Researchers from University of California – Davis found that mothers who had fevers during their pregnancies were more than twice as likely to have a child with autism or developmental delay than were mothers who did not have a fever or who took medication to counter its effect.

“Our study provides strong evidence that controlling fevers while pregnant may be effective in modifying the risk of having a child with autism or developmental delay,” said Ousseny Zerbo, Ph.D., lead author of the study. “We recommend that pregnant women who develop fever take anti-pyretic (fever-reducing) medications and seek medical attention if their fever persists.”

The study is published online in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, and is believed to be the first to consider how fever from any cause, including the flu, and its treatment during pregnancy could affect the likelihood of having a child with autism or developmental delay.

Researchers analyzed data from a large, case-control investigation known as the Childhood Autism Risk from Genetics and the Environment (CHARGE) Study. Another recent study based on CHARGE data found that mothers who were obese or diabetic had a higher likelihood of having children with autism.

Dr. Irva Hertz-Picciotto, a professor of public health sciences at UC Davis and principal investigator of CHARGE, pointed out that fever is produced by acute inflammation — the short-term, natural immune system reaction to infection or injury — and that chronic inflammation, which no longer serves a beneficial purpose and can damage healthy tissue, may be present in mothers with metabolic abnormalities like diabetes and obesity.

“Since an inflammatory state in the body accompanies obesity and diabetes as well as fever,” said Hertz-Picciotto, “the natural question is: Could inflammatory factors play a role in autism?”

Typically, when people are infected by bacteria or viruses, the body mounts a healing response that involves the release of pro-inflammatory cytokines from white blood cells into the bloodstream. Some cytokines are able to cross the placenta, and therefore could reach the fetal central nervous system, potentially altering neurotransmitters and brain development.

“We definitely think more research is necessary to pinpoint the ways that inflammation could alter brain development,” said Hertz-Picciotto.

CHARGE includes an ethnically diverse population of children aged 2 to 5 years born in California and living in Northern California. The current study included 538 children with autism, 163 children with developmental delay but not autism, and 421 typically developing children whose mothers answered standardized questionnaires about whether they had the flu and/or fever during pregnancy and if they took medications to treat their illnesses.

Interestingly, the results showed that flu during pregnancy was not associated with greater risks of having a child with autism or developmental delay. Fever from any cause during pregnancy, however, was far more likely to be reported by mothers of children with autism (2.12 times higher odds) or developmental delay (2.5 times higher odds), as compared with mothers of children who were developing typically.

For children of mothers who took anti-fever medication, the risk of autism was not different from the risk in children whose mothers reported no fever.

According to Hertz-Picciotto, the results are noteworthy because of the study’s large population-based sample and detailed information on participants.

Prior discoveries from the CHARGE evaluations suggest that taking prenatal vitamins prior to and during the first month of pregnancy may help prevent autism and that living near a freeway or in areas with high regional air pollution is associated with higher risk of autism in children.

“CHARGE has obtained a wealth of environmental, demographic and medical information on young children and their parents and provides a solid basis for a variety of epidemiologic studies,” said Hertz-Picciotto. “Those studies are helping us find ways to protect childhood neurodevelopment.”

Source: University of California – Davis Health System

Pregnant woman photo by shutterstock.

This bipartisan domestic policy goes back to the George W. Bush administration, and has been endorsed by the Obama team. The policy followed research suggestions that healthy marriages equal a healthy society.

Researchers from Binghamton University, however, said the problem is that the initial research data that promoted the happy marriage/healthy society relationship was based on data gathered from white and middle-class marriages – and, when applied to poor couples or couples of color, the relationship between a happy marriage and societal improvements falls apart.

The study is published in the current issue of American Psychologist, the flagship journal of the American Psychological Association.

“Initially, the rationale for these programs came from policy makers and scholars, who homed in on the association between unmarried parents and poverty that is plainly obvious in the data,” said Dr. Matthew D. Johnson, associate professor of psychology at Binghamton University.

This association led Bush to make the promotion of healthy marriages a central plank of his domestic policy agenda, resulting in the implementation of the Healthy Marriage Initiatives (endorsed by Barack Obama).

“Unfortunately, the data on the success of these programs has started to roll in, and the results have been very disappointing,” Johnson said.

Johnson believes the problem lies in the fact that many of these programs lack grounding in solid science and are allowed to run unchecked. He cites research from two recent multi-site studies as evidence that many of the federal programs that promote healthy marriage need to be suspended – or at the very least, overhauled.

One of these studies focused on over 5,000 couples in eight cities. Researchers examined the benefits of interventions designed to improve the relationships of low-income, unmarried couples who were either pregnant or recently had their first child.

The results indicated that the interventions had no effect in six of the cities, small beneficial effects in one city, and small detrimental effects in another city.

The results of the other outcome study focused on 5,395 low-income married couples and found that those who received the intervention experienced very small improvements in relationship satisfaction, communication, and psychological health but no significant changes in relationship dissolution or cooperative parenting.

Moreover, the interventions didn’t come cheap, costing on average around $9,100 per couple.

Johnson believes different populations and resulting different priorities influenced the program outcomes. A main issue is that the best of these programs – the ones based on scientific findings – were initially studied with middle-class couples while the federal initiatives target poor couples.

And even if the research that formed the basis of these interventions does apply, relationship improvement just doesn’t seem to be a priority for poor couples.

“There is evidence that suggests poor women want to be married and understand the benefits of healthy marriages,” said Johnson.

“But earning enough for basic household expenses, keeping their children safe and working with their children’s overburdened schools are much more urgent concerns, making the idea of focusing on marriage seem self-indulgent if not irrelevant to many poor parents. When faced with a myriad of social issues, building intimate relationships is just not high on their priority lists.”

Johnson said that this doesn’t mean the federal government shouldn’t be funding intimate relationship research. Instead, the government needs to adopt a more multifaceted approach: focus on programs that will ease the stress of poor families and at the same time, fund more rigorous basic research.

“We just don’t have solid predictors for relationship satisfaction for poor couple and couple of color, let alone whether the current marriage models apply,” he said.

Johnson pointed to the National Institutes of Health as being the perfect place to coordinate and sponsor the research, noting “It has a long history of using scientific rigor in decision-making and it would certainly help in achieving the type of results that we’re looking for from these initiatives.”

Source: Binghamton University, State University of New York

Couple having an argument photo by shutterstock.

For many adults, the beauty of the popular movie Hunger Games is the absence of sex and profanity, a followup to the remarkable Harry Potter series. Nevertheless, these examples appear to be exceptions, not the rule.

In a study, Brigham Young University professor Sarah Coyne analyzed the use of profanity in 40 books on an adolescent bestsellers list.

Coyne discovered that on average, teen novels contain 38 instances of profanity. That translates to almost seven instances of profanity per hour spent reading.

Coyne was intrigued not just by how much swearing happens in teen lit, but who was swearing: Those with higher social status, better looks and more money.

“From a social learning standpoint, this is really important because adolescents are more likely to imitate media characters portrayed in positive, desirable ways,” Coyne said.

Coyne’s study will be published in the journal Mass Communication and Society.

While profanity in TV and movies has been studied extensively, this research is the first to examine it in the realm of books aimed at teens. Thirty-five of the 40 books – or 88 percent – contained at least one instance of profanity. One of them contained nearly 500.

That’s a far higher rate than what’s found in video games rated T (Teen), of which only 34 percent contain profanity. In a way, that’s comparing apples to oranges because books contain more words – also known as “opportunities to swear” in the academic literature.

The “darkness” in current teen fiction was recently debated on the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal. And the medical journal Pediatrics published research by Coyne in October that found a link between profanity in media and teen aggression.

“Unlike almost every other type of media, there are no content warnings or any indication if there is extremely high levels of profanity in adolescent novels,” Coyne said. “Parents should talk with their children about the books they are reading.”

Source: Brigham Young University

Teenager reading photo by shutterstock.

In the study, “In Defense of Parenthood: Children Are Associated With More Joy Than Misery,” researchers from the University of British Columbia, the University of California-Riverside, and Stanford University say that while the findings contrast sharply with popular beliefs, parenthood comes with “relatively more positives than negatives, despite the added responsibilities.”

The researchers also note that the study dovetails with emerging evolutionary perspectives that suggest parenting may be a fundamental human need.

“This series of studies suggest that parents are not nearly the ‘miserable creatures’ we might expect from recent studies and popular representations,” said University of British Columbia psychology professor Elizabeth Dunn.

Over three studies, the researchers tested whether parents are happier overall than their childless peers, if parents feel better moment-to-moment than nonparents, and whether parents experience more positive feelings when taking care of children than during their other daily activities. The consistency of their findings, based on data and participants in both the U.S. and Canada, provides strong evidence challenging the notion that children are associated with reduced well-being, the researchers said.

A key factor in that parental happiness is age and marital status, the researchers note.

“We find that if you are older — and presumably more mature — and if you are married — and presumably have more social and financial support — then you’re likely to be happier if you have children than your childless peers,” says co-author Sonja Lyubomirsky, a professor of psychology at UC-Riverside. “This is not true, however, for single parents or very young parents.”

Fathers, in particular, expressed greater levels of happiness, positive emotion and meaning in life than their childless peers.

“Interestingly, the greater levels of parental happiness emerged more consistently in fathers than mothers,” says Dunn. “While more research is needed on this topic, it suggests that the pleasures of parenthood may be offset by the surge in responsibility and housework that arrives with motherhood.”

The researchers also found that the stresses associated with single parenthood did not wipe out the greater feelings of meaning and reward associated with having children.

“We are not saying that parenting makes people happy, but that parenthood is associated with happiness and meaning,” Lyubomirsky says. “Contrary to repeated scholarly and media pronouncements, people may find solace that parenthood and child care may actually be linked to feelings of happiness and meaning in life.”

Source: University of British Columbia

Researcher Lenna Nepomnyaschy, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the School of Social Work, also found that 5-year-old children have increased cognitive skills when there is an informal agreement between the mother and father to provide some financial support.

“This is definitely a puzzling result that needs to be examined further,” said Nepomnyaschy. “Maybe these [court-directed] fathers are violent, have problems with drugs, spank the children, or have bad relationships with the mother. We don’t have a definitive answer.”

“We want to be careful and not say that formal support is bad,” said Nepomnyaschy, who worked on the study published in Social Service Review with researchers from the University of Wisconsin. “For most mothers it is hugely important. But it might not be working for all types of families.”

While previous research focused on how financial support affected the children of divorced parents, nearly 40 percent of children born today have parents who are not married, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. Never-married mothers represent the largest proportion of single-parent families in the United States, the researcher noted.

The latest research, which uses data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, indicates that for young children of unmarried parents an informal agreement between the mother and father — as well as the father being involved in the child’s life — might lead to a better emotional environment.

“One possible reason why children whose fathers provide informal support might be exhibiting better vocabulary, verbal skills and scholastic aptitude is that these fathers not only give money to the mother when they can, but they also come around and are more involved in the child’s life,” Nepomnyaschy said.

According to the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, only 20 percent of unmarried fathers not living with their children paid formal child support by the time the child was 3 years old, while 40 percent provided informal support. Many of these low-income fathers are out of work and struggling to make ends meet, Nepomnyaschy noted.

Researchers found that providing some informal support — more than $700 in two years — was associated with an increase in the cognitive skill levels of the children.

However, when these fathers were mandated to provide support through the courts, children who received low levels of formal support — below $1,800 over two years — exhibited more aggressive behaviors than children the same age who were not getting any formal support from their fathers.

Researchers believe that low-income fathers and mothers may prefer informal support because, in many states, if the mother is receiving food stamps or welfare, the support check paid by the father is kept by the state. Nepomnyaschy noted that informal support also often gives the father better leverage over visitation, child-rearing, and the ability to monitor how the money is spent.

“It is likely that unmarried mothers only go after formal support when their romantic relationship ends or when the father’s informal support stops,” she said.

She believes that more research is needed to determine whether these findings hold up as children get older.

“We may find that the importance of formal child support to a child’s well-being increases in the long term,” she said. “But it is important to look at how we incentivize these fathers to get involved in ways other than just providing formal support when these children are still young.”

Source: Rutgers

Research from Kristina Durante, Ph.D., assistant professor of marketing at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) College of Business, shows that hormones associated with ovulation influence women’s perception of men as potential fathers.

“Previous research has shown in the week near ovulation women become attracted to sexy, rebellious and handsome men like George Clooney or James Bond,” said Durante. “But until now it was unclear why women would ever think it’s wise to pursue long-term relationships with these kinds of men.”

In her first study, women viewed online dating profiles of either a sexy man or a reliable man during periods of high and low fertility. The women were asked to guess how much help they could expect from the men in caring for the baby and around the house. As the women got nearer to ovulation, they thought the sexy man would contribute more to these domestic duties.

“Under the hormonal influence of ovulation, women delude themselves into thinking that the sexy bad boys will become devoted partners and better dads,” said Durante. “When looking at the sexy cad through ovulation goggles, Mr. Wrong looked exactly like Mr. Right.”

In another study, women interacted directly with male actors who played the roles of sexy cad and reliable dad once during ovulation and again at low fertility. Again, ovulating women thought that the sexy cad — but not the reliable dad — would contribute more to childcare, but only if she were his partner.

“When asked about what kind of father the sexy bad boy would make if he were to have children with another woman, women were quick to point out the bad boy’s shortcomings,” said Durante. “But when it came to their own child, ovulating women believed that the charismatic and adventurous cad would be a great father to their kids.”

“While this psychological distortion could be setting some women up to choose partners who are better suited to be short-term mates, missing a mating opportunity with a sexy cad might be too costly for some women to pass up,” Durante continued. “After all, you never know if he could be the ‘one.’”

“Ovulation Leads Women to Perceive Sexy Cads as Good Dads” was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Source: University of Texas at San Antonio

Paul Shattuck, Ph.D., assistant professor at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, said that “[T]hirty-five percent of the youth with ASDs had no engagement with employment or education in the first six years after high school. Rates of involvement in all employment and education were lower for those with lower income.”

For the study, Shattuck examined data from the National Longitudinal Transition Study 2 (NLTS2), a nine-year study of adolescents who were enrolled in special education. The NLTS2 included groups of young people with ASDs, learning disabilities, intellectual disabilities and speech and language problems.

“Compared with youth in the three other disability categories, those with an ASD had significantly lower rates of employment and the highest overall rates of no participation in any work or education whatsoever,” Shattuck said.

“Those with an ASD had a greater than 50 percent chance of being unemployed and disengaged from higher education for the first two years after high school.”

Shattuck added that about 50,000 youth with ASDs will turn 18 this year in the United States.

“Many families with children with autism describe turning 18 as falling off a cliff because of the lack of services for adults with ASDs,” he said. “The years immediately after high school are key. They are the time when people create an important foundation for the rest of their lives.

“There needs to be further research into services for young adults with ASDs to help them make the transition into adulthood and employment or further education,” Shattuck said.

Shattuck noted that special attention should be paid to interventions that will aid financially disadvantaged youth to help them gain access to services and achieve fuller participation in society.

The study is published in the journal Pediatrics.

Source: Washington University in St. Louis 

This, they believe, may lead to a simple blood test able to make the same prediction.

Approximately one in seven women suffer from postnatal depression. It typically begins about two weeks after giving birth. The likelihood of a woman developing the disorder cannot be predetermined at present.

The better-known “baby blues” tend to be much milder and shorter-lived, the researchers said. Postnatal depression symptoms include sadness; changes in eating and sleeping habits; crying spells; reduced sexual drive; anxiety and irritability.

Dr. Dimitris Grammatopoulos, a professor of molecular medicine at the University of Warwick, presented the findings May 7 to the International Congress of Endocrinology/European Congress of Endocrinology.

The researchers twice assessed a group of 200 pregnant women using the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Score — once during their first prenatal visit to the clinic, and once two to eight weeks postpartum.

Women who developed depression were more likely to have specific genetic variants of the bcl1 and rs242939 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs)[2] of the glucocorticoid receptor and the corticotrophin-releasing hormone receptor-1 genes. Those receptors control an endocrine system, the hypothalamo-pituitary-adrenal axis, which is activated by stress.

“Although we knew already that there was an association of the HPA axis with depression, ours is the first study to show a link between specific elements of this pathway and the particular case of PND,” said Grammatopoulos.

“We now intend to conduct further research on other genetic variants of the HPA axis in a larger, multi-centre study” with women from other parts of England, he said.

Source: University of Warwick

Researchers at McMaster University of Canada found that one-year-old babies who participate in interactive music classes with their parents smile more, communicate better, and show earlier and more sophisticated brain responses to music.

“Our results suggest that the infant brain might be particularly plastic with regard to musical exposure,” said Laurel Trainor, Ph.D., director of the McMaster Institute for Music and the Mind.

Trainor and David Gerry, a music educator and graduate student, received a grant from the Grammy Foundation in 2008 to study the effects of musical training in infancy. In the recent study, babies and their parents spent six months participating in one of two types of weekly music classes.

One class involved interactive music-making and learning lullabies, nursery rhymes and songs with actions. Parents and infants worked together to learn to play percussion instruments and sing specific songs.

In the other class, infants and parents played at various toy stations while recordings from the Baby Einstein series played in the background.

“Babies who participated in the interactive music classes with their parents showed earlier sensitivity to the pitch structure in music,” said Trainor.

“Specifically, they preferred to listen to a version of a piano piece that stayed in key, versus a version that included out-of-key notes. Infants who participated in the passive listening classes did not show the same preferences. Even their brains responded to music differently. Infants from the interactive music classes showed larger and/or earlier brain responses to musical tones.”

The non-musical differences between the two groups of babies were even more surprising, according to the researchers.

Babies from the interactive classes showed better early communication skills, like pointing at objects that are out of reach or waving goodbye. These babies also smiled more, were easier to soothe, and showed less distress when things were unfamiliar or didn’t go their way.

The findings were published recently in the scientific journals Developmental Science and Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.

Source: McMaster University 

The results, based on nationwide surveys of nearly 120,000 U.S. teens, suggest prevention programs may need to be introduced in childhood and early adolescence, said James C. Anthony, Ph.D., of MSU’s Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics.

Getting out information on the risks of prescription painkillers has become all the more important. Earlier this year, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that the death toll from overdoses of prescription painkillers has more than tripled in the past decade.

“While much of the previous thinking was that misuse of these drugs emerged in the final year of high school and during the college-age years, we found that for adolescents the peak risk of starting to misuse these painkillers generally occurs earlier, not during the post-secondary school years,” Anthony said.

The researchers analyzed data from the 2004 through 2008 National Surveys on Drug Use and Health to identify when young people are most likely to start using prescription pain relievers to get high or for other unapproved uses.

The results show about 1 in 60 young people between 12 and 21 years old starts misusing prescription pain relievers each year. Peak risk is at about 16 years, when roughly 1 in 30 to 40 young people start to use painkillers to get high or for other reasons not intended by the prescriber.

“Getting a firm grasp of when the first onset occurs is very important when we try to take public health action to prevent first occurrence,” Anthony said. “With the peak risk at age 16 years and a notable acceleration in risk between ages 13 and 14 years, any strict focus on college students or 12th graders might be an example of too little too late.”

The results reveal a need to strengthen prescribing guidelines and introduce early school-based prevention programs, he said.

He added there also is an opportunity to work with pharmaceutical specialists who sometimes can reformulate these drugs so their effects are blunted when misused.

But it all starts with the prescription. He suggests prescribers should first try nonopioid pain relievers, such as ibuprofen, for kids. When opioid pain killers are prescribed for adolescents — or the drugs are in the reach of teens — the number of tablets should be limited or kept under lock and key, he advised.

“Patients in transient pain are often given a larger opioid prescription than is needed,” he said. “It can end up stacked in the medicine cabinet, available to anyone in or visiting the household.”

The study was published in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.

Source: Michigan State University

In their study, researchers from Ohio State University found that pre-pregnancy obesity was associated with a three-point drop in reading scores and a two-point reduction in math scores on a commonly used test of children’s cognitive function. The children were tested between the ages of 5 and 7.

Previous research has indicated that pre-pregnancy obesity can have a negative effect on fetal organs, such as the heart, liver and pancreas. This led the Ohio State researchers to try to find out whether a mother’s obesity also could affect the fetal brain.

“One way you measure the effects on the brain is by measuring cognition,” said Rika Tanda, lead author of the study and a doctoral candidate in nursing at Ohio State.

The research also supported findings in previous studies suggesting that several other conditions affect childhood cognition, including how stimulating the home environment is, family income, and a mother’s education and cognitive skills.

“The new piece here is we have a measure associated with the fetus’s environment to add to that set of potential risk factors,” said Pamela Salsberry, Ph.D., senior author of the study and a professor of nursing at Ohio State.

“If we have a good way to understand the risks each child is born with, we could tailor the post-birth environment in such a way that they could reach their maximum capabilities.”

The researchers used data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) 1979 Mother and Child Survey, a national sample of men and women who were 14-21 years old in December 1978. From that datas et, Tanda collected information on 3,412 children born to mothers who had been full-term births.

At the time of their interview, the children were between 5 and 7 years old and had no diagnosed physical or cognitive problems.

The researchers gauged the children’s cognitive function based on their performance on Peabody Individual Achievement Test reading recognition and math assessments.

The researchers calculated the mothers’ body mass index (BMI) based on their reported heights and weights. More than half of mothers had normal BMIs before pregnancy, and 9.6 percent were obese, meaning they had a BMI of 30 or higher.

While the score differences were small — just three points lower on reading and two points lower on math — they were important.

These effects of pre-pregnancy obesity were equivalent to a seven-year decrease in the mothers’ education and significantly lower family income, two other factors that negatively affect childhood cognitive function, according to the researchers.

Source: Ohio State University

Pregnant woman on couch photo by shutterstock.

“What surprised us was that we were seeing rates of problems at the same level as what we were seeing in the mothers,” said chief researcher Jan Nicholson, Ph.D., research director at Melbourne’s Parenting Research Centre. “That was a surprise. We simply haven’t looked for this before.”

Nicholson defined the baby blues as a condition which includes symptoms of anxiety, worry, stress, feeling unable to cope, feeling blue and despairing that things won’t get better.

The researchers examined mental health data of 5,000 new mothers up until their child turned 5 and at questionnaires returned by 3,471 of the fathers. In the child’s first year of life, 9.7 percent of fathers reported symptoms of postnatal depression compared with 9.4 percent of mothers—a statistically insignificant difference.

“We were able to determine that new fathers have a higher rate of these problems, a 40 percent higher rate, than men generally who are of a similar age and background,” Nicholson said.

Men with lower incomes were at a 70 percent higher risk and the younger the father the higher the risk.  Fathers with high levels of psychological stress when their children were infants were far more likely to still be reporting psychological difficulties when their children turned 2 and 4 years old.

Nicholson said the study emphasizes that it’s time to get rid of the idea that only young mothers get the baby blues.

“There’s often an assumption that with mothers their distress is related to biological changes, but also that early life services are very much geared around mothers and babies, and we really haven’t looked at fathers closely before to see what’s going on with them,” she said.

“We think that to the extent that we have services that are geared to supporting women, given that the rate is the same for men, we should be having similar efforts going into supporting men.”

The study is published in the journal Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology.

Source: Parenting Research Centre

Father with child photo by shutterstock.

“Post-term children have a considerably higher risk of clinically relevant problem behavior and are more than twice as likely as term-born children to have clinical ADHD,” said Hanan El Marroun, Ph.D., lead author of the study.

The study found a U-shaped association between gestational age at birth and behavioral and emotional problems in early childhood. This indicates that both preterm and post-term children are at higher risk for problems, the researcher says.

The study was embedded in the Generation R Study, a large population-based study based in Rotterdam. Pregnant mothers who were due to give birth between April 2002 and January 2006 were asked to participate by their midwives and gynecologists.

The researchers measured gestational age using ultrasound, a method thought to be superior to date of last period. Based on this measure, out of 5,145 babies, 382 (7 percent) were born post-term and 226 (4 percent) were born pre-term.

A standardized and validated behavioral checklist (Child Behavior Checklist, CBCL/1.5-5) was used to assess the children. At 18 and 36 months old, a questionnaire was sent to the mother and the father was also sent a questionnaire when the child was 36 months.

Several potential explanations were offered by the researchers for the increased problems, including a higher risk of perinatal problems known to be associated with larger babies.

Also considered was uteroplacental insufficiency, a situation in which an “old” placenta offers fewer nutrients and less oxygen than required by a full term fetus. This lack of nutrients and oxygen may lead to abnormal fetal development which, in turn, may lead to abnormal emotional and behavioral development, the researchers said.

Another explanation offered by the researchers was the potential disturbance of the “placental clock,” which controls the length of pregnancy and regulates the maternal and fetal hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA-axis).

It has been suggested that placental endocrine malfunctioning or maternal stress at critical times during fetal development may influence the fetal HPA-axis, leading to neuroendocrine abnormalities that could increase the child’s vulnerability to emotional and behavioral problems later in life.

The researchers caution that longer followup is necessary to establish whether the relationship between post-term birth and behavioral problems persist beyond 36 months.

The research was published in the International Journal of Epidemiology.

Source: Oxford University Press

Upset child photo by shutterstock.

While the task may seem daunting, researchers discovered parents were impressed that they could not only influence their own children, but they can also have a positive influence on their children’s friends as well.

Specifically, researchers discovered that during high school the parents of teenagers’ friends can have as much effect on the teens’ substance use as their own parents.

“Among friendship groups with ‘good parents’ there’s a synergistic effect — if your parents are consistent and aware of your whereabouts, and your friends’ parents are also consistent and aware of their (children’s) whereabouts, then you are less likely to use substances,” said Michael J. Cleveland, Ph.D., research assistant professor at Penn State.

“But if you belong to a friendship group whose parents are inconsistent, and your parents are consistent, you’re still more likely to use alcohol. The differences here are due to your friends’ parents, not yours.”

Cleveland and his colleagues report parenting behaviors and adolescents’ substance-use behaviors to be significantly correlated in the “expected directions” in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs.

The researchers discovered that higher levels of parental knowledge and disciplinary consistency lead to a lower likelihood of substance use, whereas lower levels lead to a higher likelihood of substance use.

However, if adolescents’ friend’s parents are unaware of their own children’s activities, the risk for substance abuse goes up for both parties.

“The peer context is a very powerful influence,” said Cleveland. “We’ve found in other studies that the peer aspect can overwhelm your upbringing.”

Researchers believe this is the first study to document that parenting at the peer level proved to have a concrete and statistically significant impact on child outcomes.

In the study, researchers surveyed 9,417 9th-grade students during the spring semester, and then again the following spring semester.

The students came from 27 different rural school districts in Pennsylvania and Iowa, all participating in the Promoting School-university-community Partnerships to Enhance Resilience (PROSPER) study.

In 9th grade, the researchers asked the students to name five of their closest friends. The researchers identified social networks within the schools by matching up the mutually exclusive friendships. Overall, the researchers identified 897 different friendship groups, with an average of 10 to 11 students in each group.

At that time, students also answered questions about their perceptions of how much their parents knew about where they were and who they were with. They were also asked about the consistency of their parents’ discipline.

In the 10th-grade follow-up, students responded to questions about their substance use habits, specifically their use of alcohol, cigarettes and marijuana.

Behaviors of friends’ parents influenced substance use even when taking into account the effects of the teens’ own parents’ behaviors and their friends’ substance use, demonstrating the powerful effect of peers on adolescent behavior.

“I think that it empowers parents to know that not only can they have an influence on their own children, but they can also have a positive influence on their children’s friends as well,” said Cleveland.

“And that by acting together — the notion of ‘it takes a village’ — can actually result in better outcomes for adolescents.”

Source: Penn State

“It has long been known that autism is an umbrella term for a wide range of disorders that impair social and communication skills,” says Amy Kalkbrenner, assistant professor in the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Joseph J. Zilber School of Public Health, lead author of the study.

“What we are seeing is that some disorders on the autism spectrum, more than others, may be influenced by a factor such as whether a mother smokes during pregnancy.”

Despite the well-known harmful impact on babies, smoking during pregnancy is still common in the U.S. About 13 percent of mothers in the study had smoked during pregnancy.

The population-based study looked at smoking data from birth certificates of thousands of children from 11 states and compared it to a database of children diagnosed with autism from the CDC’s Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network (ADDMN).

Out of 633,989 children born in 1992, 1994, 1996 and 1998, 3,315 were identified as having an autism spectrum disorder at age 8.

“The study doesn’t say for certain that smoking is a risk factor for autism,” Kalkbrenner says. “But it does say that if there is an association, it’s between smoking and certain types of autism,” pointing toward disorders on the autism spectrum that are less severe and allow children to function at a higher level.

That connection needs further study, she adds.

Because of the wide spectrum of conditions and complex interplay of genetics and environment in autism, no one study can explain all cases of autism, said Kalkbrenner. “The goal of this work is to help provide a piece of the puzzle. And in this we were successful.”

The study is published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives.

Source: University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee