People have been trying to figure out why we sleep for almost as long as we have been conscious of being awake, tossing and turning in the dark.

After a few restless nights, most of us can’t even think straight. We are less able to make sense of problems, make competent moral judgments or retain what we learn, even though studies show our brain cells fire more frenetically to overcome the lack of sleep. Lose too much sleep and we become reckless, emotionally fragile, and more vulnerable to infections and to diabetes, heart disease and obesity, recent research suggests.

Yet scientists probing the purpose of sleep are still largely in the dark. “Why we sleep at all is a strange bastion of the unknown,” said sleep psychologist Matthew Walker at the University of California in Berkeley.

One vital function of sleep, researchers argue, may be to help our brains sort, store and consolidate new memories, etching experiences more indelibly into the brain’s biochemical archives.

Even a 90-minute nap can significantly improve our ability to master new motor skills and strengthen our memories of what we learn, researchers at the University of Haifa in Israel reported last month in Nature Neuroscience. “Napping is as effective as a night’s sleep,” said psychologist Sara Mednick at the University of California in San Diego.

Moreover, slumber seems to boost our ability to make sense of new knowledge by allowing the brain to detect connections between things we learn.

In research published last April in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Dr. Walker and his collaborators at the Harvard Medical School tested 56 college students and found that their ability to discern the big picture in disparate pieces of information improved measurably after the brain could, during a night’s sleep, mull things over.

It is these patterns of meaning — the distilled essence of knowledge — that we remember so well. “Sleep helps stabilize memory,” said neurologist Jeffrey Ellenbogen, director of the sleep medicine program at Massachusetts General Hospital. (…)

Sleep is controlled partly by our genes. The difference between those of us who naturally wake at dawn and night owls who are wide-eyed at midnight may be partly due to variations in a gene named Period3, which affects our biological clock. Variations in that gene also make some people especially sensitive to sleep deprivation, scientists at the U.K.’s University of Surrey recently reported.

For many of us, though, sleeplessness is a self-inflicted epidemic in which lifestyle overrides basic biology. “In this odd, Western 24-hour-MTV-fast-food generation we have created, we all feel the need to achieve more and more. The one thing that takes a hit is sleep,” Dr. Walker said. On average, most people sleep 75 minutes less each night than people did a century ago, sleep surveys record. (…)

The expectation of a nap, however, is by itself enough to measurably lower our blood pressure, researchers at the Liverpool John Moores University in England reported in October in the Journal of Applied Physiology.

Indeed, regular nappers — working men who took a siesta for 30 minutes or more at least three times a week — had a 64% lower risk of heart-related death, researchers at the University of Athens reported last February in the Archives of Internal Medicine. (…)

Source: Wall Street Journal
http://tinyurl.com/yobeo9

Children should be banned from playing computer games until the age of seven because the technology is “rewiring” their brains, it has been claimed.

Bombardment of the senses with fast-pace action games is said to be causing a shortening of attention span, harming the ability to learn.

The concerns emerged as technology industry experts gathered this week at a special summit discussing the development of children at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Educational psychologist Jane Healy said research indicated that computer games fuelled the development of basic “flight or fight” instincts rather than considered reasoning.

She believes parents would be wise to keep children away from computer games until at least the age of seven to allow their brains to develop normally.

Researchers from the Joan Ganz Cooney Centre, which investigates the relationship between children, the media and technology, said the average age that US youngsters started to use electronic gadgets had fallen from just over eight to just over 6 1/2 since 2005.

The researchers looked at more than 300 products including computer games, toys, virtual worlds for children and supposedly educational software to be run on home computers. Of these, only two educational video games employed proven learning techniques. (…)

Source: NEWS.com.au, Australia
http://tinyurl.com/2u9dpk

Changing behavior works better than announcing intentions

The year you finally go to the gym, eat healthy, lose those last 10 pounds and just feel better all around.

So how come those New Year’s resolutions are often a distant memory by the time Valentine’s candy is hitting the shelves?

It isn’t all about sheer willpower. Sure, that helps, but so does planning ahead: You’ll likely have more success sticking to your plan if you change your environment or surroundings, says Wendy Wood, a psychologist at Duke University who studies habits.

“The behaviors you have practiced tend to be automatic or cued by the environment you are in, pretty directly, even though people think they’re making choices all the time,” said Wood, professor of neuroscience and psychology.

So, if you buy a doughnut every time you go to a coffee shop, find one that doesn’t sell them. If you tend to end up at the same fast-food joint on your way home from work, take another route.
Eat off smaller plates. Use smaller utensils and tall and thin glasses. Join the people who take the stairs instead of the elevator. Get the idea?

“You structure your environment so that new behavior will be cued,” said Wood. “Willpower isn’t something that is easy to maintain over time. That’s one of the reasons why resolutions are hard to keep.”

Alcoholics and addicts have long been counseled to avoid things, such as going to bars, that trigger cravings. But research indicates that environmental cues control much of the behavior in healthy people.

One of Wood’s studies found that people repeat well-practiced actions — like ordering from the same pizzeria — even if they no longer wish to do so. Another study found that college students were more likely to break their TV-watching habit if the television was in a different location.

The key: Figuring out what behaviors trigger bad habits and then replacing them with actions that cue good habits. Yes, this takes some willpower. But it’s still easier to do than to resist those same negative triggers time after time, says Wood. (…)

Source: Indianapolis Star, United States
http://tinyurl.com/22pvmb

Children who throw long, aggressive or frequent tantrums may be doing more than just showing mum and dad who is boss. They may be displaying early signs of a psychiatric disorder, a study says.

Tantrums are common among young children and are often a sign of hunger, illness or overstimulation, says a study by Washington University in St Louis.

But children who hurt themselves or others while throwing tantrums or who cannot calm themselves down may be diagnosed with depression or disruptive disorders such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or oppositional defiant disorder.

“I think parents to some degree should expect their children to have tantrums,” said the study’s lead author, Andy Belden, from the university’s medical school. “If they are having extreme tantrums consistently [and] if almost every time they are having a tantrum they are hurting themselves or other people, that is a valid reason to go and talk to your pediatrician.” (…)

The team devised five high-risk tantrum styles that could be associated with the development of psychiatric disorder. They included tantrums marked by: self-injury; violence towards others or objects; an inability to be calmed without help; a duration of more than 25 minutes; and a frequency of more than five times a day, or between 10 and 20 times a month.

Any of these behaviours would warrant a call to the doctor, Dr Belden said. Behaviour during a tantrum was only an indicator and did not necessarily prove the existence of a psychiatric disorder.

Source: The Age, Australia
http://tinyurl.com/2ubtmv

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

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

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

When he was in the throes of his worst tantrums, Daniel Fletcher would rip wallpaper off the walls at home and hit and kick anyone who came near him.

Once, he put his pet mouse in the microwave. On another occasion he jumped out of a moving car.

He was first diagnosed with Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) at the age of two, and just three years later the little boy was prescribed the amphetamine-like drug Ritalin.

The effect, says his mother Hayley, was a loss of appetite but no difference in his behaviour.

“So the doctor kept upping the doses until he was on six times the normal dose, yet he was still hyperactive.”

Eight months ago, Daniel, now 14, was put on Risperdal - an antipsychotic drug usually given to schizophrenics.

“It was as if my son had been replaced by a doped-up zombie,’ says Hayley, 35, who took him off it a month later.

“I could hardly wake him in the morning. It was as if all his personality was disappearing, like a patient in a mental institution.”

Last week, it emerged that around 8,000 British youngsters are being treated with this powerful tranquilliser and another, similar drug called Zyprexa - despite the fact that their dangerous side-effects range from diabetes to brain tumours.

Hundreds of thousands of others are still being prescribed Ritalin, an amphetamine-like stimulant which has the same effect as “speed” and cocaine, and which, according to new evidence from the U.S., doesn’t even work in the long-term.

Ritalin is a methylphenidate which acts in a similar way to cocaine by stimulating the central nervous system, which, paradoxically, can have a calming and focusing effect.

Scientists are unclear why it works in this way, although there is some evidence that the effect is achieved by the slow release of the hormone dopamine, which controls behaviour, attention and learning.

Recent findings also suggest that Ritalin can stunt growth as well as causing heart problems, insomnia and weight problems.

In the U.S., there have been 51 deaths among children and adults taking Ritalin since 1999.

According to the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency, 11 British children on Ritalin have died.

The cause of two deaths was heart-related: one had a heart attack, the other an enlarged heart.

One was recorded as a “sudden death”. One died of a brain haemorrhage; another of a swelling in the brain.

Two committed suicide, and the last died of neo-natal respiratory distress syndrome.

Not surprisingly, experts fear that inappropriate drugs are not only being used to control children’s behaviour, but are being massively over-prescribed to some children who are simply naughty.

ADHD, they say, is nothing more than a symptom of Britain’s time-poor society, where children of parents working long hours are cracking under the strain of family life.

There are criticisms, too, that some doctors dole out pills when therapy would be a safer option.

In the U.S., where one in ten children takes Ritalin and where doctors write two million prescriptions a month, the situation is even worse.

A growing body of experts is even questioning whether ADHD exists at all.

“As a society, we are quick to reach for a pill,” says David Healy, one of the world’s leading psycho-pharmacology experts, and Professor of Psychiatry at Cardiff University.

“There’s much less willingness on the part of the medical profession to say to parents: ‘You have an awkward child. You must discipline them.’

“So we prescribe pills instead.

“The drugs used to treat ADHD are the same as speed and cocaine.

“We react with horror to the idea that our kids would use such drugs, but don’t react about drugs such as Ritalin being given to them.

“There’s a risk that your child won’t grow as well.

“There are high risks that children will go on to use street drugs, too, because they will have grown used to their effects.”

Professor Healy says anti-psychotic drugs such as Risperdal were used in the Soviet Union to extract information from political prisoners.

“People who took them would tell anything to anyone,” he says.

“When you think about giving these drugs to kids, it’s a whole new ball game.”

Dr Tim Kendall of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, who is heading a team drawing up new NHS guidelines for ADHD, insists there is a place for drugs in treatment, but admits: “We have a situation where GPs prescribe anti-psychotics inappropriately.

“There is no real excuse for prescribing drugs which are associated with such severe side-effects.”

But even where Ritalin is used, Dr Kendall says guidelines do not make it clear when doctors should diagnose ADHD and when they should prescribe drugs.

“If you diagnose people loosely, you could end up with 16 per cent of the child population with ADHD.

“Under tight criteria, only 1.6 per cent would be diagnosed,” he says.

“A generous understanding would be to say that doctors have reached a point where they don’t know what else to offer, and they haven’t got the right support to help parents.”

Of course, the ADHD debate inevitably arouses enormous passions.

While some question the disorder’s very existence and say medicating has simply replaced good parenting, for others, the idea that “bad parenting” is behind their child’s problems is almost too much to bear.

Linda Shepherd, from Ipswich, whose son Zaque, 15, has been taking Risperdal since he was nine, describes the drug as a “life-saver”.

“Without it, he’s unmanageable,” she says. “It controls his ADHD and gives us both peace of mind.

“I know there are side-effects, but for me it’s a calculated risk.

“He’s put on a lot of weight and is now obese because the drug makes him hungry all the time, but I think that’s the lesser of two evils.”

A spokeswoman for ADDISS, the Attention Deficit Disorder Information & Support Service, which believes medication has a valuable role to play, says: “Every child needs a proper evaluation and a treatment programme tailored to their problem.

“It’s not one issue. It’s a collection of factors. The problem is that people don’t have access to comprehensive evaluation and treatment.

“But not giving them medication is worse.”

Although there is no consensus on what ADHD is and, if it exists, what causes it, there is no doubt it has become a fashionable diagnosis for a host of behavioural issues.

In 1993, just 3,500 prescriptions were written for Ritalin in Britain. By 1998, there were 26,500. Last year, around 250,000 prescriptions were handed out on the NHS alone.

Such figures are underpinned by a study in 1999, which appeared to confirm Ritalin’s benefits.

But eight years on, the original researchers have re-examined the children involved in the study and there is evidence the initial effects of Ritalin wore off after three years.

Ritalin was also found to stunt the growth of some of the children.

Professor William Pelham, of the University of Buffalo, New York, who was involved in the first study, says: “They had a substantial decrease in their rate of growth in terms of both height and weight.

“In the short-term, medication will help the child behave better.

“But in the long run it won’t. And that information should be made very clear to parents.”

Perhaps most disturbing, however, is the suggestion that ADHD is nothing more than the invention of pharmaceutical companies who have used clinical trials to create a disease that can be treated with their drugs.

Last year, the NHS spent £28 million on Ritalin alone.

Professor Healy says: “There is an active campaign by pharmaceutical companies to convince people that there’s adult ADHD.

“Adults having problems are being told they have adult ADHD and are being offered drugs for it.

“Pharmaceutical companies market these drugs aggressively. How can GPs refuse to prescribe a drug ‘clinically proven’ to work?”

It is hardly surprising, then, that parents encouraged to give drugs to their children, rather than face up to the causes of their behaviour, usually take the easy way out.

Hayley Fletcher, who lives with her husband Andrew and their son Daniel in King’s Lynn, Norfolk, remembers the moment her son’s psychiatrist handed her a prescription for Risperdal.

“You assume the experts know best,” she says. “But within a month, I knew something was terribly wrong.

“I couldn’t wake him in the mornings. It was as if my son was disappearing before my eyes.

“I did some research and found they give this brain-altering drug to adults in mental institutions.

“Why did they give it to my son?

“He has severe problems, there is no doubt about that, but I cannot agree with the philosophy that these children should be drugged up to the eyeballs so they cannot be a threat to society.

“That isn’t what I want for my son.”

Instead, Hayley persuaded Daniel’s doctor to change his medication to the weaker drug Concerta, a slow-release version of Ritalin, and improved his diet with natural produce and fish oils. She also removed him from his special school and teaches him at home.

“It’s been a very long, hard path,” she says, “but Daniel is a different boy. The difference is amazing.

“Initially, I trusted the doctors. But really all they are doing is turning these children into zombies.

“Now that Daniel is virtually drug free he is taking the supplement Eye Q Fish Oils as part of a trial, and it has made such a difference to his concentration levels.”

Her son’s story echoes that of Craig Buxton, 14, who featured on last week’s Panorama, which exposed the use of anti-psychotic drugs on children with behavioural problems.

Craig, who lives with his parents, Alan and Sharon, in Stoke-on-Trent, was given both Risperdal and Zyprexa.

“The effects were dramatic and awful,” says Sharon. “Within a month, he had started self-harming, cutting himself.

“Then he attempted suicide by cutting his wrist.

“He’s taking Concerta now, and is much more stable and happy.”

John Tyson, 39, a businessman from Yarm, Teesside, didn’t question the paediatrician who put his ‘ restless, bouncy, fidgety’ son John, now 15, on Ritalin two years ago.

“When it’s a doctor you just smile and nod,” he says.

“I knew nothing about the drug or how toxic it was. But things rapidly went downhill once John started taking it.

“He became aggressive and he couldn’t cope with the word ‘no’.

He became a horrible person. The doctors increased the dose and he turned into a monster.

He was headbutting walls and throwing things out of the window. The doctors said: ‘You need more Ritalin.’”

Eventually, Mr Tyson turned for help to the Cactus Clinic at the University of Teesside’s school of social sciences.

“Attention disorders are not diseases, but patterns of inappropriate behaviour,” says clinic manager Amanda Clarkson.

According to Mr Tyson, who cut gluten, wheat and dairy out of his son’s diet and gave him mineral supplements: “After six weeks, the benefits were noticeable.

“After three months, I knew I was getting my boy back. I think it’s wicked how children are being doped when there are alternatives.”

The treatment, however, is not free. Parents can pay up to £600.

Money well spent, according to Mr Tyson, but he says it should be available to all on the NHS.

For the time being, however, it seems the medical consensus is that drugs do have a place in controlling children’s behaviour, although next year could see dramatic changes.

NHS guidelines on ADHD and its treatment are being revised after concerns were raised that current treatment is not consistent.

The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence has spent two years investigating the disorder and its treatment and will deliver its preliminary findings in January.

Experts led by Dr Tim Kendall are looking at the criteria under which ADHD should be diagnosed and, if it exists, the best treatment.

Most likely, the guidelines will be aimed at reducing the over-prescription of drugs, while recognising their usefulness in extreme cases.

“We are looking at dietary interventions,” says Dr Kendall.

“There is some evidence that coal tar derivatives found in things such as diet colas increase hyperactivity.

“There is some evidence that fish oils improve things.

“There is evidence that education can help teachers deal better with hyperactive children, and that parent training programmes are helpful.”

The final NICE guidelines are not likely to be released until next summer.

Until then, the only winners are the pharmaceutical companies.

According to a spokesman for Janssen-Cilag, maker of Risperdal: “We don’t recommend the use of Risperdal for children.

“Doctors are free to prescribe the drugs they feel are most appropriate.”

Eli Lilly, U.S.-based maker of Zyprexa, says it has never promoted its use for ADHD.

And Novartis, which makes Ritalin, says: “Ritalin has a long record as a safe and effective medication.

“It is important that medication is only one part of a total treatment programme that should include psychological, social and educational measures.”

For parents and children still baffled by the ADHD debate, such words bring little comfort.

“I’m not sure my son ever had anything called ADHD,” says John Tyson.

“He just needed a bit of help. He didn’t need to be doped.”

Source: Daily Mail, UK
http://tinyurl.com/2bl6hc

Scientists have found that the brain development of children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is delayed but otherwise typical, according to a new study by researchers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Comparing brain scans of children aged 6 to 16 who had the common psychiatric disorder with scans of those who did not, researchers found that some areas in the ADHD brain — particularly those involved in thinking, attention and planning — matured an average of three years later than “healthy” brains, but otherwise followed normal patterns of development.

The results, which were published today in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), offer new insight into why kids usually seem to outgrow their ADHD, says Dr. Philip Shaw, who led the research team at the Child Psychiatry Branch of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). “It doesn’t mean we can just sit back and do nothing,” Shaw says, but the findings complement “what psychiatrists have been telling parents for years,” that most kids with ADHD do get better…

Aside from the timing of maturation, the brains of children with ADHD appear to develop the same way typical brains do, from back to front. “Do [kids with ADHD] have basically have the same sequence of brain development? That’s a yes,” says Shaw. “Do they completely catch up with other kids? That’s what we’re looking at now.” …

Though the new study may eventually help scientists identify why ADHD causes the brain to develop slower and how kids can get better sooner, Shaw says it won’t help doctors diagnose the disorder today. ADHD diagnoses still have to made through clinical evaluations, and for now, treatment still means the widely used psycho-stimulant drugs, like Ritalin, and behavioral therapy.

As doctors continue learning about the ADHD brain, however, more and more alternative treatments, such as attention training and psychotherapy, are gaining traction. Research shows that the brain is not static — that it can physically change with experience. Studies reveal that the brains of some piano players, for instance, are more developed in the areas responsible for finger movement, while in the brains of people who have practiced meditation long-term, the attention centers are physically larger than average…

Source: TIME
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1683069,00.html

Not all children can harness the full goodness of their mother’s milk.

Does breast-feeding a child boost its brain development and raise its intelligence? Only if the child carries a version of a gene that can harness the goodness of breast-milk, say researchers.

The results add to the ‘nature versus nurture’ debate over intelligence, by showing how the two effects can interact.

The question of whether people are born intelligent or made intelligent by their environment has been debated for decades. Research with identical twins separated at birth has shown that both genetics and rearing conditions are important in determining intelligence.

One of the important environmental effects seems to be breast-feeding. Children who are breast-fed generally perform better in IQ tests than do those fed on other types of milk. Researchers think that this might be because specific fatty acids found in human milk, but not in cow’s milk or infant formulas, improve brain development.

Avshalom Caspi and Terrie Moffitt, psychologists at King’s College, London, and their colleagues looked at the relationship between breast-feeding and intelligence to explore the possibility that in this case nature and nurture might be intimately linked…

Mother care

The result will help to settle the debate over whether breast-feeding is linked to intelligence because of the nutritional quality of the milk, or because mothers who breast-feed are the sorts of mothers who encourage child learning. “I think this research will settle that debate, or at the very least bring it near a close,” says epidemiologist Jean Golding at the University of Bristol, UK…

Source: Nature.com, UK
http://www.nature.com/news/2007/071105/full/news.2007.217.html