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Stress during pregnancy could cause children to have mental and behavioural problems like ADHD?

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/6298909.stm

Stress ‘harms brain in the womb’

Children whose mothers were stressed out during pregnancy are vulnerable to mental and behavioural problems like ADHD, mounting evidence suggests.
Latest UK research by Professor Vivette Glover of Imperial College London found stress caused by rows with or violence by a partner was particularly damaging.
Experts blame high levels of the stress hormone cortisol crossing the placenta.

Professor Glover found high cortisol in the amniotic fluid bathing the baby in the womb tallied with the damage. The babies exposed to the highest levels of cortisol during their development had lower IQs at 18 months.The same infants were also more likely to be anxious and fearful, she told a conference of the Royal College of Psychiatrists.

Professor Glover said: “We looked at what stresses were most harmful. We found that if the woman had a partner who was being emotionally cruel to them while they were pregnant it had a really significant effect on their baby’s future development. It really shows that the partner has a big role to play.”

The work suggests maternal stress is a true risk factor in its own right, although Professor Glover acknowledged that genetic factors and home environment after birth would also have an impact on a child’s development. She said most babies grow up unaffected by a stressful womb environment.

Big impact

However, she said maternal stress increases the risk of a range of problems - it doubles the risk of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), for example.

“We should be screening women in pregnancy for stress and intervening. It has big public health implications. About a million children in the UK have neurodevelopmental problems - ADHD, cognitive delay, anxiety and so on. About 15% of this might be due to antenatal stress. If we could reduce the mother’s stress while she is pregnant we might be able to potentially improve the outcome for about 150,000 children,” Professor Glover said.

Dr David Coghill, senior lecturer and honorary consultant in child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of Dundee, said pregnant women should not be “unduly concerned” by the findings.
He explained: “We are talking about here is extremely high levels of stress and distress. Stress is a normal factor of daily life and is something that the body copes with very well. However, it is a warning for people who may be facing more severe stresses and for those around women who are pregnant that increasing stress levels above what is normal for a person is not a good thing to do at that time.”

Professor Glover has submitted her work for publication in a peer-reviewed journal.

Can mental training improve your intelligence? No video game or mental puzzle has convincingly been shown to work. But now a group of neuropsychologists claims it has found a task that can add points to a person’s IQ – and the harder you train, they say, the more you gain.

So-called “fluid intelligence”, or Gf, is the ability to reason, solve new problems and think in the abstract. It correlates with professional and educational success and it appears to be largely genetic.

Past attempts to boost Gf have suggested that, although by training you can achieve great gains on the specific training task itself, those gains don’t transfer to other tasks.

Now Susanne Jaeggi at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, US, and her colleagues say that is not true.

They invited 70 healthy adults to participate in a challenging training exercise known as the “dual n-back” task.

Daily training

The exercise involves tracking small squares on a screen that pop into a new location every three seconds. Volunteers have to press a button when the current location is a duplicate of two views earlier.

At the same time, consonants are played through headphones and a button is pressed if the letter is the same as that heard two “plays” earlier.

If participants perform well, the interval to be tracked (n) increases to three or more stages earlier.

Jaeggi’s volunteers were trained daily for about 20 minutes for either 8, 12, 17 or 19 days (with weekends off). They were given IQ tests both before and after the training.

The researchers found that the IQ of trained individuals increased significantly more than controls – and that the more training people got, the higher the score.

Small study

“It definitely challenges the old opinions,” says Jaeggi. She thinks their training regimen succeeded where others failed largely because it remained challenging. Also, because it was tailor-made to the individual, people were never able to go on autopilot.

Not everyone is impressed. Robert Plomin, at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, says that no serious intelligence researchers consider Gf “immutable”, as the paper suggests.

“There is no contradiction at all between substantial heritability and improvement of performance,” he says. “What is school about?”

Plomin says what is more interesting is how much an individual can profit from training. He complains, however, that the researchers did not really address this in the research, and that the study, with nine subjects in each of four training conditions, is much too small to detect it.

Source: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13786-simple-brain-exercise-can-boost-iq.html

Washington, May 6 (ANI): A new study has found that long-term, exclusive breastfeeding boosts children’s cognitive development.

In a study of 17,046 children, the team found that breastfeeding exclusively during the first year of life was associated with an increase in a child’s intelligence by first grade.

Previous studies have reported that children and adults who were breastfed as infants have higher scores on IQ tests and other measures of cognitive (thinking, learning and memory) development than those who were fed formula, according to background information in the article.

However, the evidence has been based on observational studies, in which children whose mothers chose to breastfeed were compared with those whose mothers chose not to breastfeed. The results of these studies may be complicated by subtle differences in the way breastfeeding mothers interact with their infants, the authors note.

Michael S. Kramer, M.D., of McGill University and the Montreal Children’s Hospital, Montreal, Quebec, and colleagues conducted a randomized trial of a breastfeeding promotion program involving patients at 31 maternity hospitals and affiliated clinics in Belarus.

Between June 1996 and December 1997, clinics were randomly assigned either to adopt a program supporting and promoting breastfeeding or to continue their current practices and policies.

A total of 7,108 infants and mothers who visited facilities promoting breastfeeding and 6,781 infants and mothers who visited control facilities received follow-up interviews and examinations between 2002 and 2005, when the children were an average of 6.5 years old.

Mothers who visited a facility promoting breastfeeding were more likely to feed their infants only breast milk at age 3 months (43.3 percent vs. 6.4 percent in the control group) and at all ages through 1 year. At age 6.5, the children in the breastfeeding group scored an average of 7.5 points higher on tests measuring verbal intelligence, 2.9 points higher on tests measuring non-verbal intelligence and 5.9 points higher on tests measuring overall intelligence.

Teachers also rated these children significantly higher academically than control children in both reading and writing.

“Even though the treatment difference appears causal, it remains unclear whether the observed cognitive benefits of breastfeeding are due to some constituent of breast milk or are related to the physical and social interactions inherent in breastfeeding,” the authors write.

Essential long-chain fatty acids and a compound known as insulinlike growth factor I, both found in breastmilk, could be responsible for the cognitive differences.

On the other hand, the physical or emotional component of breastfeeding may lead to permanent changes affecting brain development. Breastfeeding also may increase verbal interaction between mother and child, which could improve children’s cognitive development.

“Although breastfeeding initiation rates have increased substantially during the last 30 years, much less progress has been achieved in increasing the exclusivity and duration of breastfeeding,” the authors write.

“The consistency of our findings based on a randomized trial with those reported in previous observational studies should prove helpful in encouraging further public health efforts to promote, protect and support breastfeeding,” they conclude.

The study appears in the May issue of Archives of General Psychiatry, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. (ANI)

Source:  http://in.news.yahoo.com/ani/20080506/r_t_ani_hl/thl-breastfeeding-boosts-kids-iq-3b18f0d.html