27 November

Newborns' cry melody is shaped by their native language.

In a study done in Germany, researchers recorded the cries of 30 French and 30 German newborns. They looked at the melody and intensity contours of their cries.

The French babies produced cries with a rising melody countour while the German group made a falling ones.

The result showed the obvious influence of the native language spoken by the mother and family's voices. This also proves that the fetus is quietly listening all the time and in all likelihood the emotion of the mother is also felt by the future baby.

 

20 November

Reduce French Fries during pregnancy

The study below about acrylamide if occuring also in human beings, which is more likely, can explain why many children end up with chronic mental problems.

Researchers from Egypt have shown that acrylamide which is found in fried potatoe chips, now a commonly consumed food all over the world, has unwanted effect on the brain of the fetus of rats. The brain cells affected are the Purkinji cells, the same cells affected in children and adults who had autism.

This can explain the increasing number of children with chronic mental problems.

If my sister is planning to have a family, I will tell her not to eat excessive cooked deep fried like French fries or fried chicken.

Nutrition. 2011 Oct;27(10):1066-75.
Structural and ultrastructural evidence of neurotoxic effects of fried potato chips on rat postnatal development.
El-Sayyad HI, El-Gammal HL, Habak LA, Abdel-Galil HM, Fernando A, Gaur RL, Ouhtit A. Mansoura University, Mansoura, Egypt.
Abstract
OBJECTIVE:
Acrylamide (ACR), a proved rodent carcinogen and neurotoxic agent, is present in significant quantities in commonly consumed foods such as fried potato chips (FPC) and French fries, raising a health concern worldwide. We investigated and compared the neurotoxic effects of ACR and FPC on postnatal development.
METHODS:
Female rats were treated with ACR (30 mg/kg of body weight), fed a diet containing approximately 30% of FPC during pregnancy, or fed a standard diet (control) and their offspring were examined.
RESULTS:
Female rats treated with ACR or fed a diet containing FPC during pregnancy gave birth to litters with delayed growth and decreased body and brain weights. Light microscopic studies of the cerebellar cortex of treated animals revealed drastic decreases in Purkinje cells and internal granular layers. Different patterns of cell death were detected in Purkinje cells and neurons in the brains of pups born to treated mothers. Ultrastructural analysis of Purkinje cells revealed changes in the endoplasmic reticulum, loss of the normal arrangement of polyribosomes, swollen mitochondria with abnormally differentiated cristae, and an abnormal Golgi apparatus. The gastrocnemius muscle in the ACR and FPC groups showed extensive degeneration of myofibrils as evidenced by poorly differentiated A, H, and Z bands.

CONCLUSION:
The present study reveals for the first time that rat fetal exposure to ACR, as a pure compound or from a maternal diet of FPC, causes cerebellar cortical defects and myodegeneration of the gastrocnemius muscle during the postnatal development of pups. These results warrant a systematic study of the health effects of the consumption of FPC and French fries in the general population.

 

17 November

Some effects of stress during pregnancy:

Expectant mothers who had high stress during pregnancy are up to four times more likely to have a premature baby.
1. Their babies will have lower birth weights.
2. As early as 18th week of gestation, their level of corticotrophin releasing hormone are elevated. This hormone can damage brain cells.
3. Expectant mothers who are more positive and feel a sense of control during pregnancy do not appear to be affected by high stress.

These observations were reported by researcher Chritine Dunkel-Schetter and her associates at UCLA in October 1999.

The lesson is to avoid or reduce stress during pregnancy to have a baby with normal weight at birth which is related with the size of the brain. In general the bigger the brain, the better the child in school.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005UZGCMA How to Raise a Happy, Smart Child

16 November

Brain Parts You Should Know

There are four parts of the brain that you should know. These are the amygdala, hippocampus, pre-frontal cortex, and the fusiform face area (FFA).

The amygdala is the emotional center of the brain. Injury to this area will result to behavioral, emotional problems, and some features of autism.

The hippocampus is the memory center. If the amygdala is exposed to a happy and positive environment, the hippocampus functions more efficiently. Learning is easier and faster when the amygdala is having fun.

The pre-frontal cortex is the thinking part of the brain. For this part of the brain to function well, the hippocampus, the brain's primary hard drive, should have enough stored data for easy retrieval.

Fusiform face area (FFA) is the major area of the brain that is dedicated to "read" human face. In autistic children, the FFA is not active. Maybe this is the main reason why autistic children rarely look at the face of people. They prefer to look at objects instead. Watching TV during infancy and early childhood does not help turn-on the FFA. This is the one reason why infants should avoid television!

Fortunately, the FFA, amygdala, and hippocampus are easily turned-on by your happy, smiling, animated, enthusiastic face, and voice. Every minute of the day, when a baby sees your happy, smiling face, a positive development of the FFA and amygdala is a likely outcome. As a result, behavioral problems, school failure, and depression are reduced and a productive citizen is born.

On the other hand if your baby is exposed to unhappy faces, shouting, negative attitudes, naggings, and TV during the first few years of life, these four major parts of the brain will sustain some brain cell damage. This neural injury may be persists in some children.

You can save thousands of dollars of the cost of medical care and the agony of having a child with developmental delays by giving your baby a happy, animated, enthusiastic, and playful environment without television and technology.

Leonardo L. Leonidas, MD
Assistant Clinical Professor in Pediatrics
Distinguished Career Teaching Award, 2009
Tufts University School of Medicine, Boston, USA
Author: Preventing and Reducing Signs of Autism and Chronic Mental Difficulties in Children
  an e Book available at Amazon.com
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&field-keywords=preventing+and+reducing+autism&x=15&y=29

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005UZGCMA How to Raise a Happy, Smart Child

14 November

Training toddlers color and number words.

When you ask a mother if her toddler knows color, she will likely say confidently, "Yes." However, if you test the child to point at a color in a lineup there is a good chance that he will miss it.

Why is color and number words difficult to learn by most toddlers compared to nouns?

Researchers offered an explanation. The English language throw a curveball by using color and number words "pre-nominally," meaning before the nouns like "go get the red ball" instead of "get the ball that is red."

To prove this, researchers took 34 two-year olds and gave them color words. One group were shown familiar object by saying "this is a blue crayon" and the other group, "this crayon is blue."

Children who were given post-nominal color words, improved color recognition significantly over their baseline scores, while the ones who got the pre-nominal adjective did not learn as fast.

Another group of 56 youngsters were tested with number words. The group who heard "Look, hearts, can you show me four?" compared to "Can you show me four hearts?"

In this number words experiment, the youngsters who heard the post-nominal adjective four, dramatically improved their test scores by 30% better in both reliability and accuracy.

With these studies, toddlers will learn color and number words easier when you say, "Johnny, please get the ball that is red and give it to mama."

Source: SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN MIND, May/June, page 48, by Melody Dye

12 November 2911

Stress During Pregnancy not Fetal Brain Friendly

About six years ago, a couple from Manila visited Maine. Both of them were physicians. She is an anesthesiologist, he, a surgeon. They were in the USA to take a test to become a nurse. Yes, a nurse!

I asked them why they want to migrate to the USA. They said they have a son with Autism.

During that time I was studying the causes of Autism. So I asked the anesthesiologist about her pregnancy. I particularly asked about stress.

She told me that her pregnancy was stressful. Many complicated patients were assigned to her. While telling me about her pregnancy, she became teary. I thought she realized that her stress was the reason for having an Autistic son.

A principal from Searsport, Maine brought her one year old son to me for consultation because of developmental delay. He did not respond to his name when called. He did not look at my eyes when I talked to him. At six months old he was diagnosed to be blind. He did not make any sound like ma, da, or bye at one year old. I told the parents that their son has possible Autism. At three years old he still could not talk in sentences and he does not look at the parents when talked to.

I took the pregnancy history. The mother had severe job related stress.

From an informal survey in my practice, eight out of ten children with Autism, Asperger, or ADHD had a mother whose pregnancy was stressful.

Probably we will never know the definite cause of Autism because it is extremely difficult to biopsy the brain of a fetus or infant. However, it is easier to do internet research on the possible causes.

Animal studies, as well as some epidemiological human research have shown that gestational stress affects fetal brain development negatively.

Rats and primates when exposed to unscheduled loud noises during gestation will have offspring who can't negotiate mazes. This same offspring clings more often to his parent compared to the offspring whose mother was not stressed.

About ten years ago Quebec, Canada experienced a natural disaster, Ice Storm. Several communities in Quebec had power failure for a week or more. This event gave medical researchers a good opportunity to study the effects of stress during pregnancy. They studied two groups – the experimental group was pregnant mothers who were in areas without electric power. The control group was pregnant mothers in communities with lights and water supply.

The researchers followed up these children up to two years old and older. They found out that children whose mothers were in the Ice Storm areas had delay in language development as well cognitive difficulties. While children whose mother had electric power supply during pregnancy had mostly typical children.

The Quebec researchers found out also that the severity of the stress during pregnancy is directly related with the severity of the language delay and cognitive problems. The more stress during pregnancy, the more difficulties in neuro-developmental development.

There is scientific reason that can explain the effect of stress during pregnancy. Studies in both animals and humans showed that when the mother is stressed during pregnancy, her cortisol, the stress hormone goes up in her blood. Cortisol then goes through the placenta, then to the fetal circulation. When stress occurs during the 15th week of gestation, more corticotrophin releasing hormone (CRH) in the placenta is produced at 31 weeks later. Both cortisol and CRH have damaging effect on the fetal brain.

In animal studies an elevated maternal cortisol leads to hippocampal (memory center) cell deaths and reduced cell proliferation. This is associated with deficits in learning and memory, long lasting delays in neuro-motor development, and distractibility.

The brain is the largest functional organ during fetal development which is exposed to circulating blood with elevated stress hormone for a prolonged duration. With this huge exposure to increased level of cortisol, I think this is equivalent to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in adult occurring in the fetal brain and leading to the signs and symptoms of autism, ADHD, and other chronic mental problems in children. So we now have Fetal PTSD, the counter part of adult PTSD.

10 October 2011

If you are planning to buy a DVD advertised to advance language development of your baby, think twice. There is a fat chance that it will not help.

Why? Dr. Patricia Kuhl of the University of Washington studied this issue by comparing two groups of English-language-bound babies. One group had a 12 sessions of Mandarin exposure of listening to stories and conversations about toys from a native speaker. These babies learned Mandarin words like a native.

The other group got their lesson from a DVD of a woman reading the same stories in Mandarin and they learned nothing.

What happened? To learn languages babies need to see the facial and lip movements of the parent, grandparent, or sitter. They mimic their lip movement plus see facial reactions. Babies too need to interact as well from what has been said.

In front of a DVD there is no interaction or socialization. And there is a dose response relationship: for every hour of DVD per day, the baby learns 6 to 8 words fewer from the McArthur Communicative Inventory list of 89 words. Consider that an eleven month old baby understand an average of 16 words from the list. This will bring down the understanding to about 8 to 10 words only.

8 October 2011

Best Idea in Early Language Development I Found With Evidence

When I was in practice at Bangor, Maine I was a religious follower of the study of Hart and Risley to jump-start the early language development. In their study they found that the number of words spoken by the parents is a big factor in the success of their children in school. Professional parent usually have successful children in school, according Hart and Risley because they talked at about 2100 words per hour or 35 words a minute. In contrast, parents on welfare talked about 600 words.

This past week I was doing a research on infant language development and accidentally found the study by Catherine Tamis-LeMonde, et al.

After thinking about the Tamis-LeMonda study, which is I think is a good predictor of children language trajectory, now I have combined the ideas of Hart and Risley, LeMonda, and Michael Goldstein. The two driving forces in advancing language and cognitive skill of our child are the number of words they heard from the parent during infancy and their timely responsiveness to the cues and wants of the baby.

Tamis-LeMonde sent researchers to well-to-do families in New York city with infants at nine months old. They took a 10-minute video of the interaction between the baby and mother while playing with a toy. The way the baby look at mom or make sounds and the mother's response were recorded.

They found 65 times interactions during the 10 minutes of play, and 60% of the time the mother responded to the baby.

After the first taped-observation at nine months old, the researchers called the mother every week for one year and tract the new words the baby has said.

When the babies were 13 months old, the researchers came back and did a second video recording of the interactions.

On average the babies on the LeMonda study said the first word just before 13 months old and by 18 months old they have 50 words, were making word combination, and talking of recent events.

The variable was how often the mother responded to the baby's cues or want. The high responder mothers had babies six months ahead of the low responder. Their first words were at 10 months old and all other language milestones were reached by 14 months old.

I think the first critical ingredient in this study is the voice that came from the baby's mouth illicit an appropriate response from the mother. The second is the baby was able to associate the label or name to the object that the mother just said.

The take home lesson here to have a baby with advanced language and cognitive development: the parents should speak about 35 words a minute enthusiastically with animated voice, and perfect timing of responsiveness accurately predicting what the baby is thinking or about to say.

Leonardo L. Leonidas, MD
Assistant Clinical Professor in Pediatrics
Distinguished Career Teaching Award, 2009
Tufts University School of Medicine, Boston, USA