Lifelong benefits of cuddling your baby
by JULIE WHELDON, Daily Mail
09:39am 22nd November 2005
It may come as no surprise to parents, but cuddling your baby provides them with social benefits for years afterwards, according to scientists.
They found a clear link between love and attention in the early years and healthy emotional responses in later life.
Children who have been deprived of physical contact as babies have lower levels of social-bonding hormones, the researchers found.
Even if they are then smothered with love as toddlers, it can be very difficult to repair the damage. The research, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, looked at hormones called oxytocin and arginine vasopressin. Both play a role in response to stress and social bonding, with levels typically rising after the subject has been comforted with human contact. The scientists took 18 children aged around four and a half who had been born in orphanages and therefore missed out on the level of physical contact they might have had from a mother and father.
http://tinyurl.com/948gw
Childhood Scars That Never Heal
By Constance Holden
ScienceNOW Daily News
21 November 2005
Researchers have long suspected that abuse or neglect early in life can permanently alter people's brains, making them more prone to anxiety and depression, less able to handle stress, or even incapable of forming strong attachments with others. There has been little molecular evidence to back this up, however. Now a group reports that children who started life as neglected orphans show long-term deficiencies in hormones related to social attachment.
Hormones play an important role in our interactions with others. Oxytocin levels increase during warm physical interactions with a familiar person, and vasopressin is related to recognizing familiar people. Studying these hormones has proven difficult in small children, however, because they have to be obtained via blood samples or spinal taps.
Daycare illness guidelines exist, but largely unknown
A new Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center study shows that parents, pediatricians and child care providers are equally unknowledgeable about guidelines that recommend whether children should be excluded from child care due to particular illnesses.
As a result, children may be excluded for harmless conditions that do not meet national criteria, such as colds and allergic conjunctivitis, while being allowed to return to child care for some conditions that warrant staying home, such as uncontrolled coughing or persistent diarrhea, according to Kristen Copeland, M.D., a pediatrician at Cincinnati Children's and lead author of the study.
The study, published in the November-December issue of Ambulatory Pediatrics, found that child care providers, parents and pediatricians knew guideline recommendations for 12 common childhood ailments only 60 percent of the time.
"Inappropriate exclusions from child care can have a significant economic impact," says Dr. Copeland. "When their child attending child care becomes ill, parents have limited options. It's easy to see how exclusion can become a contentious issue between parents who may think child care providers are inconsistent and unreasonable in their application of guidelines and those child care providers who resent some parents' attempts to subvert the guidelines."
SLU research on teen moms refutes conventional wisdom: Early motherhood may not ruin their lives
Nurses can play pivotal role in helping young families succeed
ST. LOUIS -- A new Saint Louis University study rebuts the assumption that all teenagers who have babies face a future of dismal failure. "Earlier studies exaggerated the long-term negative consequences associated with teenage mothering," says Lee SmithBattle, R.N., DNSc, professor of nursing at Saint Louis University Doisy College of Health Sciences and principal investigator of a qualitative study that analyzed the experiences of teen mothers a dozen years after they had given birth to their first child. "This study and several others show that teen mothers fare better over time than our assumptions suggest," she says. SmithBattle, who has been researching teen mothers for 17 years, found that early motherhood has not ruined their lives. She has followed the lives of mothers and their families every four years, starting when their babies were less than a year old. For this article, SmithBattle analyzed interviews conducted when 11 moms were in their 30s to show how becoming a mom as a teen affected their lives. Her article appears in this month's issue of Western Journal of Nursing Research.
Multiple-birth babies, boys have higher risk of defects
GAINESVILLE, Fla. - Twins, triplets and other multiples have a nearly 50 percent greater chance of being born with birth defects, and boys tend to be more at risk than girls, according to two population-based studies conducted at the University of Florida.
UF researchers who studied all Florida births from 1996 through 2000 found multiples have a higher risk than babies born singly of developing 23 of 40 birth defects, such as spina bifida, according to results recently published online in the Maternal and Child Health Journal.
The same team of researchers, from UF's Maternal Child Health Education Research and Data Center, studied 4,768 pairs of opposite-sex twins and found that boys had a 29 percent higher risk for birth defects than girls. This could be because boys tend to develop at a slower pace, leaving a little more time for potential problems to arise, according to findings published this month in Birth Defects Research (Part A): Clinical and Molecular Teratology. "In the past 20 years, multiple births have increased because of greater reliance on assistive reproductive technology, especially among women delaying childbirth until their 30s and 40s," said Yiwei Tang, M.D., an assistant professor of pediatrics and a lead researcher on both studies. "In offering these options to women, full disclosure of an increased risk of birth defects should be made."
ADHD medication might also treat hyperactivity symptoms in autism
Methylphenidate, a medication used to treat attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), may be effective in treating hyperactivity symptoms in children with autism and related pervasive developmental disorders, researchers report in the November Archives of General Psychiatry.
The study was conducted by the Research Units on Pediatric Psychopharmacology (RUPP) Autism Network, a National Institute of Mental Health funded multi-site consortium dedicated to the development and testing of treatments for children with pervasive developmental disorders such as autism. The Yale team is directed by Lawrence Scahill, associate professor of nursing and child psychiatry at Yale.
"This study shows that methylphenidate is an effective medication for children with pervasive developmental disorder (PDD) accompanied by increased hyperactivity," said Scahill. "However, the percentage of children showing a positive response and the magnitude of benefit is lower than what we have come to expect in ADHD uncomplicated by PDD."
Periodontal therapy may reduce the incidence of preterm births and low birthweight infants
Study showed that women with gingivitis who received periodontal therapy before
CHICAGO – Pregnant women will want to include a periodontal evaluation as part of their prenatal care. That's because researchers found that periodontal treatment significantly reduced the risk of having a preterm birth or a low birthweight infant, according to a study published in the Journal of Periodontology.
"We found a significant association between gingivitis and preterm birth after adjusting for the major risk factors for preterm delivery, suggesting that gingivitis, the earliest form of periodontal disease, is an independent risk factor for preterm birth and low birthweight," said Dr. Néstor J. López, Professor of the University of Chile. "Periodontal therapy reduced preterm birth and low birthweight infant rates by 68 percent in women with pregnancy-associated gingivitis."
This is in concordance with two other intervention studies in which periodontal treatment reduced the incidence of preterm births and low birth weight infants between 71 percent and 84 percent in pregnant women with moderate to severe chronic periodontitis.
"Ideally, women should begin their pregnancy without periodontal infections, and they should be educated and motivated to maintain a high level of oral hygiene prior to and throughout pregnancy," said López. "If periodontal infection is diagnosed at any time during pregnancy, the treatment should be administered as soon as possible in order to reduce the risk of preterm birth and low birthweight."
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