Children Archives - Page 2 of 2 - Dr Amin Azhari

Being around children makes adults more generous

Adults are more compassionate and are up to twice as likely to donate to charity when children are present, according to a new study from Social Psychological and Personality Science.

Over eight experiments and more than 2,000 participants, the researchers asked adults to describe what typical children are like. After focusing on children in this way, participants subsequently indicated higher motivations towards compassionate values, such as helpfulness and social justice, and they reported greater empathy with the plight of other adults.

In a field study, which built on these findings, the researchers found that adult passers-by on a shopping street in Bath were more likely to donate to charity when more children were around relative to adults.

When no children were present and all passers-by were adults, a student research team from the University of Bath observed roughly one donation every ten minutes. But when children and adults were equally present on the shopping street, adult passers-by made two donations every ten minutes.

Release date: 05 May 2021
Source: University of Bath

Sugar not so nice for your child’s brain development

Children are the highest consumers of added sugar, even as high-sugar diets have been linked to health effects like obesity and heart disease and even impaired memory function.

However, less is known about how high sugar consumption during childhood affects the development of the brain, specifically a region known to be critically important for learning and memory called the hippocampus.

Release date: 31 March 2021

New research led by a University of Georgia faculty member in collaboration with a University of Southern California research group has shown in a rodent model that daily consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages during adolescence impairs performance on a learning and memory task during adulthood. The group further showed that changes in the bacteria in the gut may be the key to the sugar-induced memory impairment.

Release date: 31 March 2021
Source: University of Georgia

Public Health

Cardiorespiratory fitness improves grades at school

By confirming the link between children’s cardiorespiratory fitness and their school results, researchers at the UNIGE underline the importance of physical education classes at school.

Recent studies indicate a link between children’s cardiorespiratory fitness and their school performance: the more athletic they are, the better their marks in the main subjects – French and mathematics. Similarly, cardiorespiratory fitness is known to benefit cognitive abilities, such as memory and attention. But what is the real influence of such fitness on school results? To answer this question, researchers at the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland tested pupils from eight Geneva schools. Their results, published in the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, show that there is an indirect link with cardiorespiratory fitness influencing cognitive abilities, which in turn, influence school results.

Release date: 30 March 2021
Source: Université de Genève

Air Pollution Puts Children at Higher Risk of Disease in Adulthood

Children exposed to air pollution, such as wildfire smoke and car exhaust, for as little as one day may be doomed to higher rates of heart disease and other ailments in adulthood, according to a new Stanford-led study(link is external). The analysis, published in Nature Scientific Reports , is the first of its kind to investigate air pollution’s effects at the single cell level and to simultaneously focus on both the cardiovascular and immune systems in children. It confirms previous research that bad air can alter gene regulation in a way that may impact long-term health – a finding that could change the way medical experts and parents think about the air children breathe, and inform clinical interventions for those exposed to chronic elevated air pollution.

The researchers studied a predominantly Hispanic group of children ages 6-8 in Fresno, California, a city beset with some of the country’s highest air pollution levels due to industrial agriculture and wildfires, among other sources. Using a combination of continuous daily pollutant concentrations measured at central air monitoring stations in Fresno, daily concentrations from periodic spatial sampling and meteorological and geophysical data, the study team estimated average air pollution exposures for 1 day, 1 week and 1, 3, 6 and 12 months prior to each participant visit. When combined with health and demographics questionnaires, blood pressure readings and blood samples, the data began to paint a troubling picture.

Release date: 22 February 2021
Source: Stanford University

Mothers, but not fathers, with multiple children report more fragmented sleep

Mothers with multiple children report more fragmented sleep than mothers of a single child, but the number of children in a family doesn’t seem to affect the quality of sleep for fathers, according to a study from McGill University.

A total of 111 parents (54 couples and 3 mothers of single-parent families) participated in the study published in the Journal of Sleep Research led by McGill doctoral student Samantha Kenny under the supervision of Marie-Hélène Pennestri, Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational and Counselling Psychology.

Participants’ sleep patterns were studied for two weeks. Mothers with one baby reported having less interrupted and better-quality sleep than mothers with more than one child, although the total amount of sleep did not differ depending on the number of children. No difference was noted in fathers.

Release date: 12 January 2021
Source: McGill University

Covid-19

Elevated Biomarker Related to Blood Vessel Damage in All Children with SARS-CoV-2

Researchers at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) have found elevated levels of a biomarker related to blood vessel damage in children with SARS-CoV-2 infection, even if the children had minimal or no symptoms of COVID-19. They also found that a high proportion of children with SARS-CoV-2 infection met clinical and diagnostic criteria for thrombotic microangiopathy (TMA). TMA is a syndrome that involves clotting in the small blood vessels and has been identified as a potential cause for severe manifestations of COVID-19 in adults.

To assess the role of complement activation in children with SARS-CoV-2, the Immune Dysregulation Frontier Program, including co-senior authors Edward Behrens, MD and Hamid Bassiri, MD, PhD and co-first authors Caroline Diorio, MD and Kevin McNerney, MD, analyzed 50 pediatric patients hospitalized at CHOP with acute SARS-CoV-2 infection between April and July 2020. Of those 50 patients, 21 had minimal COVID-19, 11 had severe COVID-19, and 18 were diagnosed with MIS-C. The researchers used soluble C5b9 (sC5b9) as a biomarker for complement activation and TMA. sC5b9 has been implicated as an indicator of severity in TMA after hematopoietic stem cell transplant; transplant patients with markedly elevated sC5b9 have increased mortality.

The findings were published in Blood Advances.

Release date: 08 December 2020
Source: Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia

Busy Pictures Hinder Reading Ability in Children

Reading is the gateway for learning, but one-third of elementary school students in the United States do not read at grade level. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are exploring how the design of reading materials affects literacy development. They find that an overly busy page with extraneous images can draw the reader’s attention away from the text, resulting in lower understanding of content.

The results of the study are available in the September issue of the journal npj Science of Learning.

Release date: 28 September 2020
Source: Carnegie Mellon University

Children Use Both Brain Hemispheres to Understand Language, Unlike Adults

Infants and young children have brains with a superpower, of sorts, say Georgetown University Medical Center neuroscientists. Whereas adults process most discrete neural tasks in specific areas in one or the other of their brain’s two hemispheres, youngsters use both the right and left hemispheres to do the same task. The finding suggests a possible reason why children appear to recover from neural injury much easier than adults.

The study, published Sept. 7, 2020, in PNAS,

Release date: 7 September 2020

Source: Georgetown University Medical Center

Covid-19

Post-COVID syndrome severely damages children’s hearts

Multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C), believed to be linked to COVID-19, damages the heart to such an extent that some children will need lifelong monitoring and interventions, said the senior author of a medical literature review published Sept. 4 in EClinicalMedicine, a journal of The Lancet.

Release date: 4 September 2020

Source: University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio

Bilingual children may lose less brain matter as they grow up

Children and adolescents who speak more than one language may reach adulthood with more grey matter, according to a new study.

In a paper published in Brain Structure and Function, an international team of academics led by the University of Reading and Georgetown University looked at detailed scans of children’s and adolescents’ brains and found that bilingual participants had potential advantages of both grey and white matter than similarly-aged children who spoke only one language.

Release date: 2 September 2020

Source: University of Reading

Tag Archive for: Children