On her back in a dark tube, Blair Smith held still as a scanner combed her brain with magnetic waves. Words flashed by her eyes: tack, vase, hope, glow, vague, cade.

The 11-year-old had been told to press the button in her right hand if the word was real, the button in her left if it was nonsense. The answer itself was less important than the map the scanner would make of which areas of Blair’s brain lighted up when she struggled with a word.

The aim of the study, said Laurie Cutting, director of the Education and Brain Research Program at the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore, is to understand the neurological differences among students who are skilled readers, those who have difficulties and those with diagnosed learning disabilities.

If neuroscientists can pinpoint which parts of the brain are activated when a reader puzzles over an unknown word, they may eventually help teachers tailor reading instruction for individuals.

That is only the beginning. Many educators hunger for scientific data to help them structure their lessons, and neuroscience is beginning to offer them broad guidance about what works best.

One of the most startling recent revelations in neuroscience has been that the brain’s structure is much more flexible (a concept called neuroplasticity) than was previously thought; this understanding may help teachers find ways to train the brain to better solve math problems or understand a book.

“There’s an awful lot that neuroscience can begin to tell us in broad strokes that’s relevant for education and that ultimately 10 or 20 years downstream can provide us with prescriptive information,” said Robert Pianta, dean of the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education.

“I think we’re looking at a period of five years of very rich territory for investigation here.”

Complex conditions

Brain research already is opening the way to help teachers detect and address complex conditions — such as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, dyslexia and its mathematical cousin, dyscalculia — that defy blood tests and other simple medical diagnostics.

Cognitive scientists are developing a theory of “micro-development” that could turn some lesson plans upside down. Studies have found that, on a minute-to-minute basis, children and adults learn in fits and starts, often going backward. That could indicate that students should be allowed to grope their way to understanding — for instance, by being asked to power up a light bulb using a battery and a strand of wire before having the theory of electricity explained to them.

How the brain functions remains deeply mysterious, with studies seeming to unfold at a glacial pace. One expert noted that it took decades for researchers, examining data from brain and behavioral studies and other sources, to confirm the belief of many educators that focusing on phonics helps youngsters who struggle with reading.

Still, top educational institutions have recently shown new interest in the link between brain activity and education. Harvard University founded its mind, brain and education degree program in 2002. Johns Hopkins University this year briefed the Maryland State Board of Education on a neuro-education initiative that aims to “explore how current findings have application to educational practice.”

Better ways of teaching

A study published in the journal Nature last month reported a link between a primitive, intuitive sense of the size of numbers and performance in math classes, a finding that could lead to ways to identify young students who may have trouble with math and develop better ways of teaching them. Advocates of expanding pre-kindergarten classes point to studies that show the importance of early education in molding young minds.

Pianta, of the Curry School, said neuroscience has also influenced the education of autistic students.

“Twenty years ago, you might have seen an intervention that was far more oriented toward trying to get those kids to be affectionate, let’s say. Or the therapist in that case would be promoting physical contact with kids who didn’t like physical contact,” Pianta said. “Now we would look at that (response) as sort of saying this kid’s behavior is a result of their brain’s ability to process social, emotional information. You would structure your interactions with an autistic child so as not to overwhelm their capacity to process that information.”

Kurt Fischer, director of Harvard’s mind, brain and education master’s degree program, warned that many educational theories claim to be based on science but are not.

“One of the major problems we face is that there are a whole lot of things that claim to be ‘brain-based education’ that are nonsense,” he said. “One of them is the belief that boys and girls have totally different brains and learn totally differently. That’s not what the evidence shows. Not at all. The other is kind of a rigid idea of sensitive periods: that after a certain age you can’t learn a foreign language. You’ve also heard that there are left-brained and right-brained people. Total nonsense, unless they’ve had their left or right hemisphere removed. All of us use all our brains.”

Craving information

Another example Fischer cited is the widely held but dubious notion that listening to Bach in the bassinet will make babies smarter. Still, Fischer said, the popularity of such ideas shows that educators and the public crave scientific backing for classroom innovations.

At Kennedy Krieger, Cutting gave a nifty copy of her brain scan to Blair, her young research subject. The research team prepared Blair’s identical twin sister to go inside the tube for a new round of scans. They are both perfectly good readers, but the data from their studies might help others.

“Creepy but cool at the same time,” said Blair, an aspiring veterinarian. “It’s good because you help other kids.”

Source: Monterey County Herald, CA
http://www.montereyherald.com/health/ci_10913995

The University of Miami med school is one of the key research sites in a pioneering national study that will examine children’s health from birth to 21.

The University of Miami Medical School will be one of the primary research centers for a 25-year nationwide, pioneering study of children’s health, following potential mothers from before they’re pregnant to when their children reach 21.

The $3.4 billion National Children’s Study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, will track 4,000 children in four Florida counties — including Miami-Dade — and 100,000 nationwide. It will focus on 20 key children’s health issues, including autism, birth defects, heart disease, attention-deficit disorders and obesity.

”We believe it will be the largest study of pregnant women ever conducted — certainly in the United States,” said Dr. Peter Scheidt, director of the national study for the NIH. The NIH will create a national databank of health information on children.

”We won’t have to wait 21 years to benefit,” said Dr. Duane Alexander, director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. “We will release information at each step in the growth process, from pre-conception to 21.”

`THE WHOLE COUNTRY’

Dr. Steven Lipshultz, chairman of pediatrics at UM medical school and Florida principal investigator for the study, says the research will be more significant than the Framingham Heart Study, which has followed a Massachusetts town since 1948 and is seen as the basis for much of what is known about heart disease.

”That was just one Massachusetts town,” he said. “This will cover the whole country.”

Lipshultz estimates the study eventually will create up to 400 medical health jobs in Florida and $400 million of medical spending in Miami-Dade County. UM initially will receive $54.6 million from the NIH to lead the Florida portion of the project. UM will pay participants a range of fees, as yet undetermined.

Miami-Dade, Hillsborough, Orange and Baker are the counties in Florida that will participate in the study — there are 105 counties nationwide.

Lipshultz said he hopes the program can help lift Florida from its ranking of 50th out of 50 states and the District of Columbia in 13 child-health categories according to a May study by the Commonwealth Fund, a private group that studies healthcare issues.

Starting in 2010, if pilot efforts go well, UM researchers will recruit 4,000 families in the four counties.

”We will literally knock on 17,000 doors to get 1,000 children in Miami-Dade,” says Dr. Tracie Miller, associate chair of pediatrics at the UM med school and co-principal investigator of the study.

WATER SAMPLING

Other universities involved are Johns Hopkins University, Baylor College of Medicine, Michigan State University, Northwestern University, Tulane, the University of California at Los Angeles and Vanderbilt.

The studies will follow women from before they conceive, sampling the water they drink, the air they breathe, the schools, shops and workplaces in which they spend time.

Doctors, nurses and medical researchers will look into genetics and environmental factors; psychologists will trace brain development factors that might cause dyslexia, learning disorders, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Some of the key areas to be studied:

• Birth defects: Birth defects affect one in every 33 babies born in the United States each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They include heart defects, brain defects and spinal problems such as spina bifida. Birth defects account for more than 20 percent of infant deaths.

• Obesity: Studies by the Florida Governor’s Task Force on Obesity say 10 percent of Florida high school students and 11.5 percent of middle school students are overweight. They say 57.4 percent of Florida adults were overweight or obese, a 63 percent increase since 1986. Early blame was placed on lack of physical activity and poor eating habits.

• Heart disease: Reports by the Florida Department of Health say 39.7 percent of Florida residents said they had high cholesterol in 2005, up from 31 percent in 2001. The report said 26.9 percent engaged in no regular physical activity. And two-thirds of middle school students watched TV or sat at a computer screen for more than three hours a day.

• Autism: The CDC estimates that one in 150 8-year-old U.S. children has an autism spectrum disorder, making up about 560,000 individuals from birth to 21. The number is up from previous decades, possibly because a broader definition of ASD. Some parents believe, despite disagreement from many doctors, that autism might be associated with childhood vaccinations.

The CDC says it does not believe there is a connection.

Says Lipshultz: “There’s no substitute for data.”

Source: MiamiHerald.com
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/miami-dade/story/712697.html

I spent a good deal of my just-completed two-week working vacation on Cape Cod thinking about playing cards.

Not actually playing them, unfortunately — I have somehow failed to transmit my own childhood love of Spit and Gin Rummy to my daughters — but mulling over the degree to which accusing others of card-playing has become a very sorry national pastime.

I spent the first week thinking of Michael Savage, the hugely popular, widely syndicated host of the radio show, ”The Savage Nation,” who last month went on a tear, essentially accusing autistic kids (and their doctors and parents) of seeking undue sympathy, victim status, and services for a malady that is in most cases nothing less than a “fraud” and a “racket.” (If you’re feeling strong today, take a listen here.)

Then came the comments by Rick Davis, Senator John McCain’s campaign manager, that Barack Obama had “played the race card” by noting that Republicans appeared to be trying to suggest to voters that the Democratic candidate “doesn’t look like all those other presidents on those dollar bills.”

And finally, there was coffee with my niece, Margaret.

Margaret is an incoming senior at a large, suburban high school in the Midwest, who told me, one day, over a cranberry muffin, what it’s like to be applying to college in this particularly anxious admissions season.

She painted a bleak picture. Her classmates, she said disgustedly, seem to view the college admissions trials as an all out game of war, waged by combatants who are perennially flipping cards of gender, race, class, status and ethnicity, ready to cheat if they don’t like the luck of the draw. Some students, she noted, managed miraculously to discover their non-white ancestry just days before they had to check off their race on admissions forms. These same students had spent their junior years bashing Hillary Clinton for “playing the gender card” (the oft-repeated phrase.) They bewailed the terrible unfairness of a college application system that, they believed, gave unfair advantage to racial minorities and students from economically disadvantaged homes. Now they were racing to use any card they might have in their own decks — be it legacy status, or sports prowess, or family money enough to pay for the most edifying-sounding summer activities — to advance their own cause.

These were kids — mostly white, mostly comfortably middle- or upper-middle-class — who had grown up believing that they lived in a post-feminist, post-racial society. Who’d absorbed the ambient belief that measures like affirmative action, once put into place to address long histories of discrimination, were now little more than corrupt systems to be gamed.

They were truly their parents’ children, this much remarked-upon generation of non-rebels, kids who had internalized all their parents’ fears about their futures, and voiced those fears in the most unquestioning, un-self-aware ways. They were convinced of their own incipient victimhood: Because they were girls and everyone knew that college admissions were now weighted toward boys. Because they were boys and everyone knew that the whole system was biased toward girls. Because they were white and everyone knew that you can’t get in anywhere if you’re white. Or upper-middle-class.

To accuse someone of playing some sort of card — race, gender, or whatever — is to assume they’re trying to take unfair advantage and to assert that they have no genuine right to express a grievance or even to mere self-assertion. That such accusations have flowed so thick and rich in the past year of presidential campaigning and now circulate unquestioned among our next generation of college students, reflects two realities: one is the degree to which the meaning of the historical battle of America’s long-discriminated-against populations has been corrupted, and the other is the degree to which everyone seems to feel that the deck is stacked against them.

There’s a meanness that flows from this, and that airs itself most openly on the Internet and on our shock radio airwaves, whether in the rants of Rush Limbaugh or the sadistic sniping of Dr. Laura, or in the weird pride with which Savage has stuck to his guns on autism. And before you start equivocating, hemming and hawing that while autism is undoubtedly real, Savage may have a point about A.D.H.D. and the “cartel of doctors and drug companies” that he says push the diagnosis, tune in to how, one breath after bashing autism as a “fraud,” Savage took on the asthma card: ““For a long while we were hearing that every minority child had asthma,” he said. “Why was there an asthma epidemic among minority children? Because I’ll tell you why. The children got extra welfare if they were disabled and they got extra help in school. It was a money racket.”

I won’t dwell too long on this. I’ll just say that Savage is hardly alone in his views.

From where — other than ignorance — does all this ugliness spring? From a cultural moment when people feel locked in hand-to-hand combat, competing for an ever-shrinking stock of resources. The kids applying to college — in what promises to be, demographically, one of the toughest years ever — are feeling this whittling-away of the cultural pie most acutely. As a result, they’re particularly susceptible to the awful miserliness of spirit that accompanies periods of shortage.

Perhaps we shouldn’t judge them too harshly. Their mindset may be adaptive. When these kids graduate college, the economy may be even worse than it is today. If that happens, knowing how to play your cards right will be an even more valuable skill.

Source: New York Times, United States
http://warner.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/07/compassion-deficit-disorder/

Joint Attention and Social Competence, or what a baby pointing at a toy says about well-behaved toddlers

One of the key components of “normal” child development is social competence. We expect kids to become gradually better at behaving respectfully towards peers, to comply with requests made by others, to understand the thoughts of others, to play together with kids and adults, to sustain attention, and to be motivated to learn. But what makes the difference between a child who becomes socially competent and one who doesn’t? Obviously there are some risk factors, such as whether they have autism, whether both parents are present in the household, and the education and poverty level of the family. But some kids who seem to have all the advantages still have trouble getting along with others. Why?

Some studies have found that at-risk babies show some early warning signs that are associated with later poor social competence. It’s possible, for example, to measure several dimensions of “joint attention.” Take a look at this old picture of Jim and Nora playing with their kitchen set (…) Aside from the fact that they’re absolutely adorable, you can see that Jim is reaching for some utensils and Nora is following his reach and looking at the same thing. This is an example of Nora responding to joint attention. (I should add that it’s not the best example because the classic case would have Jim pointing, not touching an object — but it’s the best I could find right now, flying cross-country at 30,000 feet.)

From Jim’s perspective, he’s initiating joint attention — directing Nora’s attention to an object he’s interested in. (Again, not the best example of this since it’s not clear Jim wants to direct Nora’s attention to the object.) A third type of joint attention is initiating behavior requests, such as when an infant points to an object out of her reach in order to “ask” an adult to get it for her.

You might think that these different types of joint attention are all just manifestations of the the same phenomenon, but studies of at-risk children have found that different aspects of joint attention are associated with later social competence in different ways — which brings us back to our original question. Do typically developing kids also show the same warning signs in infancy?

Amy Vaughan Van Hecke and eight other researchers tracked 52 children from age 12 months until they were 30 months old. Initially the infants sat at a table on their parent’s lap. An experimenter across the table had a basket of toys. The experimenter spent 20 minutes systematically playing with the toys and pointing at objects in different parts of the room in ways that were designed to provide opportunities for the baby to demonstrate each type of joint attention.

The researchers then contacted tested each child again with different measures at 15 months old, 24 months old, and 30 months old. Their results matched the earlier studies of at-risk infants: there was no general relationship between joint attention and later communication skills or social competence. Instead, different types of joint attention predicted different results at different ages. For example, babies who had exceptionally high ability to initiate behavior requests at 12 months were more likely to be difficult to soothe at 15 months, but also more likely to understand more words at 24 months. Initiating behavior requests had no significant correlation with social competence at 30 months. But those who had high-level ability to initiate joint attention at 12 months, like Jim in the picture, were likely to be better able to express themselves in language at 24 months (but not comprehend more words). And this ability was the only joint attention skill that correlated significantly with social competence at 30 months.

So while there’s a clear relationship between some joint attention skills and social competence, it’s also clear that some joint attention skills are better than others. What this study doesn’t show is what causes joint attention skills themselves. Are we born with these skills, or do we learn them in early infancy?

It’s also important to note that even high-level initiation of joint attention at 12 months isn’t a perfect predictor of social competence at 30 months. Many babies who aren’t pointing to things at 12 months still end up being socially competent.

Source: ScienceBlogs
http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2008/07/joint_attention_and_social_com.php

Neuroscientists at MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory found that a previously unsuspected set of genes links nature and nurture during a crucial period of brain development.

The results, reported in the July 8 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), could lead to treatments for autism and other disorders thought to be tied to brain changes that occur when the developing brain is very susceptible to inputs from the outside world. Nature–in the form of genes–and nurture–in the form of environmental influences–are fundamentally intertwined during this period.

“Our work points to how a disorder can be genetic and yet be dependent on the environment,” said co-author Mriganka Sur, Sherman Fairchild Professor of Neuroscience at the Picower Institute and chair of MIT’s brain and cognitive sciences department. “Many genes require activity to be expressed and make their assigned proteins. They alter their expression when activity is altered. Thus, we reveal an important mechanism of brain development that should open up a window into the mechanisms and treatment of brain disorders such as autism.”

In the brain, some genes are only expressed, or turned on, in response to stimulus from the outside world. Like a panel of switches that turn lights on and off, genes that don’t receive electricity don’t “turn on” and express their particular proteins.

Sur and colleagues found a set of novel genes–including a calcium sensor called cardiac Troponin C, or cTropC–particularly sensitive to a critical period of development. The lack of proteins from these genes during a key phase of development could be one of the culprits in developing autism.

Researchers have long investigated the molecular mechanisms involved in monocular deprivation–when one eye is deprived of sight during a critical period of brain development, that eye becomes permanently blind, even after it is uncovered. This phenomenon is considered an important model for brain development because synapses for the covered eye–deprived of environmental stimulus, or what Sur calls “nurture”–shrivel up or get reassigned to other uses.

Sur and his colleagues looked at which genes are expressed, and which are not, when this phenomenon occurs. They hoped to pin down the correlation between nature–meaning the genes–and the external environment, or nurture. By identifying which genes are particularly apt to switch their expression patterns in response to “nurture,” the researchers potentially narrowed down the ones that may be implicated in developmental disorders.

Researchers believe autism spectrum disorders are tied to brain changes that occur during critical periods of development. Different but overlapping critical periods are thought to exist for various cognitive functions affected in autism, such as language and social behaviors.

“Autism is a strongly genetic disorder: genes set up risk factors but by themselves simply make proteins,” Sur said. “Genes work together with other influences. In the case of autism, these influences are unknown but could be molecules made by other genes or chemicals from the environment.”

If scientists understood how genes changed in response to environmental influences during this crucial developmental period, they might be able to one day prevent or reverse the changes.

In addition to Sur, authors are Alvin W. Lyckman, a former MIT postdoctoral associate now at Tufts University; MIT brain and cognitive sciences graduate students Sam H. Horng and Cortina L. McCurry; Picower Institute postdoctoral fellows Daniela Tropea and Audra Van Wart and colleagues from other institutions.

This work is supported by the National Institutes of Health and the Simons Foundation.

Source: Science Daily
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/07/080717211651.htm

Not long ago, giving children like Ryan a little room would have been routine. Parents of 2-year-olds who were barely saying single words, let alone simple two-word sentences, were reassured that the child would “outgrow it.” Speech therapy was reserved for severely disabled children, such as those with autism or cerebral palsy. But today toddlers who have what developmental specialists call “expressive language delay” are at the center of a heated debate over whether they need speech therapy. Research has shown that early speech and language disorders can lead to later difficulties learning to read, write and spell. As a result, some pediatricians and preschools have abandoned the wait-and-see attitudes and are recommending intervention for children whose language development raises red flags (…). “Now if we see a child faltering at all,” says Jean Mandelbaum, director of All Souls, a Manhattan nursery school, “we recommend an evaluation.” But others see speech-language therapy as unwarranted treatment for a problem that will likely clear up on its own. “It can get them talking a lot faster,” says Grover Whitehurst, a specialist in language delays, “but after a couple of years you can’t tell the difference between kids who had early intervention and kids who did not.”

No one knows why children like Ryan (the majority of late talkers are boys) don’t speak. “It’s often a big mystery,” says Patricia Walsh Kaye, a Manhattan speech-language pathologist. Hearing is an obvious suspect: even mild loss from ear infections can slow comprehension and thus the ability to speak. High-risk pregnancies involving drugs or alcohol interfere with normal brain development. Environment may play a role, too: some children do not speak because nobody speaks to them.

For parents, the mystery is less what caused the problem than how to know when it’s serious. There can be huge variability in speech and language development. By 18 months most children have a vocabulary of about 20 words. By 2 they’re forming two-word sentences (”Mommy juice”). What if the child is nowhere close to passing these milestones? If she shows good comprehension and uses gestures to communicate, she is probably still on target for language development, lack of words notwithstanding. Talking will almost certainly come soon. Doctors’ real concern centers on toddlers who do not understand simple questions or instructions.

Proponents of early intervention worry that kids who appear to be just delayed speakers may end up having more severe speech and language problems later. They’re also concerned that toddlers who are frustrated at not being able to express themselves could develop behavior problems. Denying treatment, they say, is not the answer. “I’d rather err on the side of putting a kid in therapy who might outgrow it,” says Pamela Rollins of the Callier Center for Communication Disorders in Dallas, Texas.

Not all would agree. It is difficult to tell, argue researchers, whether in the long run speech therapy actively helps or simply goes along for the developmental ride. One speech and language specialist, Rhea Paul at Portland State University in Oregon, found that of children under 2 who were not talking, about two thirds showed continued delays at 3. At 4, half did. But by kindergarten 75 percent of the children had caught up with their peers, scoring within the normal range-albeit at the low end-for language expression. “They are making slow progress all along,” says Paul. “It’s likely they will be able to function more or less OK by the time they get to kindergarten–even without intervention.”

The debate is far from over. In the meantime, Malinda Boyd is hoping Ryan will outgrow his problem–and that soon enough he’ll be talking her ear off.

Newsweek
http://www.newsweek.com/id/95361

“It is awful.” For La Trobe University psychologist Cheryl Dissanayake, there is no other way to describe the experience of telling young parents their toddler has autism.

But after an exhausting study in which she and her team have trained maternal health nurses to spot babies with signs of autism, she is finding she can identify the disorder at just 12 to 18 months rather than at three or four years old, as is more common.

Being able to intervene early with behaviourial treatment vastly improves the chances of minimising the effects. And now Dr Dissanayake has $2 million in research funding to expand her study into genetics and hormones to understand the causes of autism, which covers a complex spectrum of disorders such as Asperger’s syndrome, and pervasive developmental disorder.

One in 167 children in Australia suffers from some form of autism, with males four times likelier than females to be affected.

“You are giving the parents a life sentence, but I approach that now with a fair amount of optimism because the outcomes for the children and the family will be much better,” said Dr Dissanayake, of La Trobe’s school of psychological science.

In a dream come true for a researcher with a cause, Dr Dissanayake last week discovered she was getting double the research money she expected to establish the Olga Tennison Autism Research Centre at La Trobe University.

Named after chief benefactor Olga Tennison, whose family had first-hand experience with autism, the centre initially was being established on a $500,000 gift from Mrs Tennison, with La Trobe providing a further $500,000. But at the launch last week Mrs Tennison, widow of journalist Patrick Tennison, doubled the size of her gift, which was then matched by the university.

“If they can just get them early they can do a lot for them … but my ultimate aim is to try (to) find out what is happening,” she said.

Last week the federal Government allocated $190 million over four years to providing up to $12,000 worth of early intervention support for children aged six and younger diagnosed with autism. The Government was also offering Medicare rebates and plans to establish 150 playgroups for children with autism.

Autistic children tended to display a lack of social interaction and engagement with their environments.

“It is like they are living within themselves,” Mrs Tennison said.

The key to minimising the effects as the child grew was to tailor interaction to stimulate more normal brain development by adjusting the environment to stimulate neurological responses and to activate or switch off genes.

Researchers such as Cambridge University’s Simon Baron-Cohen, cousin of comedian Sacha Baron-Cohen, have speculated that autism may be an exaggeration or extreme manifestation of normal male brain development.

“We know from the way the brain develops and from genetics that you can alter outcomes for the child and minimise the effects of the disorder,” Dr Dissanayake said.

Essential to that was starting treatment as early as possible because young brains were more plastic.

Early intervention could make the difference between a child being able to speak or growing up almost mute.

Early treatment also helped by reducing the constant frustration that an autistic child felt at not being able to communicate.

It was this frustration, a so-called secondary manifestation of the disorder, that was partly the cause of the antisocial tantrums, sulking and tendencies toward self-harm.

Working with PhD student Josephine Barbaro, in 2006, Dr Dissanayake trained 241 maternal health nurses across 17 local areas in Victoria to identify autism in children at 12 to 18 months.

Of the 110 children referred to her, 80 per cent were shown to display autism, with the rest shown to be suffering from some lesser learning disorder. In a sign of the success of the training, only one child referred to Dr Dissanayake proved to be completely normal, if a little shy.

The study, funded by the Telstra Foundation, would be completed in October, but Dr Dissanayake said she was pushing state and federal governments to roll out such a learning program nationally.

Source: The Australian, Australia
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23953525-23289,00.html

Children are almost twice as likely to die before adulthood if they have a father over 45, research has shown.

A mass study found that deaths of children fathered by over-45s occurred at almost twice the rate of those fathered by men aged between 25 and 30.

Scientists believe that children of older fathers are more likely to suffer particular congenital defects as well as autism, schizophrenia and epilepsy. The study was the first of its kind of such magnitude in the West, and researchers believe the findings are linked to the declining quality of sperm as men age.

A total of 100,000 children born between 1980 and 1996 were examined, of whom 830 have so far died before they reached 18, the majority when they were less than a year old.

The deaths of many of the children of the older fathers were related to congenital defects such as problems of the heart and spine, which increase the risk of infant mortality. But there were also higher rates of accidental death, which the researchers believe might be explained by the increased likelihood of suffering from autism, epilepsy or schizophrenia.

Most research into older parents has, until now, focused on the risks passed on by older mothers. But the new study, published in the European Journal of Epidemiology, was adjusted to take account of maternal age and socio-economic differences.

The research also found higher death rates among children of the youngest fathers, especially those below the age of 19. However, the study said these differences were explained by the risks of teenage motherhood and poorer diet and lifestyle.

Previous research using the same data found that older men were four times as likely to father a child with Down’s syndrome, while other studies have found that the genetic quality of sperm deteriorates as men age.

More than 75,000 babies in Britain are born to fathers aged 40 and over each year, or more than one in 10 of all births. This includes more than 6,000 born to fathers aged 50 or over. The average age of fathering a child in this country is 32.

Dr Allan Pacey, senior lecturer in andrology – the medical specialty dealing with male reproduction – at the University of Sheffield, said: “A lot of people know that there are risks for the child that come from having an older mother, but children of older fathers also carry an increased risk. These sorts of results provide another good reason to have children early, when possible.”

Dr Pacey, who is secretary of the British Fertility Society, said scientists were unsure exactly what impact the ageing process had on the quality of sperm, making it impossible to detect defects before conception.

Dr Jin Liang Zhu, from the Danish Epidemiology Science Centre, which carried out the research, said: “The risks of older fatherhood can be very profound, and it is not something that people are always aware of.”

The mother’s age still has the bigger impact on child health, however. About one in 900 babies born to women under 30 have Down’s syndrome – a figure which reaches one in 100 by the age of 40. The number of over-40s giving birth in Britain each year has doubled in the past decade to 16,000. The risk of miscarriage rises sharply with age.

Source: Telegraph.co.uk, United Kingdom
http://tinyurl.com/4jl4jy

Why people continue to blame vaccines, despite evidence to the contrary.

As the brother of an autistic person and a brain scientist, I have been hoping that the increased focus on autism in the news would lead to a greater public understanding of this disorder. Instead, I am angry that this coverage is spreading dangerous myths.

My sister, Karen, is autistic. In the 1970s, my parents wondered why she behaved so differently. At the time, a prevalent idea was that an emotionally distant mother could somehow prevent a child from understanding emotions or relating normally to others. Our parents had a simpler idea, that they might have hurt Karen’s head during a bath.

Both these ideas are wrong. Autism is a neurological disorder, and its signs appear by the age of 1 or even earlier. It is highly inheritable. In identical twins where one is autistic, the chance that both are autistic is greater than 50-50. Even non-identical twins and siblings are at increased risk. In short, I dodged a genetic bullet. Now I worry about my daughter.

A link that isn’t there

Recently, celebrities such as Jenny McCarthy and other activists have taken to the airwaves to repeat the myth that autism is linked to vaccination. Although peer-reviewed scientific evidence overwhelmingly opposes their views, they have attracted attention. In a recent discussion on Larry King Live, three pediatricians invited to make the case for science were no match for McCarthy’s star power. Situations like this could mistakenly persuade parents to leave their children unvaccinated and vulnerable to contagious diseases.

Speculation about a vaccine-autism link began with a 1998 uncontrolled study of a few autistic children. But the conclusions were later retracted. Subsequent speculation focused on the compound thimerosal. But removing it from all routine childhood vaccines in the USA, Denmark, Sweden and Canada has not decreased autism rates.

What are McCarthy’s credentials? She is an actress and comedienne — with an autistic son. Her career took on new life after she wrote a best-selling pregnancy guide. Like all parents of autistic children, she wrestled with the question of what caused his disorder. She recalled that her son was vaccinated about the time his symptoms first appeared. Aha! That’s it. Here is an example of her reasoning: “I believe that parents’ anecdotal information is science-based information.”

How we’re wired

Although her concept of evidence is flawed, I don’t blame her. The error highlights how our brains are wired to think. Like the authors of the 1998 study, she concluded that two events happening around the same time must be linked. They used the principle that coincidence implies a causal link. But there was no coincidence for her son: He was born in 2002, after thimerosal was removed from vaccines.

The problem is compounded by “source amnesia,” in which people are prone to remember a statement without recalling where they heard it or whether the source was reliable. Presidential candidate John McCain might have fallen prey to source amnesia when he repeated the vaccine-autism myth last month. Recollection is more likely when the “fact” fits previously held views; parents might already dislike vaccinations based on their kids’ reaction to shots. But when it comes to a complex issue such as autism, such errors of reasoning hinder us from distinguishing real causes from coincidences.

Out of sight of the cameras, increased research funding is spurring efforts to find autism’s causes. Scientists are vitally interested in possible environmental influences. But the vaccine story is a dry well. Working on it further wastes valuable time and resources. It’s time to dig elsewhere.

As I watch my beautiful 10-month-old daughter grow, I wish that preventing autism were as simple as withholding a few injections. But along with my wife, a physician, I understand the vital importance of vaccination, not only for maintaining our baby’s health but also protecting our community from infectious diseases. Our daughter’s next shots are in two months.

Sam Wang is an associate professor of molecular biology and neuroscience at Princeton University. He is a co-author of Welcome to Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys But Never Forget How to Drive and Other Puzzles of Everyday Life.

Source: USA Today
http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2008/04/autism-myth-liv.html

A new project to study the brains of people with autism in unprecedented detail could finally pinpoint subtle neurological changes that underlie the disorder. Researchers will use an innovative set of tools developed to study gene expression to analyze exactly where early brain development goes awry.

“The technology now exists to be able to examine in fine detail the organization of brain cells–for example, whether brain cells have their proper number and position,” says Eric Courchesne, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego, who is leading the project. “This could provide a major insight into the cause of autism.”

Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by deficits in language and social behavior. While the brains of people with autism appear broadly normal, previous brain-imaging studies have revealed unusual growth patterns in very young children with the disorder. “It’s clear that in the first two years of life, the brain grows too large, too fast,” says Courchesne.

Scientists don’t yet understand the reason for the strange growth spurt–whether it’s caused by too many neurons in a particular part of the brain or a failure to prune extraneous neurons, a common occurrence in normal development. They hope that an unusual set of tools developed for the Allen Brain Atlas, a database of gene expression in the mouse brain, could finally yield clues.

To create the map, researchers at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, WA, painstakingly created a comprehensive set of DNA probes that highlight the expression patterns of individual genes. While previous studies have only been able to look at the expression of a handful of genes at a time, these probes can provide a wealth of information by revealing the expression of many genes simultaneously.

Researchers at the Allen Institute have been sifting through the toolbox for probes that can identify different cell types in the human cortex–the most recently evolved part of the brain. The team will use them to study the expression of approximately 25 genes in samples of postmortem brain tissue collected from very young children with autism. “This will give us a much clearer look at how things are disorganized, rather than just saying they are disorganized,” says Ed Lein, director of neuroscience at the Allen Institute.

The researchers will focus on the prefrontal cortex, an area in the frontal lobes involved in higher-order social and emotional communication, and one of the brain regions most affected by abnormal early overgrowth. The DNA probes will allow researchers to compare the location and organization of specific cell types, such as excitatory neurons that connect to brain areas outside of the cortex and inhibitory neurons that form local cortical circuits.

“It’s fundamentally important to identify the cause of that overgrowth,” says Courchesne. “It may help us understand how best to tailor interventions for autism, not just behaviorally, but for medical and chemical interventions down the road.”

The project will be the first to use the tools developed at the Allen Institute to study the neurobiology of human disease. The data will be made publicly available via the Web for other scientists to study, as data from the mouse brain study is now.

Source: MIT Technology Review, MA
http://www.technologyreview.com/Biotech/20557/