Study finds new insight on maternal infections, neurodevelopmental disorders

Researchers have found that the immune responses of a female mouse before pregnancy can predict how likely her offspring are to have behavioural deficits if the immune system is activated during pregnancy. The study results could help resolve what role serious infections during pregnancy play in the later development of conditions such as autism and schizophrenia in offspring. Both genetics and a variety of environmental risk factors are thought to play a role in mental illness, said Professor Kim McAllister, director of the Center for Neuroscience and senior author on the paper. Most pregnancies are resilient, she said. Although the risk from maternal immune activation is low, it could provide a way into the underlying problems that lead to schizophrenia or autism.

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HIV affects young brains even after early treatment

A new study has given a clear understanding about how even with early treatment, HIV still manages to attack young brains.

Across sub-Saharan Africa today, a vast majority of children suffer from HIV. While early antiretroviral treatment, or ART, ensured that children with and exposed to HIV have less deadly results, studies have shown that the virus can still affect the brain.

HIV may disrupt neuro-development, affecting how children learn, reason and function.

This is why, researcher gave a two-year longitudinal study to obtain a clear picture of how HIV influences children's neuro-psychological growth.

The neuro-psychological performance in 3 groups of children 5-11 years old has been examined by the researchers- individuals who acquire HIV perinatally and were treated with ART, those exposed but HIV-negative, and those who were never exposed.

The study was carried out at 6 testing sites in 3 Sub-Saharan African countries to look robustly at how HIV affects children in this field.

To date, it's the 1st well-validated, multi-site neuro-psychological evaluation of African school-aged children affected by HIV.

The researchers found that there are still major neuro-psychological challenges for children living with HIV even in the face of early treatment and good clinical care.

One of the researchers said- these children came into the study with a deficit compared to their counterparts. It stayed about the same throughout the 2 years, except in one important area- reasoning and planning. On that specific test domain, the children living with HIV failed to progress over time.
In other words, in the field of planning and thinking over the course of the study, the difference between infected and HIV-negative children increased.

Such skills typically develop in healthy children in the school years.

This is the most important cognitive function for the future of children living with HIV in terms of their likelihood of taking their medications, making good decision, abstaining from risky behaviours like early sexual activity, psycho-social issues and school-related achievement, he said.

However, early medical treatment started as early as 6 months of age, is probably not enough to address the neurocognitive deficits associated with HIV, even though it helps keep children alive and healthier than they would be without treatment.

In these children, treatment should be started even earlier to improve long-term neurocognitive outcomes.

Researchers are already working on long-term care and support. Earlier this year, the head researcher received a 50year, 3.2 million $ NIH grant to continue his work with children affected by HIV un Uganda and Malawi.

Through this grant, researchers will investigate how MSU-developed computer cognitive games can serve as tools for neurocognitive evaluation, enrichment and potentially rehabilitation.

He hopes that the findings of the 2 experiments will contribute to making this neuro-psychological evaluation paradigm part of the cost-benefit of caring for HIV-affected children.

Often it's overlooked or seen as an afterthought, but unlike other areas of medical follow-up neuro-psychological evaluation really gets at how well the kids are going to adapt and function in school, at home, in the community and in society in general, he said. It's really what links us most directly to the human burden of disease.

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Here’s how sleep deprivation affects your performance

Sleep deprivation affects us much more than prior theories have suggested, say researchers, adding that it impacts place-keeping - or, the ability to complete a series of steps without losing one’s place, despite potential interruptions.

“Our research showed that sleep deprivation doubles the odds of making place-keeping errors and triples the number of lapses in attention, which is startling,” said study researcher Kimberly Fenn from Michigan State University in the US.

“Sleep-deprived individuals need to exercise caution in absolutely everything that they do, and simply can’t trust that they won’t make costly errors. Oftentimes - like when behind the wheel of a car - these errors can have tragic consequences,” Fenn added.

For the study, the researchers recruited 138 people to participate in the overnight sleep assessment; 77 stayed awake all night and 61 went home to sleep. 

All participants took two separate cognitive tasks in the evening: one that measured reaction time to a stimulus; the other measured a participant’s ability to maintain their place in a series of steps without omitting or repeating a step - even after sporadic interruptions. 

The participants then repeated both tasks in the morning to see how sleep-deprivation affected their performance.

After being interrupted there was a 15 per cent error rate in the evening and we saw that the error rate spiked to about 30 per cent for the sleep-deprived group the following morning. The rested participants’ morning scores were similar to the night before.

There are some tasks people can do on auto-pilot that may not be affected by a lack of sleep,” Fenn said. 

However, sleep deprivation causes widespread deficits across all facets of life. 

“Our findings debunk a common theory that suggests that attention is the only cognitive function affected by sleep deprivation,” said study researcher Michelle Stepan.

“Some sleep-deprived people might be able to hold it together under routine tasks, like a doctor taking a patient’s vitals,” Stepan said.

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Aerobic exercise boosts memory in patients

A new study has provided evidence for beneficial effects of aerobic exercise on brain and memory in people afflicted with multiple sclerosis (MS).

Hippocampal atrophy seen in MS is linked to the memory deficits that affect approximately 50 percent of individuals with MS.

Despite the prevalence of this disabling symptom, there are no effective pharmacological or behavioral treatments.

A research scientist said that aerobic exercise may be the first effective treatment for MS patients with memory problems.

She said that moreover, aerobic exercise has the advantages of being readily available, low cost, self-administered, and lacking in side effects.

The study's participants were two MS patients with memory deficits who were randomized to non-aerobic (stretching) and aerobic (stationary cycling) conditions.

Baseline and follow-up measurements were recorded before and after the treatment protocol of 30-minute exercise sessions 3 times per week for 3 months. Data were collected by high-resolution MRI (neuroanatomical volumes), fMRI (functional connectivity), and memory assessment.

Aerobic exercise resulted in a 16.5 per cent increase in hippocampal volume, a 53.7 per cent increase in memory, and increased hippocampal resting-state functional connectivity. Non-aerobic exercise resulted in minimal change in hippocampal volume and no changes in memory or functional connectivity.

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Healthy preterm babies have academic difficulties

Scientists have claimed that premature babies are at higher risk for lower academic achievement, especially in mathematics.

A psychiatrist said that preterm children, who are deemed "normal" in terms of their development at infant/toddler stages, may still remain at risk for significant math difficulties, as well as deficits in attention, executive functions, and spatial skills.

She said that recent studies have identified a common pattern of subtle abnormality in the deep white matter of the brain among children born very premature.

Dr. asserted that these early abnormalities may affect the subsequent development of widely distributed brain areas, and may account for the patterns of cognitive deficit that are observed later in childhood.

She explained that however, there is currently very little data actually linking these neural abnormalities with the emergence of such deficits and associated early academic difficulties.

She said that the goal of the current study is to provide these essential data as children enter a critical developmental stage when intervention may have the best potential to achieve better outcomes for these children.

The study participants will include 60 healthy children born at 25 to 32 gestational weeks with average intelligence, and 40 full-term children matched for age, sex and verbal IQ.

Children will enter the study within six months of entering kindergarten and will be followed for three years. The scientists predict that specific early perceptual and cognitive deficits will be related to math deficits that emerge as children start school.

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Sharing mother's stress in the womb leaves children prone to depression

Scientists claim to have unravelled why some people are more prone to suffering from anxiety and depression than others – they shared their mother’s stress in the womb.

Researchers have discovered a key component of the placenta that normally protects unborn babies from high levels of hormones that build up in their mothers’ blood when she is stressed.

In some mothers, however, this protective element can be faulty, allowing the foetus to be exposed to stress hormones and leaving a child more prone to anxiety and depression in later life.

The scientists have found that eating large amounts of liquorice, which is a common craving for pregnant women, can also deactivate the barrier that protects the foetus from the mother’s stress.

The findings may help to explain why some children grow up less able to deal with stress and anxiety than others.

It could also explain why among soldiers, some will develop post traumatic stress disorder after being caught in a bomb blast while others will remain unaffected.

Professor Jonathan Seckl, an endocrinologist at the Queen’s Medical Research Institute at the University of Edinburgh who has been conducting the work, said: “There is an enzyme found in high levels in the placenta and the baby’s brain.

"It seems to be a natural barrier to stress hormones as it deactivates them.

“If you inhibit this barrier then you start to get children being born with low birth weight and who have altered stress responses and depression. This may be what underpins the variation you get from one individual to another.”

Professor Seckl and colleagues at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel believe a breakdown in the protective enzyme , allows high levels of a stress hormone called cortisol that builds up in the mother’s blood when she is under stress to cross into the foetus’s brain, where it can trigger something known as developmental programming.

This is causes genes to be switched on or off and can determine how they work through a child’s life. In our evolutionary history this would have helped prepare a mother’s offspring for the outside world.

However, in the modern world it appears to lead to conditions such as depression, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and leave children more anxious.

Studies by Professor Seckl have shown that rats who were fed liquorice, which contains a potent inhibitor of the barrier enzyme, have shown that they tend to have offspring that are more prone to anxious behaviour.

Similarly, mice that were born without the genes for the protective enzyme also had offspring that were more prone to hyperactive and anxious behaviour, particularly if they had been stressed during pregnancy.

Professor Seckl added: “When we looked at Finish women, who tend to eat a lot of liquorice, those who ate a bag a day compared to those who did not eat liquorice tended to have babies born a couple of days earlier.

“By the age of eight, however, we saw a two third increase in the rates of attention deficits and anxiety behaviours.”

Scientists have also found that very high levels of stress in the mother can also overwhelm the barrier enzyme in the placenta, while in some women they may not produce enough of the enzyme in the first place.

Studies of children who were in the womb during the 9/11 terrorism attacks in New York have also shown that if mothers are exposed to stress in the third trimester their babies tend to have altered stress responses and altered behaviour.

Professor Alon Chen, a neurobiology at the Weizmann Institute who is working with Professor Seckl on a joint UK and Israeli project, suggested that exposure to stress in the later stages of pregnancy appears to be the most crucial.

Professor Chen said: “Late gestation is a very sensitive window. If you expose animal models to stress in the second trimester then you get 16% of the offspring showing susceptibility to post traumatic stress.

“In the third trimester this rises to 30% of the offspring.

“This may help to explain why when you send a group of soldiers into a battle zone and they are involved in a trauma only around 10 to 15 per cent may develop post traumatic stress disorder.

“The theory is that they have some predisposition towards it. What we are finding suggests they were exposed to excessive stress while they were developing in the womb.”

However, the researchers now believe they have found a molecule in the blood that indicates when someone has been exposed to high levels of stress in the womb.

This could allow them to develop a diagnostic test that will help spot those children most at risk of anxiety or depression.

Professor Seckl added: “We could spot people at risk and then determine the right way to intervene.”

Scientists at the Babraham Institute in Cambridge last week also announced that they had identified the biological process to strip the epigenetic imprinting off genes.

It raises the possibility of "wiping the slate clean" to reset cells and could lead to new types of treatment.

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Struggles With Motor Skills Compound Social Problems in Autism

Problems with motor skills such as throwing and catching can add to the social struggles faced by children with autism, a new study says.

It included 35 children, aged 6 to 15, with autism who were considered high-functioning and attended typical school classes. The children underwent tests for two types of motor skills: object-control motor skills that involve precise action such as catching or throwing; and locomotion skills such as running and walking.

The children who struggled with object-control motor abilities were more likely to have more severe problems with social and communications skills that those with better object-control motor skills, according to the study.

"So much of the focus on autism has been on developing social skills, and that is very crucial," lead author said.

"Yet we also know there is a link between motor skills and autism, and how deficits in these physical skills play into this larger picture is not clearly understood," said  an expert on the movement skills of children with autism.

She said the findings add to the growing body of research highlighting the link between autism and motor skill problems.

"Something which seems as simple as learning to ride a bike can be crucial for a child with autism," . "Being able to ride a bike means more independence and autonomy. They can ride to the corner store or ride to a friend's house. Those kind of small victories are huge."

Physical activity is linked not only to health, but to social skills and mental well-being, she noted.

The good news is that motor skills can be taught.

"We have programs and interventions that we know work, and have measurable impact on motor skill development," she said. "We need to make sure we identify the issue and get a child help as early as possible."

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