Oxford attorney Richard Scruggs and nationally known family counselor John Rosemond have something in common – they think the disease known as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder is bunk, but they’re taking different tracks to debunk attitudes about the so-called disorder.

Scruggs, who led the settlement between U.S. states and the tobacco industry in 1998, leads a lawyers group alleging in two lawsuits that the makers of the drug Ritalin conspired with psychiatrists to “create” the condition ADHD.

In a story last week by Reuters News Service, Scruggs contends that the health of more than 4 million children is at stake because they are taking a drug that they do not need.

Dr. Rosemond, whose column runs in the Daily Journal, has no stake in the lawsuit but is writing a book about what he calls “the ADHD scheme” with a nationally known pediatrician, who Rosemond says “has seen the light.”

“The symptoms are typical of toddlers, which is why I think the simple explanation is this: Postmodern – post 1960s – parenting practices are failing to resolve toddlerhood … it just goes on and on and on.”

The two lawsuits, filed in state court in Hackensack, N.J. and in San Diego federal court, name Swiss health care group Novartis AG, the American Psychiatric Association and nonprofit support group called Children and Adults with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder.

The suits seek class action status and billions of dollars in damages. The allegations are denied by both the company and the APA.

“The main complaint is that they (the defendants) have inappropriately expanded the definition of ADHD to include ‘normal’ children so that they can promote and sell more drugs and treat more people,” Scruggs said in a phone interview last week.

“These suits represent the latest class-action battleground in the U.S., but since it involves kids, this is that much more important,” he said to Reuters. “Ninety percent of all Ritalin is sold in the United States. We think it’s a pretty tough case to say that ADHD is a disease that doesn’t exist in Europe, but exits here.” (…)

The ADHD ‘scheme’

Rosemond told the Daily Journal he, too, looks at the ADHD “scheme” as a potential health hazard.

Recent brain scan evidence, he said, shows that the brains of ADHD kids were delayed three years when compared with the brains of normal kids.

“What the researchers neglected to tell the media – who got all excited about this – is that the ADHD kids in the research sample had been taking medication for at least three years,” the North Carolina family counselor noted. “A more reasonable interpretation of the data, therefore, is that Ritalin and the other drugs used to ‘treat’ something that isn’t a disease in the first place, cause delays in brain development.” (…)

Source: Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, MS
http://www.djournal.com/pages/story.asp?ID=262946&pub=1&div=News

Your children may have it all – but do they ever get your time?

The headline “Why time with mum and dad is best Christmas gift for children” accompanied stories based on a new guide from the Children’s Society on how to do things with your children over the holidays. Its research found that children consistently rate spending time with their parents as the No 1 priority over the festive period.

But many parents are so caught up in making Christmas memorable, with a ceaseless round of present and food shopping, that it becomes virtually impossible for them to give little ones the time they crave.

School, in some ways, provides the least of learning. Research by Susan Landry at the University of Texas has indicated that parents and family provide the most important developmental pushes. They establish a context for social learning and speed up the acquisition of language, cognitive skills and children’s ability to play on their own.

The secret is giving a child time and emotional encouragement. But rather than spending time with our offspring at Christmas, we tend to pack kids off for “activities” such as a bowling trip or some other “treat”.

Or we buy them computer games, which tend to require going solo.

Would it be better if we returned to the parenting style of our own youth, when activities meant sitting down and doing something with our children? Perhaps one of the reasons why the period between Christmas and the new year is so memorable for children is because they finally get important adults to themselves. The whole nation collectively chills out. (…)

Source: Times Online, UK
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/article3083653.ece

New evidence suggests our brains are hardwired before birth to recognize faces and places. But in contrast, the neural circuitry we use to recognize words develops mainly as a result of experience.

That’s according to new findings from the University of Michigan.

“There’s been a big debate about whether face recognition is a function we’re wired to perform for survival. This is the first study to look at that question using brain imaging in twins,” said psychology professor Thad Polk, the first author of a paper on the results that are published in the Dec. 19 edition of The Journal of Neuroscience.

Polk and his colleagues used functional MRI to examine brain activity in sets of identical and fraternal twins who viewed pictures of faces, houses, chairs, made-up words and abstract control images. Faces, houses, and words are known to elicit distinct patterns of activity in the brain’s ventral visual cortex, on the bottom of the brain, behind and around the ears. (…)

The brain circuits used to recognize chairs or made-up words were no more similar in identical twins than in fraternal twins. That suggests that the neural circuitry underlying these behaviors is not innate. Instead, that circuitry is primarily learned through experience, Polk said.

But in the face and house categories, the scientists saw a different story. The neural pathways used to process these images were more similar in identical than fraternal twins. This suggests that genes play a significant role in this type of brain function. Identical twins are genetic copies of one another. Fraternal twins are as genetically different as regular siblings.

These results cannot be chalked up to greater structural similarity in identical twins’ brains, the study says. If they could be, then the brain activity patterns for made-up words and chairs should also have been more similar in identical twins. They weren’t.

“Face and place recognition are older than reading on an evolutionary scale,” Polk said. “They are shared with other species and they provide a clearer adaptive advantage. It’s therefore plausible that evolution would shape the cortical response to faces and places, but not symbols such as words and letters.”

He said that this research could help scientists understand what’s innate and what is learned. “If we can figure out the extent to which the brain can change as a result of experience and what makes it change, we could potentially develop therapies for people with brain damage,” Polk said. When parts of the brain are damaged, other areas often compensate. (…)

Source: EurekAlert, DC
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-12/uom-tss121907.php

The prospect of the first treatment for thousands of sufferers of a severe form of autism is raised by a study published today.

The research suggests that a certain class of drugs could help reverse Fragile X syndrome, the most common inherited cause of mild to severe intellectual disability and marked attention deficits, as well as social, language, emotional and behavioural problems.

These drugs are not yet approved, but are expected to go into human safety trials in America next year. If shown to be safe on adults, they will be tested on children, who are expected to benefit the most.

Hopes of the first treatment flow from a study, published today in the journal Neuron, in which mice developed to mimic the severe disease had diverse symptoms corrected by tinkering with a single gene.

“These findings have major therapeutic implications for Fragile X syndrome and autism,” says lead author Prof Mark Bear, director of the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Autism is a catch-all term for a wide range of symptoms - usually marked by an inability to recognise and show emotions. Fragile X syndrome affects mostly boys at a rate of one in 4,000, with girls affected at half the rate and up to one-third of boys and young men with Fragile X qualify for having an autistic spectrum disorder.

Today’s work backs the theory that many of the severe symptoms - learning disabilities, autistic behaviour, childhood epilepsy - stem from too much activation of a protein that picks up messenger chemicals in the brain - the metabotropic glutamate receptor, known as mGluR5.

“I think this may be relevant for children with mild autism too,” Prof Bear told The Telegraph.

Fragile X and several other gene mutations that cause autism suggest that autistic behaviours may be linked to excessive manufacture of proteins in synapses, the junctions between brain cells. ” If this hypothesis is correct, therapies targeting mGluR5 could be helpful,” he says.

Fragile X is also marked by excessive and more spindly brain connections, memory loss, and changes to the growth and electrical properties of brain cells. “Remarkably, all these excesses can be reduced by reducing mGluR5,” said Prof Bear. (…)

Source: Telegraph.co.uk, United Kingdom
http://tinyurl.com/yt957q

Not long ago a Korean woman married to a Finn and living in Finland had an unusual experience in her adopted country. One day her child’s nursery school teacher suggested the three-year-old needed some testing. It seems the child was having a hard time following along in class. A pediatrician and a psychotherapist examined the child for a few days to check the child’s hearing, learning ability and development. The child, they decided, was a late developer and should be placed in the nation’s 14-year education system rather than the normal 12-year one.

▶In Finland, 500,000 people or one in five of the economically active population receive vocational training provided free by the state. A factory worker can register for a restaurant management course to learn cooking and restaurant management skills. Finnish people speak English more fluently than people in many other non-English speaking countries, though their official languages are Finnish and Swedish. TV stations even air programs in English. The Finnish government helps its people acquire as much knowledge and training as possible so that they can play a role as valuable citizens. (…)

▶Finland finished top in science, second in math and second in reading skills in the OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment, the results of which were released early this month. In fact, the country topped the overall list of world nations. It also topped the list in the first and second PISA surveys in 2000 and 2003. Finland also finished first in the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Index for three straight years from 2003 to 2005. Though it is a small country with a population of just five million, Finland has become a powerful and respected nation based on its robust human resources. (…)

Source: Chosun Ilbo, South Korea
http://english.chosun.com/w21data/html/news/200712/200712190002.html

Researchers at Duke University have demonstrated that monkeys have the ability to perform mental addition. In fact, monkeys performed about as well as college students given the same test.

The findings shed light on the shared evolutionary origins of arithmetic ability in humans and non-human animals, according to Assistant Professor Elizabeth Brannon, Ph.D. and Jessica Cantlon, Ph.D., of the Duke Center for Cognitive Neuroscience.

Current evidence has shown that both humans and animals have the ability to mentally represent and compare numbers. For instance, animals, infants and adults can discriminate between four objects and eight objects. However, until now it was unclear whether animals could perform mental arithmetic. (…)

Cantlon and Brannon set up an experiment in which macaque monkeys were placed in front of a computer touch screen displaying a variable number of dots. Those dots were then removed and a new screen appeared with a different number of dots. A third screen then appeared displaying two boxes; one containing the sum of the first two sets of dots and one containing a different number. The monkeys were rewarded for touching the box containing the correct sum of the sets.

The same test was presented to college students, who were asked to choose the correct sum without counting the individual dots. While the college students were correct 94 percent the time and the monkeys 76 percent, the average response time for both monkeys and humans was about one second. (…)

That monkeys and humans share the ability to add suggests that basic arithmetic may be part of our shared evolutionary past.

Humans have added language and writing to their repertoire, which undoubtedly changes the way we represent numbers. “Much of adult humans’ mathematical capacity lies in their ability to represent numerical concepts using symbolic language. A monkey can’t tell the difference between 2000 and 2001 objects, for instance. However, our work has shown that both humans and monkeys can mentally manipulate representations of number to generate approximate sums of individual objects,” says Brannon.

Source: EurekAlert, DC
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-12/dumc-mcp121407.php

(…) All year, researchers have danced on the grave of childhood. Hardly a week has passed without another report highlighting the grim lives of UK children; their innocence corrupted by celebrities, not to mention sinister psychologists conspiring with cereal manufacturers to fatten infants for an early grave. (…)

Such enemies are all the more plausible because some crises of childhood are real. Reading ability is dropping down the international scale, and mental health problems are increasing. So, when the National Union of Teachers is reported - as it was last week - to be warning that commercial exploitation is fuelling a rise in bullying, obesity and depression, everyone buys the message, no questions asked.

While demands that adverts for junk food and alcohol should be shown only after the 9pm watershed are sensible, constant assertions that the market is killing childhood are much more suspect. Adults always cite cultural bogeymen, often ones they don’t understand. The internet and electronic games, excellent in many ways for children’s development, are seen more often as potentially malign. (…)

The scaremongers are right, in one respect at least. Childhood is too commercialised, though not necessarily by the usual suspects. Last week, a report for the Sutton Trust showed that class divisions in the UK are as wide as they were 30 years ago. By the age of three, the average middle-class child has a 1,100-word vocabulary, whereas the average working-class one has 525 words. Long before GCSEs at the age of 16 or so, the rich but thicker child has overtaken the poor but clever one. Only 10 per cent of children from the poorest fifth of households get a degree, while 44 per cent of the richest fifth do so. And no wonder, when the all-in costs linked to a state education, from nursery through to graduation, are £47, 310.

One of the most welcome parts of Balls’s children’s plan is the renewed commitment to abolish child poverty by 2020. If that happens, and it will take some investment, then many ogres of childhood may melt away. Health, fitness and weight are all class issues. Obesity and heart disease are plagues of the poor. It is no accident that far more children are overweight in the UK, with its sclerotic social mobility, than in the fairer Nordic societies. As for loss of innocence, it’s not primarily about supermarkets selling Britney-style thongs to pre-teens, however nasty that may be. It’s about watching your mother being poor and ill and harassed, or seeing your father die too young because he was born in east Glasgow rather than Chelsea. It’s comforting for rich people to blame the Spice Girls for the woes of children, rather than confronting the truth: that kids are commodified by more than celebrity and possessions.

Governments tend to see children as investments. Money ploughed into their education is expected to pay quick dividends, reckoned up in tests and counted in league tables. Balls’s plan goes some way to dismantling this managerial framework and putting the emphasis back on being happy. (…)

As parents, we should read more stories to our children, spend more time with them and serve more broccoli. However vital, these aren’t a complete answer. Nor is commercial pressure the only problem. For poor children, in particular, the most insidious mirage is not the designer gear they can’t afford, the reality shows they will never win or the celebrities they will never be. It is the lives that they will never lead because this unequal society shuts the turnstiles before they are even born.

Narrowing social divisions is not just about better daycare, or producing schools to which all parents want to send their children. It’s also about recognising that a child’s worst enemy is not too much material wealth but far too little. Balls’s plan is not perfect. But, besides addressing poverty, it does at least focus on the unmeasurables, such as play and contentment, which bear no price tag or barcode. If that marks a shift towards establishing real values, then childhood for our young will be a better place.

Source: Guardian Unlimited, UK
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2228406,00.html

Remember when a toy was just something to play with? We knew children learned by playing but we weren’t hung up on it. Now the competition among toy manufacturers seems designed to encourage competition among parents to make sure their toddlers have a big edge on other toddlers before they reach the competitive world of kindergarten.

Nothing is just a toy anymore. “Encourages sensory explorations, develops fine motor skills, encourages gross motor activity, helps develop eye-hand co-ordination, visually stimulating” and that’s only a teether! Granted, it seems like a very nice and interesting teether, but I shudder a bit at the thought of Christmas future.

A toy to hang on the crib says “contributes to baby’s understanding of cause and effect, the link between baby’s actions and the resulting reaction: when she kicks the kick-pad with her feet (cause), she causes interesting activity in the aquarium (effect). An action that begins quite randomly gradually becomes intentional as she learns about her ability to make things happen. With practice, she learns that there is a link between the force of her kick and the motion she creates, so that when she kicks harder, the movement is stronger, causing the creatures in the water to bounce about more, and vice versa.” All true I’m sure, but by this time, I instinctively pledge to resist being sucked into over-analyzing toys and play.

(…) They have the most wonderful wooden blocks on-line (just Google wooden blocks for kids) but the block manufacturers don’t say “encourages sensory explorations, develops fine motor skills, encourages gross motor activity, helps develop eye-hand co-ordination, visually stimulating” even though blocks do all of that. They also stimulate the imagination (nobody tells you what to build); teach patience in dealing with life’s frustrations (when they all fall down); and provide opportunity for lessons in sharing and co-operation (helping build it again) and pacifism (it’s not nice to throw them at your sister). Block manufacturers need to get with the times. Grandmothers know about blocks, but a young mother might think she was not a good mother if she chose blocks instead of a laptop computer for her three-year-old.

Yes, they have laptop computers for three year olds, brightly coloured learning toys that I’d say are the very best thing if you want your children to get a head start on entertaining themselves while sitting down and moving nothing except their fingers. (…)

Source: ChronicleHerald.ca, Canada
http://thechronicleherald.ca/AtHome/998493.html

Starting in the late 1960s, Dr. Henry Morgentaler sacrificed the next 20 years of his life in a heroic struggle to win reproductive rights for women. Finally, in 1988, the Supreme Court’s historic Morgentaler decision repealed Canada’s abortion law completely. The law had resulted in unequal access and arbitrary obstacles for women seeking abortions, thereby violating their constitutional rights. One justice recognized the abortion decision as a highly personal one that was protected under a woman’s right to liberty and freedom of conscience.

After the law was struck down, access to abortion improved significantly, with legal clinics opening in several provinces. Canada’s abortion rate has since become moderate and stable, with numbers declining slightly in recent years. The lack of restrictions has also allowed abortions to be performed earlier and safer — 90% occur by 12 weeks of gestation, and less than 0.3% after 20 weeks gestation. The latter are done only under extreme circumstances, such as severe fetal abnormalities or life-threatening maternal health problems.

The fact that Canadian women and doctors act in a timely and responsible manner in the absence of criminal sanctions proves that no laws are needed to limit or regulate abortion. Such laws in other countries are based on patriarchal assumptions that women’s main role is to be mothers; women cannot make abortion decisions rationally or without coercion; and therefore, motherhood must be state-enforced. But pregnancies are often unwelcome or ill-advised for a wide variety of reasons. Women are independent beings with rights, and children and motherhood are both too valuable to ever be forced onto someone.

A wonderful legacy of the Morgentaler decision is Canada’s management of abortion, not as a crime, but as essential healthcare that saves and improves women’s lives. Our experience with no abortion law has become the envy of many people around the world. It’s a model we should proudly showcase and encourage other countries to emulate. (…)

Source: Canoe.ca, Canada
http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Features/2007/12/13/4723055-sun.html

Professor Simon Baron-Cohen reports on advances in helping children with autism to understand feelings

Autism comes by degrees. People with the milder form, Asperger’s syndrome, display communication difficulties and “obsessional” interests. In severe cases, however, it can be as if your child is locked in a glass bubble, staring vacantly past you as you desperately try to make eye-contact. (…)

WHAT ARE THE CAUSES?

According to a study in The Lancet last year, an estimated 1 per cent of the population lie somewhere on the autistic spectrum. This figure represents an increase over earlier ones but this rise is likely to be due to better diagnosis and awareness of the condition. Autism spectrum conditions result from alterations in brain development, affecting how an individual perceives, learns and communicates. The two main subgroups are autism and Asperger’s syndrome.

Using the latest brain scanning methods such as fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging), studies from labs in Cambridge and London, and confirmed in labs around the world, have revealed that certain brain areas are underactive in people with autism. The amygdala (sometimes thought of as the emotion centre) and the medial prefrontal cortex (involved in social behaviour) are underactive in people with autism spectrum conditions when they are trying to decode another person’s facial expression.

Studies from San Diego suggest that the autistic brain is also growing too fast in early childhood, and researchers in Carnegie Mellon University have found that different regions of the brain are not connected in the usual way. New work from Cambridge suggests that elevated testosterone levels in the foetus, in the second trimester of pregnancy, is associated with a greater number of autistic traits. This finding may help to explain why many more boys than girls develop an autism spectrum condition. In New York, researchers are experimenting with boosting levels of a different hormone, oxytocin. This is sometimes called the “love hormone”, as levels increase in intimate relationships. Elevated levels of the hormone are associated with being more trusting and better able to read emotional expressions. It may be relevant that women produce twice as much oxytocin as men.

Autism and Asperger’s syndrome run in families. If there is one child who has a diagnosis on the autistic spectrum, the likelihood of another child also having a diagnosis is about 5-10 per cent, which is higher than the general population rate. Molecular genetic studies are focused on identifying the key genes that might play a role in increasing the risk of a diagnosis. Studies of twins have established that it is not 100 per cent genetic, since even among identical twins, when one has autism, the likelihood of both twins having autism is only about 60 per cent. This means there must also be an environmental component, but what it is remains unknown. (…)

WHAT HELPS?

(…) The message is that a diagnosis of autism does not mean there is no hope for learning and development. Parents, therapists and teachers wanting to know which methods to try should visit a wonderful new website (www.researchautism.net) that provides impartial summaries of the evidence for or against a different method.

MYTHS ABOUT AUTISM

The MMR vaccination causes autism

There is no strong evidence for this claim. In Japan, for example, although the rates of autism were rising (as they have been worldwide), they continued to rise even after the withdrawal of the MMR public health programme.

Autism is caused by poor parenting

This idea has been disproved. Autism is found in families where other children have been raised successfully, and the fact that autism involves atypical neurological development from the earliest stage shows that it is not a reaction to parental behaviour. (…)

Source: Times Online, UK
http://tinyurl.com/yt8k6d