By Sam Wong It seems you can judge an athlete by their face – if they are a man, that is. Male athletes with a higher world ranking tend to be judged as more attractive by women, but there is no such trend among women. Several studies have previously reported a link between facial attractiveness and sporting performance in men, leading to suggestions that women respond to facial cues that reflect athletic ability in potential partners. Some have suggested this is because, in our evolutionary past, women might have benefited from choosing a partner with speed, skill and endurance. As a better hunter, the idea goes, he would have brought home more food, and he might pass on his fitness to their children. But these studies have been criticised, notably for only looking at men. They also tended to focus on team sports, therefore failing to isolate individual performance. To find more evidence, Tim Fawcett and colleagues at the University of Exeter, UK, collected photos of 156 men and women who competed at the 2014 Winter Olympics in the biathlon – an event combining cross-country skiing and shooting. Each athlete was rated for their facial attractiveness by members of the opposite sex, who didn’t know the purpose of the study. © Copyright New Scientist Ltd.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 23992 - Posted: 08.25.2017

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR Studies have shown that obese women give birth to larger babies who are at risk for obesity and other metabolic problems later in life. Some have thought that the reason may be that obese mothers, whose bodies are rich in nutrients, somehow “overfeed” the fetus during gestation. A new study has found that this is unlikely. The study, in PLOS Medicine, looked at more than 10,000 mother-child pairs, following their offspring into early adulthood. Researchers had data on body mass index, education, occupation and smoking behavior for both mothers and fathers. They also did tests for 153 metabolic traits in the children, including levels of fats in the blood. They found that both maternal and paternal B.M.I. were associated strongly with the metabolic traits of their children. Since paternal B.M.I. cannot affect the fetus during its development, this suggests that familial traits, rather than any “programming” of the fetus in the womb, are the explanation for metabolic abnormalities in the children of obese mothers. The senior author, Deborah A. Lawlor, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Bristol in England, said obesity in pregnancy is dangerous for many reasons. But the evidence that the mother’s weight alone determines her children’s future metabolic health is weak, and putting all the burden on the pregnant woman is not helpful. “The whole family should have a healthy weight,” she said. © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 23991 - Posted: 08.25.2017

By James Gallagher People with higher levels of lithium in their drinking water appear to have a lower risk of developing dementia, say researchers in Denmark. Lithium is naturally found in tap water, although the amount varies. The findings, based on a study of 800,000 people, are not clear-cut. The highest levels cut risk, but moderate levels were worse than low ones. Experts said it was an intriguing and encouraging study that hinted at a way of preventing the disease. The study, at the University of Copenhagen, looked at the medical records of 73,731 Danish people with dementia and 733,653 without the disease. Tap water was then tested in 151 areas of the country. The results, published in JAMA Psychiatry, showed moderate lithium levels (between 5.1 and 10 micrograms per litre) increased the risk of dementia by 22% compared with low levels (below five micrograms per litre). However, those drinking water with the highest lithium levels (above 15 micrograms per litre) had a 17% reduction in risk. The researchers said: "This is the first study, to our knowledge, to investigate the association between lithium in drinking water and the incidence of dementia. "Higher long-term lithium exposure from drinking water may be associated with a lower incidence of dementia." Lithium is known to have an effect on the brain and is used as a treatment in bipolar disorder. However, the lithium in tap water is at much lower levels than is used medicinally. Experiments have shown the element alters a wide range of biological processes in the brain. © 2017 BBC.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 23990 - Posted: 08.24.2017

/ By Eric Bender Physicians call it the 5,000-hour problem. If you have a common chronic condition such as cardiovascular disease or diabetes, the expert in charge of your health for almost all of your 5,000 waking hours annually is — you. And, frankly, you won’t always make the best choices. “The behavior changes that are necessary to address chronic disease are much more in your hands than in the doctor’s,” points out Stacey Chang, executive director of the Design Institute for Health at Dell Medical School in Austin, Texas. “To cede that control to the doctor sometimes is actually counterproductive.” “While there have been enormous advances in technology, there’s still a lot of work to be done with the science of habit formation.” With that in mind, a rapidly evolving set of new digital health tools is angling to help patients engage better with their own care. Wearable health monitors already on the market help to track heart rate, footsteps, or blood glucose levels; sophisticated home health sensors can report on weight and blood pressure; and phone apps can present key feedback and maybe even offer personalized advice. The only problem: It has thus far proved very difficult to know what really works. Indeed, despite a veritable avalanche of “digital health” products, from Fitbits to telehealth heart sensors, and despite floods of data flowing both to the people who use them and to their physicians — and even despite clear evidence that many doctors very much want these new gadgets to work — there is still precious little clinical data proving that they are providing major patient benefits or delivering more cost-effective care. Copyright 2017 Undark

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 23989 - Posted: 08.24.2017

By Jessica Hamzelou People who use methamphetamine are almost five times more likely to have a stroke caused by a bleed in the brain, many of which are fatal. “We can add stroke to the list of terrible and devastating things that methamphetamine does,” says Damian Zuloaga, of the University at Albany, New York. Beyond the signature tooth decay known as “meth mouth”, methamphetamine also increases heart rate and blood pressure, and can trigger heart attacks. The drug can lead to psychosis, and has been linked to anxiety disorders, depression, and problems with movement similar to those seen in Parkinson’s disease. A handful of studies have also linked methamphetamine use to strokes. To explore further, Julia Lappin and her colleagues at the Australian National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre in Sydney sifted through published research on the topic. The team specifically looked for research into people under the age of 45 – a group less likely to be affected by age-related causes of stroke. They assessed the results of 77 studies in total. Most of these studies were conducted in the US, where, in 2012, around 1.2 million people reported using methamphetamine in the past year. Several of the studies the team looked at reported that strokes are responsible for between one and five per cent of methamphetamine-related deaths. And other studies found that methamphetamine was to blame for between two and six per cent of all strokes caused by a blockage in the brain’s blood flow in under 45s. © Copyright New Scientist Ltd.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Stroke
Link ID: 23988 - Posted: 08.24.2017

By Matthew Hutson Engineers have figured out how to make antennas for wireless communication 100 times smaller than their current size, an advance that could lead to tiny brain implants, micro–medical devices, or phones you can wear on your finger. The brain implants in particular are “like science fiction,” says study author Nian Sun, an electrical engineer and materials scientist at Northeastern University in Boston. But that hasn’t stopped him from trying to make them a reality. The new mini-antennas play off the difference between electromagnetic (EM) waves, such as light and radio waves, and acoustic waves, such as sound and inaudible vibrations. EM waves are fluctuations in an electromagnetic field, and they travel at light speed—an astounding 300,000,000 meters per second. Acoustic waves are the jiggling of matter, and they travel at the much slower speed of sound—in a solid, typically a few thousand meters per second. So, at any given frequency, an EM wave has a much longer wavelength than an acoustic wave. Antennas receive information by resonating with EM waves, which they convert into electrical voltage. For such resonance to occur, a traditional antenna's length must roughly match the wavelength of the EM wave it receives, meaning that the antenna must be relatively big. However, like a guitar string, an antenna can also resonate with acoustic waves. The new antennas take advantage of this fact. They will pick up EM waves of a given frequency if its size matches the wavelength of the much shorter acoustic waves of the same frequency. That means that that for any given signal frequency, the antennas can be much smaller. © 2017 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 23987 - Posted: 08.23.2017

By Alexander P. Burgoyne, David Z. Hambrick More than 60 years ago, Francis Crick and James Watson discovered the double-helical structure of deoxyribonucleic acid—better known as DNA. Today, for the cost of a Netflix subscription, you can have your DNA sequenced to learn about your ancestry and proclivities. Yet, while it is an irrefutable fact that the transmission of DNA from parents to offspring is the biological basis for heredity, we still know relatively little about the specific genes that make us who we are. That is changing rapidly through genome-wide association studies—GWAS, for short. These studies search for differences in people’s genetic makeup—their “genotypes”—that correlate with differences in their observable traits—their “phenotypes.” In a GWAS recently published in Nature Genetics, a team of scientists from around the world analyzed the DNA sequences of 78,308 people for correlations with general intelligence, as measured by IQ tests. The major goal of the study was to identify single nucleotide polymorphisms—or SNPs—that correlate significantly with intelligence test scores. Found in most cells throughout the body, DNA is made up of four molecules called nucleotides, referred to by their organic bases: cytosine (C), thymine (T), adenine (A), and guanine (G). Within a cell, DNA is organized into structures called chromosomes­. Humans normally have 23 pairs of chromosomes, with one in each pair inherited from each parent. © 2017 Scientific American

Keyword: Intelligence; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 23986 - Posted: 08.23.2017

By Madhumita Murgia CINCINNATI — Just before Christmas 2015, child psychiatrist Daniel Nelson noticed an unusual number of suicidal kids in the hospital emergency room. A 14-year-old girl with a parent addicted to opioids tried to choke herself with a seat belt. A 12-year-old transgender child hurt himself after being bullied. And a steady stream of kids arrived from the city’s west side, telling him they knew other kids — at school, in their neighborhoods — who had also tried to die. “I think there’s an increase in suicidal kids in Cincinnati,” Nelson told a colleague. “We need to start mapping this out.” So Nelson and his colleagues collected the addresses of 300 children admitted to Cincinnati Children’s Hospital with suicidal behavior over three months in early 2016, looking for patterns. Almost instantly, a disturbing one emerged: Price Hill, a poor community with a high rate of opioid overdoses, was home to a startling number of suicidal kids. “This is who is dying from opiates — people in their 20s and 30s. Think about what that population is,” Nelson said. “It’s parents.” Nelson says there may be a connection between the opioid epidemic and the increased risk of suicide in teenagers and children. (Luke Sharrett for The Washington Post) Now Nelson is working with county coroners across the nation to try to corroborate his theory, that trauma from the nation’s opioid epidemic could help explain an extraordinary increase in suicide among American children. Since 2007, the rate of suicide has doubled among children 10 to 14, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Suicide is the second-leading cause of death between the ages of 10 and 24. The suicide rate among older teenage girls hit a 40-year high in 2015, according to newly released data from the National Center for Health Statistics. © 1996-2017 The Washington Post

Keyword: Depression; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 23985 - Posted: 08.23.2017

By Helen Thomson Our brains seem better at predictions than we are. A part of our brain becomes active when it knows something will be successfully crowdfunded, even if we consciously decide otherwise. If this finding stands up and works in other areas of life, neuroforecasting may lead to better voting polls or even predict changes in financial markets. To see if one can predict market behaviour by sampling a small number of people, Brian Knutson at Stanford University in California and his team scanned the brains of 30 people while they decided whether to fund 36 projects from the crowdfunding website Kickstarter. The projects were all recently posted proposals for documentary films. Each participant had their brain scanned while taking in the pictures and descriptions of each campaign, and they were then asked if they would want to fund the project. When the real Kickstarter campaigns ended a few weeks later, 18 of the projects had gained enough funding to go forward. Examining the participants’ brain scans, the team discovered that activity in a region called the nucleus accumbens had been different when they considered projects that later went on to be successful. Prediction paradox The team trained an algorithm to recognise these differences in brain activity using scan data from 80 per cent of the projects, then tested the program on the remaining 20 per cent. Using neural activity alone, the algorithm was able to forecast which Kickstarter campaigns would be funded with 59.1 per cent accuracy – more than would be expected by chance. © Copyright New Scientist Ltd.

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 23984 - Posted: 08.22.2017

By RONI CARYN RABIN Many of us grab coffee and a quick bite in the morning and eat more as the day goes on, with a medium-size lunch and the largest meal of the day in the evening. But a growing body of research on weight and health suggests we may be doing it all backward. A recent review of the dietary patterns of 50,000 adults who are Seventh Day Adventists over seven years provides the latest evidence suggesting that we should front-load our calories early in the day to jump-start our metabolisms and prevent obesity, starting with a robust breakfast and tapering off to a smaller lunch and light supper, or no supper at all. More research is needed, but a series of experiments in animals and some small trials in humans have pointed in the same direction, suggesting that watching the clock, and not just the calories, may play a more important role in weight control than previously acknowledged. And doctors’ groups are taking note. This year, the American Heart Association endorsed the principle that the timing of meals may help reduce risk factors for heart disease, like high blood pressure and high cholesterol. The group issued a scientific statement emphasizing that skipping breakfast — which 20 to 30 percent of American adults do regularly — is linked to a higher risk of obesity and impaired glucose metabolism or diabetes, even though there is no proof of a causal relationship. The heart association’s statement also noted that occasional fasting is associated with weight loss, at least in the short term. “I always tell people not to eat close to bedtime, and to try to eat earlier in the day,” said Marie-Pierre St-Onge, an associate professor of nutritional medicine at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, who led the work group that issued the statement. Perhaps not surprisingly, the latest study found that those who supplemented three meals a day with snacks tended to gain weight over time, while those who ate only one or two meals a day tended to lose weight, even compared with those who just ate three meals a day. © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 23983 - Posted: 08.22.2017

By JANE E. BRODY A very slender friend recently admitted to me that she “can’t stand to be around fat people.” Her reaction is almost visceral, and it prompts her to avoid social and professional contact with people who are seriously overweight. Although she can’t pinpoint the source of her feelings, she said they go back as far as she can remember. And she is hardly alone. Decades ago, researchers found that weight-based bias, which is often accompanied by overt discrimination and bullying, can date back to childhood, sometimes as early as age 3. The prejudiced feelings may not be apparent to those who hold them, yet they can strongly influence someone’s behavior. A new study by researchers at Duke University, for example, found that “implicit weight bias” in children ages 9 to 11 was as common as “implicit racial bias” is among adults. The study’s lead author, Asheley C. Skinner, a public health researcher, said that prejudices that people are unaware of may predict their biased behaviors even better than explicit prejudice. She traced the origins of weight bias in young children and adolescents to the families they grow up in as well as society at large, which continues to project cultural ideals of ultra-slimness and blames people for being fat. “It’s pretty common for parents to comment on their own weight issues and tell their children they shouldn’t be eating certain foods or remark about how much weight they’re gaining,” Dr. Skinner said.

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 23982 - Posted: 08.22.2017

By Bianca Datta Hallucinations are often distressing—a suggestion that something is amiss in our brains. But new research suggests we’re all susceptible to hallucinations, and that may not be such a bad thing. In a paper released last week in Science, a team from Yale University set out to understand how we interpret the world around us—in short, how we determine what’s real and what’s not. They suspected that people who regularly hallucinate perceive the world based on what they expect to happen, while others, who don’t hallucinate, would rely more what their senses are telling them is happening in the world. Even healthy participants experienced conditioned hallucinations. The mechanism that causes auditory hallucinations is related to those used in normal perception. To determine that, authors Phil Corlett and Al Powers began by conditioning participants to hear a tone when they were shown a checkerboard pattern. Then they slowly removed the actual sound and asked people when they heard it. Participants who regularly heard voices were five times more likely to say they heard a tone when there wasn’t one, and they were 25-30% more confident in their choice. But they weren’t alone in hearing things. In fact, all of the participants experienced some induced hallucinations during the experiment. “I did not expect that people who did not have a psychotic illness would perform so similarly to people who did hear voices,” Powers says. “They were very, very alike.” © 1996-2017 WGBH Educational Foundation

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Hearing
Link ID: 23981 - Posted: 08.22.2017

Richard Harris It's always appealing to think that there could be an easy technical fix for a complicated and serious problem. For example, wouldn't it be great to have a vaccine to prevent addiction? "One of the things they're actually working on is a vaccine for addiction, which is an incredibly exciting prospect," said Dr. Tom Price, secretary of Health and Human Services. He was talking to reporters earlier this week, after the White House discussed the recommendations from a government commission tasked with suggesting ways to cope with the nation's opioid epidemic. Trump Says He Intends To Declare Opioid Crisis National Emergency But, as is so often the case, there's no quick fix on the horizon for an epidemic that is now killing more Americans than traffic accidents. Researchers have been working on vaccines against addictive drugs, including nicotine, cocaine and heroin, for almost two decades. "Like any other vaccine, you inject the vaccine and you use your immune system to produce antibodies," says Dr. Ivan Montoya, acting director of the division of Therapeutics and Medical Consequences at the National Institute on Drug Abuse. "In this case, the antibodies are against the drugs of abuse." © 2017 npr

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 23980 - Posted: 08.22.2017

By Abby Olena Our brains quickly characterize everything we see as familiar or new, and scientists have been investigating this connection between vision and cognition for years. Now, research in Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata) reveals that the activation of neurons in a part of the primate brain called the perirhinal cortex can cause monkeys to recognize new objects as familiar and vice versa. The study was published today (August 17) in Science. “There are a lot of really exciting aspects to this paper,” says neuroscientist David Sheinberg of Brown University, who did not participate in the work. “This group continues to make advances that are helping us understand how we convert visual impressions into things we know.” Primate brains process visual information through several brain structures that make up the ventral visual stream. The last stop in this stream is the perirhinal cortex, part of the medial temporal lobe. Scientists know that this brain structure plays roles in visual memory and object discrimination. But one open question is whether the perirhinal cortex represents objects’ physical traits or whether it might also communicate information about nonphysical attributes, such as whether an object has been seen before. “In the primate, the perirhinal cortex is the link between the visual pathway and the limbic memory system,” coauthor and University of Tokyo neuroscientist Yasushi Miyashita writes in an email to The Scientist. “Therefore, the perirhinal cortex is one of the most likely candidates in the brain where visual information is transformed to subjective semantic values by referring to one’s own memory.” © 1986-2017 The Scientist

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 23979 - Posted: 08.19.2017

/ By Steven Lubet There is a memorable episode in the now-classic sitcom Scrubs in which the conniving Dr. Kelso unveils a plan to peddle useless “full body scans” as a new revenue stream for the perpetually cash-strapped Sacred Heart Hospital. The irascible but ultimately patient-protecting Dr. Cox objects loudly. “I think showing perfectly healthy people every harmless imperfection in their body just to scare them into taking invasive and often pointless tests is an unholy sin,” he says. Undeterred, Kelso launches an advertising campaign that promotes the scans in a tear-jerking television commercial and a billboard screaming “YOU may already be DYING.” Alarmist medical advertising is pretty funny on television, but it can be far more troubling in real life. Although I’ve never been alerted to impending death, I recently received an advertisement from my own trusted health care provider warning that I may have Alzheimer’s disease, although I have no known symptoms and no complaints. As long-time patients at NorthShore University Health System, which is affiliated with the University of Chicago, my wife and I received two solicitations from its Center for Brain Health touting the development of “ways to slow brain aging and even prevent the onset of Alzheimer’s.” According to the ads, which arrived in both postcard and email form, there is “new hope for delaying — even preventing — aging brain diseases” through “genetic testing, advanced diagnostics, and lifestyle factors.” Copyright 2017 Undark

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 23978 - Posted: 08.19.2017

By Denise D. Cummins Looking directly at the camera, NPR's Skunk Bear host Adam Cole laments, "It's pretty clear that I'll never be able to have a real human-style conversation with an ape.” In his short and very entertaining video, Cole summarizes decades of research aimed at teaching apes human language, all of which, we are to understand, came to naught. But what the video actually shows us is how little the average person (and many scientists) understands about language. At one point, Cole tells his dog to sit, and the dog sits. This, he tells us, is not evidence that the dog knows English. But actually, it is. The dog's behavior shows us that he is capable of understanding the simple concept of sitting, that he is capable of distinguishing the verbal signal "sit" from other verbal signals, and that he is capable of connecting the two. This isn't rocket science, it isn't magic, and it isn't anthropomorphizing. It is just the way word learning works. In studies conducted at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, a border collie named Rico was taught the meanings of 200 words. He could even use theprocess of elimination to figure out unfamiliar words: If he already knew the word "ball,” and his trainer showed him a ball and a stick and told him to get the "stick,” he would bring the stick. He could remember new words even after a month of not hearing them. © 2017 Scientific American,

Keyword: Animal Communication; Language
Link ID: 23977 - Posted: 08.19.2017

Tina Hesman Saey Add a new ingredient to the sugar, spice and everything nice needed to make girls. A protein called COUP-TFII is necessary to eliminate male reproductive tissue from female mouse embryos, researchers report in the Aug. 18 Science. For decades, females have been considered the “default” sex in mammals. The new research overturns that idea, showing that making female reproductive organs is an active process that involves dismantling a primitive male tissue called the Wolffian duct. In males, the Wolffian duct develops into the parts needed to ejaculate sperm, including the epididymis, vas deferens and seminal vesicles. In females, a similar embryonic tissue called the Müllerian duct develops into the fallopian tubes, uterus and vagina. Both duct tissues are present in early embryos. A study by French endocrinologist Alfred Jost 70 years ago indicated that the testes make testosterone and an anti-Müllerian hormone to maintain the Wolffian duct and suppress female tissue development. If those hormones are missing, the Wolffian duct degrades and an embryo by default develops as female, Jost proposed. That’s the story written in textbooks, says Amanda Swain, a developmental biologist at the Institute of Cancer Research in London. But the new study “demonstrates that females also have a pathway to make sure you don’t get the wrong ducts,” says Swain, who wrote a commentary in the same issue of Science. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2017.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 23976 - Posted: 08.19.2017

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR A handful of walnuts may be an effective weight loss tool. Walnuts are rich in omega-3 fatty acids and other substances and, in moderation, have been linked to reduced risk of obesity and diabetes. They may also efficiently reduce appetite. Researchers now may have found out why. They had nine hospitalized obese patients drink, on five consecutive days, either a smoothie containing 48 grams of walnuts (1.7 ounces, or about 14 walnut halves and 315 calories) or a placebo smoothie identical in taste and calorie content. Then, after a month on their regular diet, the patients returned for a second five-day trial, with placebo drinkers on the first trial receiving a walnut smoothie, and vice versa. The participants underwent M.R.I. brain exams while looking at pictures of high-fat food (cake, for example), low-fat food (vegetables) or neutral pictures of rocks and trees. The study, published in Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism, found that when people looked at pictures of high-fat food, activation in the insula, a part of the brain involved in appetite and impulse control, increased among those who drank the walnut smoothie, but not among placebo drinkers. The study was funded in part by the California Walnut Commission. “Walnuts can alter the way our brains view food and impact our appetites,” said the lead author, Olivia M. Farr, of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. “Our results confirm the current recommendations to include walnuts as part of a healthy diet.” © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 23975 - Posted: 08.19.2017

Nicola Davis The eternal sunshine of a spotless mind has come one step closer, say researchers working on methods to erase memories of fear. The latest study, carried out in mice, unpicks why certain sounds can stir alarming memories, and reveals a new approach to wiping such memories from the brain. The researchers say the findings could be used to either weaken or strengthen particular memories while leaving others unchanged. That, they say, could potentially be used to help those with cognitive decline or post-traumatic stress disorder by removing fearful memories while retaining useful ones, such as the sound of a dog’s bark. “We can use same approach to selectively manipulate only the pathological fear memory while preserving all other adaptive fear memories which are necessary for our daily lives,” said Jun-Hyeong Cho, co-author of the research from the University of California, Riverside. The research is the latest in a string of studies looking at ways to erase unpleasant memories, with previous work by scientists exploring techniques ranging from brain scans and AI to the use of drugs. Published in the journal Neuron by Cho and his colleague Woong Bin Kim, the research reveals how the team used genetically modified mice to examine the pathways between the area of the brain involved in processing a particular sound and the area involved in emotional memories, known as the amygdala. “These mice are special in that we can label or tag specific pathways that convey certain signals to the amygdala, so that we can identify which pathways are really modified as the mice learn to fear a particular sound,” said Cho. “It is like a bundle of phone lines,” he added. “Each phone line conveys certain auditory information to the amygdala.” © 2017 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Emotions; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 23974 - Posted: 08.18.2017

By Ingfei Chen, Spectrum In October 2010, Lisa and Eugene Jeffers learned that their daughter Jade, then nearly 2 and a half years old, has autism. The diagnosis felt like a double whammy. The parents were soon engulfed by stress from juggling Jade’s new therapy appointments and wrangling with their health insurance provider, but they now had an infant son to worry about, too. Autism runs in families. Would Bradley follow in his big sister’s footsteps? "We were on high alert,” Lisa Jeffers says. “There were times I would call his name, and he wouldn't look.” She says she couldn’t help but think: Is it because he's busy playing or because he has autism? In search of guidance, the parents signed Bradley up for a three-year study at the University of California, Davis (UC Davis) MIND Institute, a half-hour drive from their home near Sacramento. Researchers there wanted answers to some of the same questions the couple had: What are the odds that infants like Bradley—younger brothers or sisters of a child with autism—will be on the spectrum too? Could experts detect autism in these babies early on, so that they might benefit from early intervention? The infant-sibling study at UC Davis is one of more than 20 similar long-running investigations across the United States, Canada and United Kingdom, the first of which began around 2000. These ‘baby sib’ studies, which collectively have followed thousands of children, are among the most ambitious and expensive projects in autism research. Many of the scientists who run them anticipated that by tracking this special population, they would be able to spot signs of autism before age 1, and ultimately create an infant screen for the condition. © 2017 Scientific American

Keyword: Autism; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 23973 - Posted: 08.18.2017