By Anil Ananthaswamy To understand human consciousness, we need to know why it exists in the first place. New experimental evidence suggests it may have evolved to help us learn and adapt to changing circumstances far more rapidly and effectively. We used to think consciousness was a uniquely human trait, but neuroscientists now believe we share it with many other animals, including mammals, birds and octopuses. While plants and arguably some animals like jellyfish seem able to respond to the world around them without any conscious awareness, many other animals consciously experience and perceive their environment. Read more: Why be conscious – The improbable origins of our unique mind In the 19th century, Thomas Henry Huxley and others argued that such consciousness is an “epiphenomenon” – a side effect of the workings of the brain that has no causal influence, the way a steam whistle has no effect on the way a steam engine works. More recently, neuroscientists have suggested that consciousness enables us to integrate information from different senses or keep such information active for long enough in the brain that we can experience the sight and sound of car passing by, for example, as one unified perception, even though sound and light travel at different speeds. © Copyright New Scientist Ltd.

Keyword: Consciousness; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 23785 - Posted: 06.28.2017

By Meredith Wadman The hallmark brain damage in Parkinson’s disease is thought to be the work of a misfolded, rogue protein that spreads from brain cell to brain cell like an infection. Now, researchers have found that the normal form of the protein—α-synuclein (αS)—may actually defend the intestines against invaders by marshaling key immune cells. But chronic intestinal infections could ultimately cause Parkinson’s, the scientists suggest, if αS migrates from overloaded nerves in the gut wall to the brain. “The gut-brain immune axis seems to be on a cusp of an explosion of new insights, and this work offers an exceptionally exciting new hypothesis,” says Charles Bevins, an expert in intestinal immunity at the University of California, Davis, who was not involved with the study. The normal function of αS has long been a mystery. Though the protein is known to accumulate in toxic clumps in the brain and the nerves of the gut wall in patients with Parkinson’s disease, no one was sure what it did in healthy people. Noting that a region of the αS molecule behaves similarly to small, microbe-targeting proteins that are part of the body’s immune defenses, Michael Zasloff, an immunologist at Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington, D.C., set out to find whether αS, too, might help fend off microbial invaders. © 2017 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 23784 - Posted: 06.28.2017

By Debra W. Soh If there was a way of telling who in our society is sexually attracted to children, are we entitled to know? A recent study from Georg-August-University Göttingen in Germany suggests that we may need to grapple with this question. Phallometric testing, also known as penile plethysmography, is considered the gold standard in measuring male sexual arousal, and particularly, deviant sexual interests such as pedophilia, which is the sexual interest in prepubescent children, roughly aged 3 to 10. The test involves measuring the volume of blood in the test-taker’s penis using an airtight glass tube (or conversely, measuring penile circumference with a mercury strain gauge) while he is presented with a series of images of children and adults, and audio stories describing a corresponding sexual encounter. Phallometry is commonly used in forensic settings to assess the sexual interests of sex offenders, in order to determine their risk of re-offending. As one can imagine, sex offenders tend not to be forthright about their sexual preferences, which makes phallometry all the more important. It has, however, been criticized because the test can become easier for individuals to fool with each successive assessment. Brain scanning using fMRI holds much promise as a diagnostic tool in evaluating sexual interests, as research has documented a reliable network of brain regions involved in sexual arousal. The current study took this another step by testing whether brain functional activation could be used to infer what someone finds sexually interesting without them knowing. © 2017 Scientific American,

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Brain imaging
Link ID: 23783 - Posted: 06.28.2017

By Michael Price Contrary to popular lore that portrays chimpanzees as having “super strength,” studies have only found modest differences with humans. But our closest relatives are slightly stronger by several measures, and now a study comparing the muscle fibers of different primates reveals a potential explanation: Humans may have traded strength for endurance, allowing us to travel farther for food. To determine why chimpanzees are stronger than humans—at least on a pound-for-pound basis—Matthew O’Neill, an anatomy and evolution researcher at the University of Arizona College of Medicine in Phoenix, and colleagues biopsied the thigh and calf muscles of three chimps housed at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. They dissected the samples into individual fibers and stimulated them to figure out how much force they could generate. Comparing their measurements to known data from humans, the team found that, at the individual fiber level, muscle output was about the same. Given that different fibers throughout the muscle might make a difference, the researchers conducted a more thorough analysis of tissue samples from pelvic and hind limb muscles of three chimpanzee cadavers from various zoos and research institutes around the United States. Previous studies in mammals have found that muscle composition between trunk, forelimb, and hind limb muscles is largely the same, O’Neill says, so he’s confident the samples are representative across most of the chimp’s musculature. The team used a technique called gel electrophoresis to break down the muscles into individual muscle fibers, and compared this breakdown to human muscle fiber data. © 2017 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Muscles; Evolution
Link ID: 23782 - Posted: 06.27.2017

Carl Zimmer Mark D. Zabel wants to set some fires. Dr. Zabel and his colleagues are developing plans to burn plots of National Park Service land in Arkansas and Colorado. If the experiments turn out as the researchers hope, they will spare some elk and deer a gruesome death. Across a growing swath of North America, these animals are dying from a mysterious disorder called chronic wasting disease. It’s caused not by a virus or bacterium, but a deformed protein called a prion. When ingested, prions force normal proteins in the animal’s body to become deformed as well. Over the course of months, prions can gradually wreck the animal’s nervous system, ultimately killing it. This year is the 50th anniversary of the discovery of chronic wasting disease. In the September issue of Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews, Dr. Zabel, an immunologist at Colorado State University, and his former graduate student Aimee Ortega survey what scientists have learned about the slow-spreading plague. It makes for ominous reading. “There’s a lot that we still don’t know and don’t understand about the disease,” Dr. Zabel said in an interview. Once chronic wasting disease gets a foothold, it can spread relentlessly. It’s now documented in 24 states, and continues to expand into new ranges. In some herds, as many as half of the animals carry prions. It’s only been in recent years that scientists have gained crucial clues to how the disease spreads. Direct contact, it turns out, isn’t the only way that the prions get from one animal to another. © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Prions
Link ID: 23781 - Posted: 06.27.2017

By Alice Klein Women are missing out on optimum medical treatment because most pre-clinical drug research is done in male animals, a new study suggests. New drugs must be evaluated in animals before being considered for human trials. Over three-quarters of these studies use only male animals because of concerns that female hormone cycles will affect experiments. It is also widely assumed that what works for males will work for females. However, research by Natasha Karp at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge and her colleagues casts doubt on this assumption. They compared 234 physical traits in 14,000 male and female lab mice. Sex differences were identified for 57 per cent of quantifiable traits – like cholesterol level and bone mass – and for 10 per cent of qualitative traits, like head shape. In another 40,000 mice, they found that when they switched off specific genes, the effects varied according to sex. This suggests that genetic diseases may manifest themselves differently in males and females and require different treatments, says Karp. These sex nuances mean that drugs optimised for male animals may be less effective in females, or even cause harm, says Karp. Between 1997 and 2001, 8 of the 10 drugs that were pulled from the market in the US posed greater health risks for women – possibly as a result of male-biased animal research, she says. © Copyright New Scientist Ltd.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 23780 - Posted: 06.27.2017

By Catherine Caruso, More than half of all opioid prescriptions in the United States are written for people with anxiety, depression, and other mood disorders, according to a new study that questions how pain is treated in this vulnerable population. People with mood disorders are at increased risk of abusing opioids, and yet they received many more prescriptions than the general population, according to an analysis of data from 2011 and 2013. “We’re handing this stuff out like candy,” said Dr. Brian Sites, of Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, the senior author of the study. Opioid prescribing in the U.S. quadrupled between 1999 and 2015, and during that time over 183,000 people died from overdoses related to prescription opioids, according to the CDC. Sites said more research is needed to understand whether opioids are being overprescribed to adults with mood disorders. “If you want to come up with social policy to address the need to decrease our out-of-control opioid prescribing, this would be the population you want to study, because they’re getting the bulk of the opioids, and then they are known to be at higher risk for the bad stuff,” he said. The study, published Monday in the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine, tapped a U.S. health survey that gathered data from providers and facilities on prescription medications, health status, and basic demographics for about 51,000 adults. It found that 19 percent of the 38.6 million Americans with mood disorders use prescription opioids, compared to 5 percent of the general population — a difference that remained even when the researchers controlled for factors such as physical health, level of pain, age, sex and race. © 2017 Scientific American

Keyword: Depression; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 23779 - Posted: 06.27.2017

/ By Rod McCullom Facebook has problem — a very significant problem — with the violent and gruesome content which has quickly found its way, in numerous instances, onto the social network and its Facebook Live feature, which was introduced to American users in January 2016. The disturbing litany of murders, suicides and assaults have already become macabre technological milestones. These include Robert Godwin Sr., the 74-year-old father of nine and grandfather of 14 who was selected by a gunman at random and then murdered in a video posted to Facebook in mid-April. One week later, a man in Thailand streamed the murder of his 11-month old daughter on Facebook Live before taking his own life. The beating and torture of an 18-year-old man with intellectual and development disabilities was live-streamed on the service in January, and the tragic shooting death of two-year-old Lavontay White Jr. followed a month later on Valentine’s Day. “At least 45 instances of violence — shootings, rapes, murders, child abuse, torture, suicides, and attempted suicides — have been broadcast via Live [since] December 2015,” Buzzfeed’s Alex Kantrowitz reported this month. “That’s an average rate of about two instances per month.” Copyright 2017 Undark

Keyword: Aggression; Robotics
Link ID: 23778 - Posted: 06.27.2017

Frances Perraudin A 90-tonne machine that will allow cancer patients to receive state-of-the-art high-energy proton beam therapy on the NHS for the first time is to be installed at a hospital in Manchester. The cyclotron delivers a special type of radiotherapy currently only available overseas. The NHS has been paying for patients to travel abroad for the treatment since 2008. A 90-metre (300ft) crane will be used to lower the machine into position at the Christie hospital on Thursday. It will sit in a bunker reinforced with 270 timber, steel and concrete posts. Proton beam therapy targets certain cancers very precisely, increasing success rates and reducing side-effects. It causes less damage to healthy tissue surrounding the tumour and is particularly appropriate for certain cancers in children, who are more at risk of lasting damage because their organs are still growing. The treatment came to national attention in 2014 when a police search was mounted after the parents of five-year-old Ashya King took him out of hospital against doctors’ wishes and travelled to the continent. The couple hoped to secure proton beam therapy to treat their son’s brain tumour, but doctors argued that the treatment would not increase the boy’s chances of recovery. © 2017 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 23777 - Posted: 06.27.2017

By THERESE HUSTON “Does being over 40 make you feel like half the man you used to be?” Ads like that have led to a surge in the number of men seeking to boost their testosterone. The Food and Drug Administration reports that prescriptions for testosterone supplements have risen to 2.3 million from 1.3 million in just four years. There is such a condition as “low-T,” or hypogonadism, which can cause fatigue and diminished sex drive, and it becomes more common as men age. But according to a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine, half of the men taking prescription testosterone don’t have a deficiency. Many are just tired and want a lift. But they may not be doing themselves any favors. It turns out that the supplement isn’t entirely harmless: Neuroscientists are uncovering evidence suggesting that when men take testosterone, they make more impulsive — and often faulty — decisions. Researchers have shown for years that men tend to be more confident about their intelligence and judgments than women, believing that solutions they’ve generated are better than they actually are. This hubris could be tied to testosterone levels, and new research by Gideon Nave, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania, along with Amos Nadler at Western University in Ontario, reveals that high testosterone can make it harder to see the flaws in one’s reasoning. How might heightened testosterone lead to overconfidence? One possible explanation lies in the orbitofrontal cortex, a region just behind the eyes that’s essential for self-evaluation, decision making and impulse control. The neuroscientists Pranjal Mehta at the University of Oregon and Jennifer Beer at the University of Texas, Austin, have found that people with higher levels of testosterone have less activity in their orbitofrontal cortex. Studies show that when that part of the brain is less active, people tend to be overconfident in their reasoning abilities. It’s as though the orbitofrontal cortex is your internal editor, speaking up when there’s a potential problem with your work. Boost your testosterone and your editor goes reassuringly (but misleadingly) silent. © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Attention
Link ID: 23776 - Posted: 06.26.2017

By Diana Kwon Across the animal kingdom, nearly all creatures sleep or display sleep-like states. The roundworm, Caenorhabditis elegans, does not sleep in a typical day-night cycle like humans and many other animals. Instead, these worms catch most of their z’s while transitioning from one larval stage to another, during a period called lethargus. When these creatures fall asleep, most of their neurons become inactive spontaneously, suggesting that sleep—at least in worms—is a passive state of the brain, according to a study published today (June 22) in Science. “The condition between sleep to wakefulness is probably one of the most drastic changes that our brains undergo,” says Manuel Zimmer, a neuroscientist at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology at the Vienna Biocenter in Austria. “How a brain can switch between such drastically different states is not really understood.” To investigate this process, Zimmer and colleagues examined the brains of C. elegans. These worms do indeed have primitive brains, yet their nervous system comprises only 302 neurons, making it much easier to tackle than, say, the human brain, with billions of neurons, or even the fly brain, which has around 100,000 nerve cells. Using transgenic worms engineered with a fluorescent indicator that becomes active in response to high calcium levels in neurons (a proxy for neural activity), the researchers imaged the C. elegans brain during the transitions between sleep and wake states by adjusting oxygen levels. Because these soil-dwelling creatures live among low levels of oxygen (10 percent), atmospheric oxygen concentrations (21 percent) induce hyperactivity and wakefulness. © 1986-2017 The Scientist

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 23775 - Posted: 06.26.2017

By Natalie Grover (Reuters) - A handful of drugmakers are taking their first steps toward developing marijuana-based painkillers, alternatives to opioids that have led to widespread abuse and caused the U.S. health regulator to ask for a withdrawal of a popular drug this month. The cannabis plant has been used for decades to manage pain and there are increasingly sophisticated marijuana products available across 29 U.S. states, as well as in the District of Columbia, where medical marijuana is legal. There are no U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved painkillers derived from marijuana, but companies such as Axim Biotechnologies Inc, Nemus Bioscience Inc and Intec Pharma Ltd have drugs in various stages of development. The companies are targeting the more than 100 million Americans who suffer from chronic pain, and are dependent on opioid painkillers such as Vicodin, or addicted to street opiates including heroin. Opioid overdose, which claimed celebrities including Prince and Heath Ledger as victims, contributed to more than 33,000 deaths in 2015, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Earlier this month, the FDA asked Endo International Plc to withdraw its Opana ER painkiller from the market, the first time the agency has called for the removal of an opioid painkiller for public health reasons. The FDA concluded that the drug's benefits no longer outweighed its risks. Multiple studies have shown that pro-medical marijuana states have reported fewer opiate deaths and there are no deaths related to marijuana overdose on record.(http://reut.rs/2r74Sbe) © 2017 Scientific American

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 23774 - Posted: 06.26.2017

By JANE E. BRODY It’s perfectly normal for someone to feel anxious or depressed after receiving a diagnosis of a serious illness. But what if the reverse occurs and symptoms of anxiety or depression masquerade as an as-yet undiagnosed physical disorder? Or what if someone’s physical symptoms stem from a psychological problem? How long might it take before the true cause of the symptoms is uncovered and proper treatment begun? Psychiatric Times, a medical publication seen by some 50,000 psychiatrists each month, recently published a “partial listing” of 47 medical illnesses, ranging from cardiac arrhythmias to pancreatic cancer, that may first present as anxiety. Added to that was another “partial listing” of 30 categories of medications that may cause anxiety, including, ironically, popular antidepressants like selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or S.S.R.I.s. These lists were included in an article called “Managing Anxiety in the Medically Ill” meant to alert mental health practitioners to the possibility that some patients seeking treatment for anxiety or depression may have an underlying medical condition that must be addressed before any emotional symptoms are likely to resolve. Doctors who treat ailments like cardiac, endocrine or intestinal disorders would do well to read this article as well lest they do patients a serious disservice by not recognizing an emotional cause of physical symptoms or addressing the emotional components of a physical disease. © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Stress
Link ID: 23773 - Posted: 06.26.2017

Rebecca Hersher The first problem with the airplane bathroom was its location. It was March. Greg O'Brien and his wife, Mary Catherine, were flying back to Boston from Los Angeles, sitting in economy seats in the middle of the plane. "We're halfway, probably over Chicago," Greg remembers, "and Mary Catherine said, 'Go to the bathroom.' " "It just sounded like my mother," Greg says. So I said 'no.' " Mary Catherine persisted, urging her husband of 40 years to use the restroom. People started looking at them. "It was kind of funny," says Greg. Mary Catherine was more alarmed than amused. Greg has early-onset Alzheimer's, which makes it increasingly hard for him to keep track of thoughts and feelings over the course of minutes or even seconds. It's easy to get into a situation where you feel like you need to use the bathroom, but then forget. And they had already been on the plane for hours. Finally, Greg started toward the restroom at the back of the plane, only to find the aisle was blocked by an attendant serving drinks. Mary Catherine gestured to him. "Use the one in first class!" At that point, on top of the mild anxiety most people feel when they slip into first class to use the restroom, Greg was feeling overwhelmed by the geography of the plane. He pulled back the curtain dividing the seating sections. "This flight attendant looks at me like she has no use for me. I just said 'Look, I really have to go the bathroom,' and she says 'OK, just go.' " © 2017 npr

Keyword: Alzheimers; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 23772 - Posted: 06.26.2017

Andrea Hsu Intuitively, we tend to think of forgetting as failure, as something gone wrong in our ability to remember. Now, Canadian neuroscientists with the University of Toronto are challenging that notion. In a paper published Wednesday in the journal Neuron, they review the current research into the neurobiology of forgetting and hypothesize that our brains purposefully work to forget information in order to help us live our lives. I spoke with Blake Richards, one of the co-authors of the paper, who applies artificial intelligence theories to his study of how the brain learns. He says that in the AI world, there's something called over-fitting — a phenomenon in which a machine stores too much information, hindering its ability to behave intelligently. He hopes that greater understanding of how our brains decide what to keep and what to forget will lead to better AI systems that are able to interact with the world and make decisions in the way that we do. We hear a lot about the study of memory. Is the study of forgetting a relatively new thing? Within psychology, there's a long history of work examining forgetting. So that's not a new field of study. But the neuroscientists — those of us who work with the biology of how the brain works — have not really examined forgetting much in the past. Generally, the focus for the last few decades in neuroscience has been the question of how do the cells in our brains change themselves in order to store information and remember things. It's only been in the last few years that there's been an upswing in scientific studies looking at what's happening inside our brains at the cellular level that might actually produce forgetting. © 2017 npr

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 23771 - Posted: 06.24.2017

By Sam Wong People who have had amputations can control a virtual avatar using their imagination alone, thanks to a system that uses a brain scanner. Brain-computer interfaces, which translate neuron activity into computer signals, have been advancing rapidly, raising hopes that such technology can help people overcome disabilities such as paralysis or lost limbs. But it has been unclear how well this might work for people who have had limbs removed some time ago, as the brain areas that previously controlled these may become less active or repurposed for other uses over time. Ori Cohen at IDC Herzliya, in Israel, and colleagues have developed a system that uses an fMRI brain scanner to read the brain signals associated with imagining a movement. To see if it can work a while after someone has had a limb removed, they recruited three volunteers who had had an arm removed between 18 months and two years earlier, and four people who have not had an amputation. While lying in the fMRI scanner, the volunteers were shown an avatar on a screen with a path ahead of it, and instructed to move the avatar along this path by imagining moving their feet to move forward, or their hands to turn left or right. The people who had had arm amputations were able to do this just as well with their missing hand as they were with their intact hand. Their overall performance on the task was almost as good as of those people who had not had an amputation. © Copyright New Scientist Ltd.

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 23770 - Posted: 06.24.2017

By Chris Brown, Chris Corday, All it took was a single beer for Murray's Shaw life to unravel. The moment came on a bike holiday in January 2016 in San Diego while he was with some friends from the Vancouver area. After almost 20 years sober, the community college instructor from New Westminster, B.C., cracked open a cold one at the end of a long ride. Fourteen months later, he died alone in a hotel room in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. Fentanyl overdose was the coroner's conclusion. "He wasn't making a choice with a rational mind. He was depressed and he was battling this impulse to use," said his wife, Sasha Wood, who offered to tell her husband's story to CBC News in the hopes it might help other families dealing with substance abuse issues. Fentanyl has become a scourge across the country, but B.C. has been hit the hardest: an average of four people have died of drug overdose every day in 2017. Wood said the events that led to Shaw's death illustrate much that's wrong with how the Canadian health care system treats those with an addiction. 'I just thought he could stop' Shaw had problems with alcohol in his 20s and got into trouble with the law. But Wood, 49, says he sought treatment and turned his life around. He stopped drinking completely, went to university and worked toward a PhD. ©2017 CBC/Radio-Canada.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 23769 - Posted: 06.24.2017

By KATIE THOMAS Nolan and Jack Willis, twins from upstate New York, and just 10 other boys took part in a clinical trial that led to the approval last fall of the very first drug to treat their rare, deadly muscle disease. Now the Willis boys are again test cases as a different type of medical question comes to the fore: whether insurers will cover the controversial drug, Exondys 51, which can cost more than $1 million a year even though it’s still unclear if it works. The boys’ insurer, Excellus BlueCross BlueShield, refused to cover the cost of the drug because the twins, who are 15, can no longer walk. Their disease, Duchenne muscular dystrophy, overwhelmingly affects boys and causes muscles to deteriorate, killing many of them by the end of their 20s. “I’m cycling between rage and just sadness,” their mother, Alison Willis Hoke, said recently, on the day she learned that an appeal for coverage had been denied. For now, the company that sells the drug, Sarepta Therapeutics, is covering the treatment’s costs, but Mrs. Hoke does not know how long that will last. The desperation in Mrs. Hoke’s voice reflects a sobering reality for families of boys with the disease since their elation last fall over the drug’s approval. Because the Food and Drug Administration overruled its own experts — who weren’t convinced the Exondys 51 had shown sufficiently good results — and gave the drug conditional approval, many insurers are now declining to cover it or are imposing severe restrictions that render patients ineligible. The story of Exondys 51 raises complex and emotionally charged questions about what happens when the F.D.A. approves an expensive drug based on a lower bar of proof. In practice, health insurers have taken over as gatekeeper in determining who will get the drug. © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Muscles; Movement Disorders
Link ID: 23768 - Posted: 06.23.2017

By Kat McGowan Doctors at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital could not figure out what was wrong with the 29-year-old man sitting before them. An otherwise healthy construction worker from Nicaragua, the patient was suffering from a splitting headache, double vision and ringing in his ears. Part of his face was also numb. The cause could have been anything—from an infection to a stroke, a tumor or some kind of autoimmune disease. The Emergency Department (ED) staff took a magnetic resonance imaging scan of the man’s brain, performed a spinal tap and completed a series of other tests that did not turn up any obvious reason for the swelling in his brain—a condition that is formally known as encephalitis. Most likely, it was some kind of infection. But what kind? Nineteen standard tests are available to help clinicians try to pin down the source of encephalitis, but they test for the presence of only the most common infections; more than 60 percent of cases go unsolved each year. Physicians looked in the patient’s cerebrospinal fluid (which surrounds the brain and protects it) for evidence of Lyme disease, syphilis and valley fever, among other things. Nothing matched. So the S.F. General ED staff settled on the most likely culprit as a diagnosis: a form of tuberculosis (TB) that causes brain inflammation but cannot always be detected with typical tests. Doctors gave the man a prescription for some steroids to reduce the swelling plus some anti-TB drugs and sent him home. © 2017 Scientific American,

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 23767 - Posted: 06.23.2017

by Laura Sanders When we brought our first baby home from the hospital, our pediatrician advised us to have her sleep in our room. We put our tiny new roommate in a crib near our bed (though other containers that were flat, firm and free of blankets, pillows or stuffed animals would have worked, too). The advice aims to reduce the risk of sleep-related deaths, including sudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS. Studies suggest that in their first year of life, babies who bunk with their parents (but not in the same bed) are less likely to die from SIDS than babies who sleep in their own room. The reasons aren’t clear, but scientists suspect it has to do with lighter sleep: Babies who sleep near parents might more readily wake themselves up and avoid the deep sleep that’s a risk factor for SIDS. That’s an important reason to keep babies close. Room sharing also makes sense from a logistical standpoint. Middle of the night feedings and diaper changes are easier when there’s less distance between you and the babe. But babies get older. They start snoring a little louder and eating less frequently, and it’s quite natural to wonder how long this room sharing should last. That’s a question without a great answer. In November 2016, the American Academy of Pediatrics task force on SIDS updated its sleep guidelines. The earlier recommendation was that babies ought to sleep in parents’ bedrooms for an entire year. The new suggestion softens that a bit to say infants should be there for “ideally for the first year of life, but at least for the first 6 months.” © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2017

Keyword: Sleep; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 23766 - Posted: 06.23.2017