Mother and Child

A new study, which followed 180 pre-term infants from birth to age seven, found that babies who were fed more breast milk within the first 28 days of life had had larger volumes of certain regions of the brain at term equivalent and had better IQs, academic achievement, working memory, and motor function.                                 "Our data support current recommendations for using mother's milk to feed preterm babies during their neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) hospitalization. This is not only important for moms, but also for hospitals, employers, and friends and family members, so that they can provide the support that's needed during this time when mothers are under stress and working so hard to produce milk for their babies," says Mandy Brown Belfort, MD, a researcher and physician in the Department of Newborn Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital and lead author. Researchers stu...

Menopause--and the insomnia that often accompanies it --make women age faster, two new studies reveal. The work suggests these factors could increase women's risk for aging-related diseases and earlier death. The dual findings, respectively published July 25 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Biological Psychiatry, suggest these factors could increase women's risk for aging-related diseases and earlier death. "For decades, scientists have disagreed over whether menopause causes aging or aging causes menopause," said Steve Horvath, a professor of human genetics and biostatistics at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, and a senior author on both studies. "It's like the chicken or the egg: which came first? Our study is the first to demonstrate that menopause makes you age faster." "Not getting restorative sleep may do more than just affect our functioning the next ...

Tens of thousands of babies may be born with debilitating Zika-related disorders in the course of the outbreak sweeping through Latin America and the Caribbean, researchers said Monday.  Mathematical projections suggest about 93.4 million people may catch the virus — including some 1.65 million pregnant women-before the epidemic fizzles out, a team reported in the journal Nature Microbiology.  Eighty percent of people will develop mild symptoms or never even be aware they have the virus. But for babies in the womb Zika can be devastating-linked to a brain-damaging disorder called microcephaly that can lead to stillbirth or severely disabling birth defects.  Among women in a high-risk early term of pregnancy, anything between one and 13 percent have foetuses develop microcephaly or other Zika-related complications, said the multidisciplinary research team from the United States, Britain and Sweden.  This meant “somewhere on the order of tens of thousa...

A new study of toddlers has found that the presence of background noise in home or at school can make learning new words more difficult for children. Conducted at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the research appears in the journal Child Development. "Learning words is an important skill that provides a foundation for children's ability to achieve academically," notes Brianna McMillan, doctoral student in psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who led the study. "Modern homes are filled with noisy distractions such as TV, radio, and people talking that could affect how children learn words at early ages. Our study suggests that adults should be aware of the amount of background speech in the environment when they're interacting with young children." Studies on the impact of environmental noise suggest that too much noise can affect children both cognitively and psycho-physiologically, as seen in more negative school performance...

High energy sound waves could treat a potentially deadly complication that affects some twin pregnancies, says new research. The early-stage feasibility study involving sheep suggests High Intensity Focused Ultrasound -- a technique already used for treating some cancers -- could help a condition called Twin-Twin Transfusion Syndrome (TTTS). It was conducted by researchers from Imperial College London and the University of Cambridge, with technology being developed at The Institute of Cancer Research, London. Twin-Twin Transfusion Syndrome occurs in around one in seven identical twin pregnancies, and leads to one baby growing much larger than the other due to abnormal blood vessels in the placenta. Some identical twins share a placenta, which provides the babies with equal amounts of oxygen and nutrients, carried in the blood. However in TTTS the shared placenta contains abnormal blood vessels that cause more blood to flow to one baby, leaving the other deprived of oxyge...

Boy babies are much more likely to experience potentially life-threatening outcomes at birth than girls, new research has confirmed. The research investigated data of more than 574,000 South Australian births over a 30-year period (1981-2011). The research, which investigated data of more than 574,000 South Australian births over a 30-year period (1981-2011), is the first population-based study of its kind in Australia to confirm the presence of differences in birth outcomes based on the sex of the baby. The research team -- involving the University of Adelaide's Robinson Research Institute, the University of Groningen in The Netherlands, and the Pregnancy Outcome Unit of SA Health -- evaluated the relationship between the babies' sex and adverse outcomes, such as pre-term birth, pregnancy-induced high blood pressure disorders, and gestational diabetes mellitus. The results will be published online in the journal  PLOS ONE . "The major conclusion of our study is...

A patch made from cryopreserved human umbilical cord may be a novel method for treating spina bifida in utero, according to scientists. A patch comprised of the donated outer layer of the umbilical cord from healthy newborns was used for the repairs. The surgeries were performed at Children's Memorial Hermann Hospital. "The promise of this patch is that the umbilical cord contains specific natural material called heavy chain hyaluronic acid/pentraxin3 that has regenerative properties," said Ramesha Papanna, M.D., M.P.H., lead author, assistant professor in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences at McGovern Medical School and maternal-fetal medicine specialist at The Fetal Center at Children's Memorial Hermann Hospital. "It allows the local tissue to grow in at the repair site instead of a healing by scar formation that occurs with traditional repair methods. This decrease in scar formation may help improve the spinal cord fu...

Children as young as 9 months-old prefer to play with toys specific to their own gender, according to a new study. The research suggests the possibility that boys and girls follow different developmental trajectories with respect to selection of gender-typed toys and that there is both a biological and a developmental-environmental components to the sex differences seen in object preferences. The paper, which is published in the journal of  Infant and Child Development , shows that in a familiar nursery environment significant sex differences were evident at an earlier age than gendered identity is usually demonstrated. The research therefore suggests the possibility that boys and girls follow different developmental trajectories with respect to selection of gender-typed toys and that there is both a biological and a developmental-environmental components to the sex differences seen in object preferences. To investigate the gender preferences seen with toys, the resea...

How long does the protection from a mother's immunization against influenza during pregnancy last for infants after they are born? A new study indicates that the vaccine's efficacy against influenza illness was highest when infants were 8 weeks or younger at 85.6 percent but decreased as the infants grew to 25.5 percent among infants 8 to 16 weeks and to 30.3 percent among infants 16 to 24 weeks. Marta C. Nunes, Ph.D., of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, and coauthors sought to answer that questions in an article published online by  JAMA Pediatrics . It's an important question because the incidence of influenza among infants is high and illness can cause hospitalizations and death. Also, current vaccines don't work well in infants less than 6 months of age and are not licensed for use in that age group. Infants born to women who participated in a randomized clinical trial of trivalent inactivated influenza vaccine (IIV3) when they...