not in Great Britain. Similarly, they found that a larger family size was associated with lower math scores in the U.S., but not in Great Britain.

“This may indicate that parents have fewer resources per child in larger families, and that the government in Great Britain has instituted policies that help compensate for that, whereas those policies are lacking in the U.S.,” Parcel said. “Those policies could possibly include the child allowances and National Health Service, which may help parents use their own resources to better support child cognition.”

The researchers also identified many ways in which the U.S. and Great Britain are similar. In both countries, low birth weight, health limitations, and larger family size were associated with lower verbal facility.

Child health limitations were also linked to lower math scores in both countries, and health limitations, male gender, and larger family size were associated with lower reading achievement in both countries.

The mother’s cognitive ability and stronger home environments were associated with higher verbal facility, math scores, and reading achievement in both countries, according to the study’s findings.

“Parents are equally important in both societies, and policies can’t replace good parents,” Parcel said. “But there do appear to be areas where policies can support families and help children succeed.”

The study was published in the journal Social Science Research.

Source: North Carolina State University

 
Photo Credit: MIKI Yoshihito. Shared under a Creative Commons license..

Teen Stalking Victims at Higher Risk for Depression, Risky Behaviors

A new study has found that 14 percent of girls and 13 percent of boys are victims of stalking.

These __teens are also more likely to report symptoms linked to depression, as well as risky behavior, including binge drinking and sexting, according to the study, published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

For the study, researchers surveyed 1,236 randomly selected teens. The survey asked __teens specific questions about the actions of others. Because it’s generally agreed that stalking requires a pattern of repeated unwanted behaviors, researchers used a list of 19 stalking victimization indicators and gathered data about how often each one occurred.

Teens were then separated into three classes based on the frequency of exposure: A non-victim class, a minimal exposure class, and a victim class.

Class size was fairly consistent across genders with 50 percent of girls and 53 percent of boys falling into the non-victim class, 36 percent of girls and 34 percent of boys qualifying for the minimal exposure class, and 14 percent of girls and 13 percent of boys making up the victim class.

“Little is actually known about the rates and potential consequences of stalking victimization in developing adolescent populations,” said lead investigator Dennis E. Reidy, Ph.D., Division of Violence Prevention, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

“Identifying how these different stalking tactics manifest in different combinations is critical because different stalking profiles likely confer varying degrees and forms of risk. For instance, a victim primarily experiencing surveillance/monitoring by a stalker may suffer far fewer physical, social, and psychological consequences than a victim of a stalker showing more diversity in stalking behavior.”

Once the researchers identified the three classes, they conducted further analysis to determine the potential mental and behavioral health factors associated with being a victim of stalking.

Along with tracking the stalking indicators, the survey also asked the teens about psychiatric symptoms, such as mood disorder, post-traumatic stress, feelings of hopelessness; sexual behaviors, including number of partners, frequency of sexting, oral sex, and intercourse; and substance use.

The findings revealed that teens in the victim class were more likely to report mood symptoms and instances of risky behavior than teens in the other two groups.

“A general trend across boys and girls alike emerged,” Reidy said. “Adolescents in the victim class reported more psychiatric symptoms during the past month and a higher frequency of physical dating violence victimization, alcohol use, and binge drinking during the prior 12 months. Additionally, girls in the victim class reported higher prevalence of marijuana use and more sexting and oral sex partners during the past year.”

“The data suggest a substantial proportion of adolescents are victims of stalking and are likewise at risk for a number of deleterious health outcomes,” he added. “As such, this population merits further attention by prevention researchers and practitioners.”

Source: Elsevier