Links for Keyword: Development of the Brain

Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, or subscribe to our mailing list, to receive news updates. Learn more.

Links 81 - 100 of 586

Surety Bond: Breast-Feeding May Increase Children's IQ

By R. Douglas Fields Children breast-fed longer than six months scored a 3.8-point IQ margin over those who were bottle-fed, according to a seven-year study by researchers at Jagiellonian University Medical College in Poland. Medical epidemiologist Wieslaw Jedrychowski and colleagues followed 468 babies born to nonsmoking mothers. The children were tested five times at regular intervals from infancy through preschool age. The data showed that cognitive abilities of preschoolers who were breast-fed scored significantly higher than bottle-fed infants, and IQ score was directly proportional to how long the infants had been breast-fed: IQs were 2.1 points higher in children who were breast-fed for three months; 2.6 points higher when babies were breast-fed for four to six months; 3.8 points higher in children breast-fed longer than six months. The results were published in the May 2011 issue of the European Journal of Pediatrics. This research confirms observations reported 70 years ago by Carolyn Hoefer and Mattie Hardy in JAMA The Journal of the American Medical Association, as well as many subsequent studies. This body of research provides the scientific basis for the World Health Organization's recommendation that all infants should be exclusively breast-fed for the first six months of life. But what is the missing ingredient that undermines the cognitive development of bottle-fed babies? Chemists searching for a specific compound in mother's milk have been overlooking the obvious difference between breast-feeding and bottle-feeding—something that could easily account for the difference in cognitive development, wrote Tonse Raju, a pediatrician and neonatalogist at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development in the current issue of Breastfeeding Medicine, October 2011. (Raju was not involved in the Jedrychowski study.) © 2011 Scientific American,

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 12: Sex: Evolutionary, Hormonal, and Neural Bases; Chapter 1: Biological Psychology: Scope and Outlook
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex; Chapter 1: An Introduction to Brain and Behavior
Link ID: 16047 - Posted: 11.17.2011

Perinatal antidepressant stunts brain development in rats

Rats exposed to an antidepressant just before and after birth showed substantial brain abnormalities and behaviors, in a study funded by the National Institutes of Health. After receiving citalopram, a serotonin-selective reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) , during this critical period, long-distance connections between the two hemispheres of the brain showed stunted growth and degeneration. The animals also became excessively fearful when faced with new situations and failed to play normally with peers – behaviors reminiscent of novelty avoidance and social impairments seen in autism. The abnormalities were more pronounced in male than female rats, just as autism affects 3-4 times more boys than girls. “Our findings underscore the importance of balanced serotonin levels – not too high or low -- for proper brain maturation,” explained Rick Lin, Ph.D. , of the University of Mississippi Medical Center, Jackson, a Eureka Award grantee of the NIH's National Institute of Mental Health. Lin and colleagues report on their discovery online during the week of Oct. 24, 2011, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Last July, a study reported an association between mothers taking antidepressants and increased autism risk in their children. It found that children of mothers who took SSRI's during the year prior to giving birth ran twice the normal risk of developing autism — with treatment during the first trimester of pregnancy showing the strongest effect. A study published last month linked the duration of a pregnant mother's exposure to SSRIs to modest lags in coordination of movement " but within the normal range " in their newborns.

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 16: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavior Disorders; Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 12: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavioral Disorders; Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development
Link ID: 15941 - Posted: 10.25.2011

Teen brains' growing pains

By Laura Sanders The roller-coaster teenage years can take IQs along for the ride. A person’s IQ can nosedive and climb sky-high during adolescence, while corresponding brain regions wax and wane in bulk, researchers report online October 19 in Nature. The results suggest that the IQ number given to a child is not immutable, as many researchers believe, says neuroscientist Richard Haier of the University of California, Irvine. “This is an extremely interesting paper.” Back in 2004, Cathy Price of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London and colleagues tested the IQs of 33 healthy participants who were, on average, 14 years old. While the teens were in the lab, structural MRI brain scans measured particular brain regions. About four years later, Price and her team invited the teenagers back for a redo. Overall, IQ scores held steady: Average IQs were 112 in 2004 and 113 four years later. But when the researchers zoomed in on individual teens, they found that about a third of the teenagers had meaningful changes in IQ, and a handful showed dizzying climbs or plunges. One such plunge was 18 IQ points — which would be enough to demote a person from genius status to merely above average. The retest also turned up an IQ gain of 21 points — which would elevate a below-average person to above average. Some people who scored high the first time around scored even higher later, and some low scorers scored even lower. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior; Chapter 1: Biological Psychology: Scope and Outlook
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development; Chapter 1: An Introduction to Brain and Behavior
Link ID: 15926 - Posted: 10.22.2011

Ailment Can Steal Youth From the Young

By JANE E. BRODY Patrick Fox, now 14, considers himself lucky. It took only a year to find out why he was always tired, his heart raced and he ached all over, why he became overheated easily and had terrible headaches almost every day. Once a happy, active child and good student who enjoyed school, by age 12 he could hardly get out of bed. Various medical specialists — pediatrician, cardiologist, rheumatologist and geneticist — failed to find a physical cause for his symptoms. Some said he should see a psychiatrist because he was a malingerer, lazy, depressed, manipulative or overly anxious. Instead, after his racing heart caused chest pains that felt like an impending heart attack, his mother whisked him off to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., where in just two hours he learned he had a form of autonomic dysfunction known as POTS, short for postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome. It has taken some youngsters with the syndrome as long as a decade to get a proper diagnosis, by which time their teen years are a washout. Patrick, who lives in Columbia, S.C., said he was telling his story in hopes that it would help others with the syndrome, which affects up to 1 percent of teenagers, get to the bottom of their problem more quickly. Patrick’s mother, Jacqueline Fox, said physicians needed to be better educated about the disorder so that it is promptly and accurately diagnosed and patients are treated before years of their youth go down the drain. In young people, POTS is almost always eventually outgrown, but proper treatment can give them their lives back in the meantime. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development
Link ID: 15923 - Posted: 10.18.2011

Brain growth, not size, predicts IQ in preterm babies

By Rachael Rettner How fast a baby's brain grows, rather than how large it is, predicts the child's mental abilities later in life, a new study of preterm infants suggests. The faster the brain's cerebral cortex grew during the first months of life, the higher the children scored at age 6 on intelligence tests designed to measure their abilities to think, speak, plan and pay attention, the researchers found. The cerebral cortex is an outer layer of the brain that is critical for language, memory, attention and thought. The study found no relationship between the size of a baby's brain and the child's later test scores. While it's not clear whether the results would also apply to babies born full-term, researchers said the findings are helping them understand what might go wrong in the brains of preterm babies that causes many of those infants to experience cognitive problems later in life. "It points us to the fact that the period before normal birth is a critical time for brain growth," said study researcher David Edwards, a professor of neonatal medicine at Imperial College in London. Anything that disrupts this growth, including preterm birth or certain illnesses, may reduces cognitive abilities, Edwards said. © 2011 msnbc.com

Fat Molecule May Cause 'Water on the Brain'

by Jennifer Couzin-Frankel Many babies born prematurely suffer from bleeding in their still-developing brains. Even when the bleeding stops, another life-threatening condition can strike: hydrocephalus, which occurs when fluid produced to keep the brain healthy builds up because it can't properly drain. For decades, doctors have known that the bleeding and hydrocephalus, also called "water on the brain," were linked, but they weren't sure why. A new study suggests the answer lies in a lipid that's common in blood but that can also profoundly disrupt brain structure and function when it's present in large quantities. Hydrocephalus strikes about one in 1500 babies, and treatment is imperfect. Doctors usually implant a shunt to drain cerebrospinal fluid out of the brain and into the spinal cord. Shunts fail over time, however, and follow-up surgeries are sometimes needed. The condition itself can also cause lifelong neurological problems. The roots of hydrocephalus remain murky, but for those linked to brain bleeds, the hypothesis was that blood clots—necessary to stop the bleeding—blocked the razor-thin pathways through which cerebrospinal fluid must travel to exit the brain. "We assumed for 100 years that it was just a mechanical block," says James McAllister II, a neuroembryologist at the University of Utah School of Medicine in Salt Lake City, who wasn't involved in the recent work. "Everybody thought that you dammed up the narrow channels." A group based at The Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, California, recently began to suspect that something else was at work. For years, Scripps neuroscientist Jerold Chun had been studying the embryonic brain and how certain lipids in the blood of both the mother and the embryo affect its development. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

See-Through Mouse Brains Created; May Aid Medical Scans

Brian Handwerk A new chemical may soon allow scientists to see exactly what's on your mind—because the substance turns brain tissue totally transparent. Known as Scale, the new chemical makes body tissue so crystal clear that light can penetrate deeply enough for researchers to directly see fluorescent markers embedded in cells and other structures. This advance could unveil new frontiers in medical imaging, according to its creators. "Our current experiments are focused on the mouse brain, but applications are neither limited to mice nor to the brain," Atsushi Miyawaki, of Japan's RIKEN Brain Science Institute, said in a press statement. We envision using Scale on other organs such as the heart, muscles, and kidneys and on tissues from primate and human biopsy samples." Paul Thompson, a neurologist at the UCLA School of Medicine who's unaffiliated with the research, said pictures of transparent organs and embryonic mice treated with Scale are incredible. "I've worked in brain imaging for 20 years, and seeing something like this really had a wow factor," he said. © 1996-2011 National Geographic Society.

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior; Chapter 2: Functional Neuroanatomy: The Nervous System and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development; Chapter 2: Cells and Structures: The Anatomy of the Nervous System
Link ID: 15775 - Posted: 09.08.2011

Medical Mysteries: A tiny baby who didn’t grow

By Sandra G. Boodman, Right away the obstetrician knew that something was very wrong. Morgan McElhinney weighed just over five pounds and had a head that was abnormally long and narrow. Her muscle tone was worrisomely floppy, and her cry unusually weak. Doctors at Frederick Memorial Hospital let Lisa Simonson McElhinney hold her newborn briefly before whisking her off to the neonatal intensive care unit. “I didn’t see her much for a few days,” recalled McElhinney of the period immediately following the birth of her fourth child, in June 2002. After nearly a week in the hospital the baby was sent home, although no one could say what was wrong. Initial tests found no obvious cause, such as a metabolic disorder. “We were scared,” said McElhinney, who manages apartment buildings in Frederick. “You try to be optimistic and say, ‘Maybe she’s not that bad, maybe she’s just really early and will grow out of it.’ Even the professionals tried to be optimistic” at first, she said. More than five years would elapse before McElhinney and her husband, Brad, learned the reason for their daughter’s problems. That knowledge brought a fresh wave of grief that rocked McElhinney and drew her to a new endeavor aimed at helping other families. The first sign something was amiss, said McElhinney, now 46, came just before she went into labor, when the baby turned from the foot-first breech position to the proper head-down position. © 1996-2011 The Washington Post

Charting Brain Growth in Humans and Chimps

By SINDYA N. BHANOO Although baby humans and baby chimpanzees both start out with undeveloped forebrains, a new study reports that the human brain increases in volume much more rapidly early on. The growth is in a region of the brain known as the prefrontal cortex and is part of what makes humans cognitively advanced compared with other animals, including the chimpanzee, our closest relative. The prefrontal cortex plays a major role in decision-making, self-awareness and creative thinking. Tetsuro Matsuzawa, a zoologist at Kyoto University in Japan, and his colleagues performed magnetic resonance imaging scans on three young chimpanzees over about six years, starting when the chimps were 6 months old. The researchers compared these scans with M.R.I. scans taken of human infants and children. They found that the white matter in the prefrontal cortex of chimpanzees does not grow as rapidly as it does in humans. Their findings appear in the journal Current Biology. That the brains of both animals undergo significant growth indicates that brain development in both is shaped by life experience. This may be why human babies and chimp babies share some similarities — like the impulse to smile at caregivers. But the rapid development of the prefrontal cortex in humans may contribute to superior skills in communication and social interaction. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development
Link ID: 15675 - Posted: 08.13.2011

Out of the Brains of Babes

By Steve Mirsky Parents often wonder what their little ones are absorbing from them. For example, my mother had a wonderful vocabulary. So it may be more than a family fable that when I was asked as a two-year-old whether I was wet, I allegedly responded, “No, I’m saturated.” Then again, my father has always tended to interpret things quite literally, which may explain why, a year or two later, my supposed response to the question of how my favorite record went was “’round and around and around.” (This all happened shortly after the invention of movable type, when music was literally pressed onto large vinyl disks that “turned” on what was fittingly called a turntable. For more on turntables, see this space in the June issue.) I was reminded of preposterously precocious utterances by tiny tykes during a brief talk that string theorist Brian Greene gave at the opening of the 2011 World Science Festival in New York City on June 1. Greene said he sometimes wondered about how much information small children pick up from standard dinner-table conversation in a given home. He revealed that he got some data to mull over when he hugged his three-year-old daughter and told her he loved her more than anything in the universe, to which she replied, “The universe or the multiverse?” Closer to home (well, my home at least), my seven-year-old grandnephew has often exhibited an interest in various science and math topics. He, like many preschoolers at the time, was deeply disappointed by the 2006 demotion of Pluto from the family of planets. So great was his grief then that when I asked him about Pluto’s fall, he only said, “I don’t want to talk about it.” More recently, he was a passenger when his grandfather exited a highway onto a cloverleaf that took them off their northern route toward the east, then south and then west onto the next road. With that maneuver complete, the kid said, “That was a 270-degree turn.” Which he either learned from his smart parents or from watching the X Games. © 2011 Scientific American,

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior; Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development; Chapter 14: Attention and Consciousness
Link ID: 15650 - Posted: 08.08.2011

Placenta to the rescue

Zoë Corbyn The placenta has long been thought of as a passive organ that simply enables a fetus to take up nutrients from its mother. But new research in mice shows that when calories are restricted, the placenta steps up to the plate – actively sacrificing itself to protect the fetal brain from damage. Researchers at Cambridge University, UK, examined what happened to 10 fetuses from 8 mice when their pregnant mothers were deprived of food for 24 hours – as might happen in the wild — about mid-way through gestation. This point in pregnancy is critical in the development of the hypothalamus, the part of the brain that controls primal urges, including maternal instincts. Behavioural neuroscientists Kevin Broad and Barry Keverne found that the placenta responded by breaking down its own tissues, recycling proteins inside its cells to provide a steady supply of nutrients to the developing hypothalamus despite the mother's interrupted food intake. Their study is published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1. "We didn't know before that this protection of the fetus goes on," says Keverne. "I expected the lack of food to affect the fetal brain and the placenta equally, but instead we see the placenta acting as an interface to make sure the fetuses' particular stage of brain development is protected." © 2011 Nature Publishing Group

A Drug for Down Syndrome

By DAN HURLEY Early in the evening of June 25, 1995, hours after the birth of his first and only child, the course of Dr. Alberto Costa’s life and work took an abrupt turn. Still recovering from a traumatic delivery that required an emergency Caesarean section, Costa’s wife, Daisy, lay in bed, groggy from sedation. Into their dimly lighted room at Methodist Hospital in Houston walked the clinical geneticist. He took Costa aside to deliver some unfortunate news. The baby girl, he said, appeared to have Down syndrome, the most common genetic cause of cognitive disabilities, or what used to be called “mental retardation.” Costa, himself a physician and neuroscientist, had only a basic knowledge of Down syndrome. Yet there in the hospital room, he debated the diagnosis with the geneticist. The baby’s heart did not have any of the defects often associated with Down syndrome, he argued, and her head circumference was normal. She just didn’t look like a typical Down syndrome baby. And after all, it would take a couple weeks before a definitive examination would show whether she had been born with three copies of all or most of the genes on the 21st chromosome, instead of the usual two. Costa had dreamed that a child of his might grow up to become a mathematician. He had even prevailed upon Daisy to name their daughter Tyche, after the Greek goddess of fortune or chance, and in honor of the Renaissance astronomer Tycho Brahe. Now he asked the geneticist what the chances were that Tyche (pronounced Tishy) really had Down syndrome. “In my experience,” he said, “close to a hundred percent.” © 2011 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior; Chapter 17: Learning and Memory
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development; Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development
Link ID: 15637 - Posted: 08.02.2011

Residents of the brain: Scientists turn up startling diversity among nerve cells

By Laura Sanders Peer out the window of a plane landing at LaGuardia Airport, and the tiny people scurrying around the streets of New York City all look the same. But take a stroll down Fifth Avenue and a new view emerges: Up close, New Yorkers are very different. A street view of the brain also reveals a new perspective: No two cells are the same. Zoom in, and the brain’s wrinkly, pinkish-gray exterior becomes a motley collection of billions of cells, each with personalized quirks and idiosyncrasies. Powerful new techniques are giving researchers a glimpse of this staggering diversity — especially among nerve cells, the brain’s information brokers. Even nerve cells presumed to do the same job come in a range of shapes and sizes and display a host of behaviors, sending their electrical messages in unpredictable ways, new studies reveal. The closer scientists scrutinize nerve cells, called neurons, the more differences turn up. This cellular menagerie has left researchers puzzling over how best to categorize what neuroscientist Rafael Yuste of Columbia University calls these “living creatures.” So far, systematic methods are lacking. “Even after 100 years of research, we have no clue how many classes of neurons there are,” says Yuste, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute researcher. He and other scientists are developing new algorithms to automate neuron classification, in the hope of someday compiling a standard “parts list” of the brain. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 2: Functional Neuroanatomy: The Nervous System and Behavior; Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 2: Cells and Structures: The Anatomy of the Nervous System; Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development
Link ID: 15565 - Posted: 07.16.2011

Hope for premature babies with brain injuries

Erika Check Hayden Scientists have identified the molecular players central to an incurable brain injury common in premature babies, and have shown how such injuries might one day be treated, sparing people from lifelong conditions such as cerebral palsy. In babies born before their lungs are fully developed, lack of oxygen can disrupt nerve cells' ability to make a protective coating, called myelin, that makes up the brain's 'white matter'. Without myelin, brain cells die, leaving children vulnerable to neurological deficits such as cerebral palsy. Some 20% of babies born before 6.5 months gestation experience lasting brain damage (see The most vulnerable brains). "We have become very good at keeping these premature babies alive, but we have no strategy to prevent the long-term neurological consequences that can occur in them," says Vittorio Gallo, a neuroscientist at the Children's National Medical Center in Washington DC. Writing in Nature Neuroscience1, David Rowitch at the University of California, San Francisco, and his colleagues point the way towards such a strategy. By studying the brains of babies who had died after incurring brain injuries caused by a lack of oxygen, they discovered that a gene called AXIN2 was expressed in infants with white-matter brain injuries. © 2011 Nature Publishing Group,

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior; Chapter 19: Language and Hemispheric Asymmetry
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development; Chapter 15: Language and Our Divided Brain
Link ID: 15497 - Posted: 06.27.2011

Math disability tied to bad number sense

By Bruce Bower Math doesn’t add up for some kids, and a weak number sense may be partly to blame. An evolutionarily ancient ability to estimate quantities takes a big hit in children with severe, instruction-resistant math difficulties, say psychologist Michèle Mazzocco of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and her colleagues. In contrast, below-average, average and superior math students estimate amounts comparably well, the researchers report in a paper published online June 16 in Child Development. “It’s possible that developmental routes to mathematical learning disability share a core deficit in numerical estimation,” Mazzocco says. Math learning disability, or dyscalculia, affects an estimated 5 to 7 percent of school children. Dyscalculia is defined as consistent, extremely low scores on math achievement tests. Causes of this problem remain poorly understood. Mazzocco’s new findings coincide with results from an ongoing study of more than 300 Missouri school children tested annually since kindergarten. By third grade, kids with math learning disability display several types of thinking hitches, says psychologist and investigation director David Geary of the University of Missouri in Columbia. In some cases of dyscalculia, youngsters have trouble gauging whether one set of items is more numerous than another. Others can’t estimate the number of items that they briefly see, quickly forget verbal information, can’t hold related pieces of information in mind or struggle in all of these areas. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

In Tiny Worm, Unlocking Secrets of the Brain

By NICHOLAS WADE In an eighth-floor laboratory overlooking the East River, Cornelia I. Bargmann watches two colleagues manipulate a microscopic roundworm. They have trapped it in a tiny groove on a clear plastic chip, with just its nose sticking into a channel. Pheromones — signaling chemicals produced by other worms — are being pumped through the channel, and the researchers have genetically engineered two neurons in the worm’s head to glow bright green if a neuron responds. These ingenious techniques for exploring a tiny animal’s behavior are the fruit of many years’ work by Dr. Bargmann’s and other labs. Despite the roundworm’s lowliness on the scale of intellectual achievement, the study of its nervous system offers one of the most promising approaches for understanding the human brain, since it uses much the same working parts but is around a million times less complex. Caenorhabditis elegans, as the roundworm is properly known, is a tiny, transparent animal just a millimeter long. In nature, it feeds on the bacteria that thrive in rotting plants and animals. It is a favorite laboratory organism for several reasons, including the comparative simplicity of its brain, which has just 302 neurons and 8,000 synapses, or neuron-to-neuron connections. These connections are pretty much the same from one individual to another, meaning that in all worms the brain is wired up in essentially the same way. Such a system should be considerably easier to understand than the human brain, a structure with billions of neurons, 100,000 miles of biological wiring and 100 trillion synapses. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Difficulty estimating quantity linked to math learning disability

Researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health have discovered that the innate ability to estimate quantities is impaired in children who have a math learning disability. The link between difficulty estimating quantities and math difficulties was seen only in children who had a math learning disability, and not in those who did poorly in math but were not considered to be learning disabled. "The findings suggest that students may struggle with math for very different reasons," said Kathy Mann Koepke, Ph.D., director of the Mathematics and Science Cognition and Learning program at the NIH’s Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), which funded the study. "Research to identify these reasons may lead to new ways of identifying those at risk, and developing the means to help them." Math learning disability is also referred to as dyscalculia. The study was published in Child Development and was conducted by Michèle Mazzocco, Ph.D., at the Kennedy Krieger Institute and the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and her colleagues, Lisa Feigenson, Ph.D., and Justin Halberda, Ph.D., also at Johns Hopkins. In earlier research, Drs. Feigenson and Halberda have shown that the innate ability to estimate and compare quantities is present in infancy and improves with age.

Antipsychotic drugs risky to newborns

There are potential risks to babies born to women who took antipsychotic drugs in pregnancy, Health Canada says. The department said it is updating safety information on the drug labels to highlight the potential risk of abnormal muscle movements and withdrawal symptoms in newborns whose mothers were treated with the drugs during the third trimester. Babies born to women treated with antipsychotic drugs during the third trimester run the risk of abnormal muscle movements and withdrawal symptoms, Health Canada says.Babies born to women treated with antipsychotic drugs during the third trimester run the risk of abnormal muscle movements and withdrawal symptoms, Health Canada says. Michaela Rehle/Reuters Antipsychotic drugs are used to treat symptoms of psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Health Canada said it has notified Canadian manufacturers of typical and newer antipsychotic drugs to update safety labels. "Women taking an antipsychotic and who are pregnant or thinking of becoming pregnant should talk to their doctor about their treatment," Health Canada advised in a statement Wednesday. "Patients should not stop taking their medication without first speaking to a healthcare practitioner, as abruptly stopping an antipsychotic drug can cause serious adverse events." © CBC 2011

Blood test for Down syndrome creates ethical debate

By MALCOLM RITTER NEW YORK — The results of the blood test revealed only a risk, but when she saw them, she still threw up. Now she had to find out for sure. So she lay on her back at a doctor's office, praying, comforted by her Christian faith and her mother at her side, while a needle was slipped into her belly. Erin Witkowski of Port Jervis, N.Y., was going to find out if the baby she was carrying had Down syndrome. For years, many women have gone through an experience like hers: a blood or ultrasound test that indicates a heightened risk of the syndrome, followed by a medical procedure to make a firm diagnosis by capturing DNA from the fetus. Usually it's the needle procedure Witkowski had, called amniocentesis, done almost four months or more into the pregnancy. Sometimes it's an earlier test called CVS, or chorionic villus sampling, which collects a bit of tissue from the placenta. Both pose a tiny but real chance for miscarriage, and experts say highly skilled practitioners are not available everywhere. But by this time next year there may be an alternative — one that offers accurate results as early as nine weeks into the pregnancy. Companies are racing to market a more accurate blood test than those available now that could spare many women the need for an amnio or CVS. It would retrieve fetal DNA from the mother's bloodstream. And the answer could come before the pregnancy is obvious to others. For some women, that might mean abortion is a more tenable choice. For others it could be a mixed blessing. Copyright 2011 The Associated Press

Bipolar kids: Victims of the 'madness industry'?

by Jon Ronson THERE'S a children's picture book in the US called Brandon and the Bipolar Bear. Brandon and his bear sometimes fly into unprovoked rages. Sometimes they're silly and overexcited. A nice doctor tells them they are ill, and gives them medicine that makes them feel much better. The thing is, if Brandon were a real child, he would have just been misdiagnosed with bipolar disorder. Also known as manic depression, this serious condition, involving dramatic mood swings, is increasingly being recorded in American children. And a vast number of them are being medicated for it. The problem is, this apparent epidemic isn't real. "Bipolar emerges from late adolescence," says Ian Goodyer, a professor in the department of psychiatry at the University of Cambridge who studies child and adolescent depression. "It is very, very unlikely indeed that you'll find it in children under 7 years." How did this strange, sweeping misdiagnosis come to pass? How did it all start? These were some of the questions I explored when researching The Psychopath Test, my new book about the odder corners of the "madness industry". Freudian slip The answer to the second question turned out to be strikingly simple. It was really all because of one man: Robert Spitzer. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Previous Page | Next Page

Links By Chapter:

Links for Keyword: Development of the Brain