TV and video game distractions linked to sleep loss in boys with Autism (ADS/ADD)

Exposure to television and video games could play a role in the sleep problems of children with autism, new research suggests.

Boys with the neurodevelopmental disorder who have TVs and game consoles in their bedrooms get less sleep than other boys with equal screen access, the study authors found.

"If parents of children with autism are noticing that their child struggles with sleep, they might consider monitoring—and perhaps limiting—pre-bedtime exposure" to video games and TV, said study lead author Christopher Engelhardt, a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Missouri Thompson Center for Autism & Neurodevelopmental Disorders in Columbia, Mo.

It's not clear if the boys in the study get too little sleep, or if they're watching TV and playing video games because they have trouble sleeping.

The findings, reported online Nov. 18 in the journal Pediatrics, don't provide insight into whether the positive aspects of TV watching and video game playing might offset any effect on sleep.

It's estimated that 1 out of every 88 U.S. children has an autism spectrum disorder, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Symptoms include problems with communication and socialization, and can range from mild, as in Asperger's syndrome, to severe autism. Boys face a much higher risk of autism than girls.

Certain Sleep problems appear to be a hallmark of autism.
"Some sleep problems, such as taking longer to fall asleep and waking up at night, occur in 50 percent to 80 percent of children with autism," Engelhardt said.

"The reasons for these problems are numerous, including trouble with sleep cycles and regulating hormones that are important and necessary for sleep."

Compared to typically developing children, children with autism also seem to be particularly drawn to TV and video games, Engelhardt pointed out.

"We suspect that this is the case, particularly with video games, because the environments, emotions and social interactions are much easier to control and interpret than in real life," he said.

For this study, the researchers wanted to explore the possible impact of TV-watching and gaming on the sleeping patterns of kids with autism.

They surveyed parents of 49 boys with an autism spectrum disorder, 38 with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and 41 who had neither disorder. The boys were between 8 and 17 years old.

When computers were in the bedroom, sleep differences were significant: about 7 hours for boys with autism compared to more than 8.5 hours for the others.

Boys with autism and a bedroom TV also got less sleep: fewer than 8 hours a night compared to about 8.5 hours for the other boys.

However, the parents weren't asked questions designed to determine if the kids weren't getting enough sleep. And the research doesn't prove that media use deprives these boys of sleep.

It's possible that boys with autism and easy access to TV and video games need less sleep, Engelhardt said. Or they might watch and play because they are awake more.

Still, it's known that sleep disturbances can worsen problematic behaviors of children with autism and interfere with learning and family functioning, the authors noted.

Sleep problems are "one of the top complaints in families who are dealing with autism," said Matthew Belmonte, a neuroscientist at Groden Center in Providence, R.I.

But parents, not professionals, are key to figuring out the proper role of TV and video games in a child's life, added Belmonte, who was not involved with the study.

"You don't need an M.D. or Ph.D. to tell you when a child is just relaxing with a video game or when it's keeping that child awake unnecessarily."

Engelhardt said he enjoys playing video games himself and isn't on a crusade against them. Video games and TV can benefit children with autism, he noted.

"Researchers have known for a long time that video games are excellent teachers, so it's possible that these media can be used to develop and shape the types of behaviours generally valued by society, such as behaviours intended to help and assist others," Engelhardt said.

It's even possible, he added, that relaxing video games and TV shows could help kids with autism sleep better.

Teens' self-consciousness linked with specific brain, physiological responses

Teenagers are famously self-conscious, acutely aware and concerned about what their peers think of them. A new study reveals that this self-consciousness is linked with specific physiological and brain responses that seem to emerge and peak in adolescence.

"Our study identifies adolescence as a unique period of the lifespan in which self-conscious emotion, physiological reactivity, and activity in specific brain areas converge and peak in response to being evaluated by others," says psychological scientist and lead researcher Leah Somerville of Harvard University.

The findings, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggest that teens' sensitivity to social evaluation might be explained by shifts in physiological and brain function during adolescence, in addition to the numerous sociocultural changes that take place during the teen years.

Somerville and colleagues wanted to investigate whether just being looked at—a minimal social-evaluation situation—might register with greater importance, arousal, and intensity for adolescents than for either children or adults.

The researchers hypothesized that late-developing regions of the brain, such as the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), could play a unique role in the way teens monitor these types of social evaluative contexts.

The researchers had 69 participants, ranging in age from 8 to almost 23 years old, come to the lab and complete measures that gauged emotional, physiological, and neural responses to social evaluation.

They told the participants that they would be testing a new video camera embedded in the head coil of a functional MRI scanner.

The participants watched a screen indicating whether the camera was "off," "warming up," or "on", and were told that a same-sex peer of about the same age would be watching the video feed and would be able to see them when the camera was on. In reality, there was no camera in the MRI machine.

The consistency and strength of the resulting data took the researchers by surprise: "We were concerned about whether simply being looked at was a strong enough 'social evaluation' to evoke emotional, physiological and neural responses," says Somerville.

"Our findings suggest that being watched, and to some extent anticipating being watched, were sufficient to elicit self-conscious emotional responses at each level of measurement."

Specifically, participants' self-reported embarrassment, physiological arousal, and MPFC activation showed reactivity to social evaluation that seemed to converge and peak during adolescence.

Adolescent participants also showed increased functional connectivity between the MPFC and striatum, an area of the brain that mediates motivated behaviors and actions.

Somerville and colleagues speculate that the MPFC-striatum pathway may be a route by which social evaluative contexts influence behavior.

The link may provide an initial clue as to why teens often engage in riskier behaviors when they're with their peers.

Depression in Adolescent Girls linked to Father Absence

New research from the Children of the 90s study at the UK University of Bristol shows that girls whose fathers were absent during the first five years of life were more likely to develop depressive symptoms in adolescence than girls whose fathers left when they were aged five to ten years or than boys in both age groups (0-5 and 5-10). 

This finding has been found to be true, even after a range of factors was taken into account.

While previous studies have looked at the effect of childhood separation and divorce on the risk of depression in adolescence, this new research, published 15 May in Psychological Medicine, is one of only a few studies to look specifically at the effect of a father's absence and the timing of his departure on adolescents' mental health.

The study is one of the largest of its kind (5,631 children) and because Children of the 90s has charted the health and well-being of its participants since birth, it is one of only a few able to demonstrate a strong link between early childhood father absence and teenage girls' risk of depressive symptoms.

The finding has been found to be true, even after a wide range of other factors that can contribute to depression – including home ownership, social status, financial problems, family size, parental conflict, the mother's educational background and history of depression – are taken into account.

The authors say their findings are in line with previous studies suggesting that young children are more likely to suffer depression because they have developed fewer 'coping mechanisms' than older children, who also have more opportunities and resources to cope, as well as more social support networks, e.g. friends, outside the family.

Previous studies suggest that the stronger negative effect of father absence on the mental health of teenage girls over boys could be because girls are more vulnerable to negative interpersonal and family life events.

Iryna Culpin, the paper's lead author, said: "These findings indicate a need to include fathers in research related to child and adolescent mental health issues."

She also suggests that support for depression could be aimed at teenage girls whose father left before the age of five.

The authors highlight that it does not necessarily follow that a teenage girl who experiences depression as a teenager will continue to be affected later in life.

They also point out that the study did not examine the level of contact nor the quality of the relationship between a child and an absent father, all of which could influence the risk of depression.

More information: Culpin, I. et al. Father absence and depressive symptoms in adolescence: findings from a UK cohort, Psychological Medicine.

UK LD Shock: Early death link to learning disabilities 'shocking'

UK People with learning disabilities die on average 16 years earlier than they should, due to NHS failings, according to official research.

The UK Department of Health, which commissioned the work, says this is unacceptable.

The deaths occur due to delays or problems investigating, diagnosing and treating illnesses.

The charity Mencap estimates 1,200 people with learning disabilities under NHS care die needlessly each year.

Avoidable deaths
The Bristol University researchers who carried out the work looked at all deaths over a two-year period at five primary care trust areas in the south-west of England.

This revealed that people with learning disabilities were more likely to have a premature death than those in the general population.

Women with learning disabilities died on average 20 years earlier than other women. Men with learning disabilities died 13 years sooner.

Dr Pauline Heslop

One of the researchers, Dr Pauline Heslop, said: "These are shocking findings and must serve as a wake-up call to all of us that action is urgently required.

"This report highlights the unacceptable situation in which people with learning disabilities are dying, on average, more than 16 years sooner than anyone else.

"The cause of their premature deaths appears to be because the NHS is not being provided equitably to everyone based on need."

Basing its statistics on the new research, the charity Mencap believes the failure to properly understand the health needs of people with learning disabilities results in 1,238 people in England dying needlessly each year.

Jan Tregelles

Mencap's acting chief executive Jan Tregelles, said: "A scandal of avoidable deaths on the scale of [that at the Mid-Staffordshire NHS Trust] takes place every year for people with a learning disability in the NHS.

"These deaths, caused by poor care and delays in diagnosis and treatment, highlight the scale of discrimination faced by disabled patients in the NHS."

The Bristol University academics have made several recommendations, including:

• the creation of a review body to investigate the deaths of people with learning disabilities
• a named health professional to co-ordinate the care of those with multiple health needs
• improved guidelines on when a "do not resuscitate" order should be used

In a statement, the UK's (lack of) Care And Support Minister, Norman Lamb, said: "This important and sobering report highlights, yet again, the inequalities that people with learning disabilities face with regard to their health and care.

"It is just not acceptable that people with learning difficulties have such a high risk of dying prematurely.

"The findings from this report will feed into the work going on to address the issues identified from the Winterbourne abuse scandal and the Francis report into the Mid-Staffordshire NHS Trust scandal"

Autism: Difficulty in Recognising Faces Linked to Performance in a Group of Neurons

Neuroscientists at Georgetown University Medical Center (GUMC) have discovered a brain anomaly that explains why some people diagnosed with autism cannot easily recognise faces -- a deficit linked to the impairments in social interactions considered to be the hallmark of the disorder.

They also say that the novel neuro-imaging analysis technique they developed to arrive at this finding is likely to help link behavioural deficits to differences at the neural level in a range of neurological disorders.

The final manuscript published March 15 in the online journal NeuroImage: Clinical, the scientists say that in the brains of many individuals with autism, neurons in the brain area that processes faces (the fusiform face area, or FFA) are too broadly "tuned" to finely discriminate between facial features of different people.

They made this discovery using a form of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) that scans output from the blueberry-sized FFA, located behind the right ear.

"When your brain is processing faces, you want neurons to respond selectively so that each is picking up a different aspect of individual faces. The neurons need to be finely tuned to understand what is dissimilar from one face to another," says the study's senior investigator, Maximilian Riesenhuber, PhD., an associate professor of neuroscience at GUMC.

"What we found in our 15 adult participants with autism is that in those with more severe behavioral deficits, the neurons are more broadly tuned, so that one face looks more like another, as compared with the fine tuning seen in the FFA of typical adults," he says.

"And we found evidence that reduced selectivity in FFA neurons corresponded to greater behavioral deficits in everyday face recognition in our participants. This makes sense. If your neurons cannot tell different faces apart, it makes it more difficult to tell who is talking to you or understand the facial expressions that are conveyed, which limits social interaction."

Riesenhuber adds that there is huge variation in the ability of individuals diagnosed with autism to discriminate faces, and that some autistic people have no problem with facial recognition.

"But for those that do have this challenge, it can have substantial ramifications -- some researchers believe deficits in face processing are at the root of social dysfunction in autism," he says.

The neural basis for face processing
Neuroscientists have used traditional fMRI studies in the past to probe the neural bases of behavioral differences in people with autism, but these studies have produced conflicting results, says Riesenhuber.

"The fundamental problem with traditional fMRI techniques is that they can tell which parts of the brain become active during face processing, but they are poor at directly measuring neuronal selectivity," he says, "and it is this neuronal selectivity that predicts face processing performance, as shown in our previous studies."

To test their hypothesis that differences in neuronal selectivity in the FFA are foundational to differences in face processing abilities in autism, Riesenhuber and the study's lead author, neuroscientist Xiong Jiang, PhD, developed a novel brain imaging analysis technique, termed local regional heterogeneity, to estimate neuronal selectivity.

Read the full article here 

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Georgetown University Medical Center

Dyslexia Linked to Brain’s Inconsistency with Encoding Sound

Researchers from Northwestern University report that they have found a biological mechanism that appears to play a vital role in learning to read.

This finding provides significant clues into the workings behind dyslexia — a collection of impairments unrelated to intelligence, hearing or vision that makes learning to read a struggle.

As many as one in 10 children is estimated to suffer from this disorder.

“We discovered a systematic relationship between reading ability and the consistency with which the brain encodes sounds,” said Nina Kraus, Hugh Knowles Professor of Neurobiology, Physiology and Communication.

The report, titled “Unstable Representation of Sound: A Biological Marker of Dyslexia,” is published in the Journal of Neuroscience.

For the study, researchers recorded the automatic brain wave responses of 100 school-aged children to speech sounds.

 They discovered that the very best readers encoded the sound most consistently while the poorest readers encoded it with the most difficulty.

The brain’s response to sound appears to stabilize as children learn to successfully connect sounds with their meanings.

On a positive note, biology is not destiny. In a previous study, the researchers found that the inconsistency with which the poorest readers encoded sound could be “fixed” through training.

In that study, children with reading difficulties were fitted for a year with assistive listening devices that transmitted their teacher’s voice directly into their ears.

After a year, the children made improvements in reading as well as in the consistency with which their brains encoded speech sounds, especially consonants.

“Use of the devices focused youngsters’ brains on the “meaningful” sounds coming from their teacher, diminishing other, extraneous distractions,” said Kraus.

“After a year of use, the students had honed their auditory systems and no longer required the assistive devices to keep their reading and encoding advantage.”

According to Kraus, people rarely have difficulty encoding vowel sounds, which are relatively simple and long.

It is consonant sounds, which are shorter and more acoustically complex, that are more likely to be incorrectly processed by the brain.

“Understanding the biological mechanisms of reading puts us in a better position to both understand how normal reading works and to ameliorate it where it goes awry,” says Kraus.

“Our results suggest that good readers profit from a stable neural representation of sound, and that children with inconsistent neural responses are likely at a disadvantage when learning to read,” Kraus adds.

“The good news is that response consistency can be improved with auditory training.”

Effects of Cigarette Smoking and Family History Of Alcoholism Linked To Love Of Sweets Among Women

Effects of Cigarette Smoking and Family History Of Alcoholism Linked To Love Of Sweets Among Women

Despite the greater health risks, women derive more pleasure than men from the smell and taste of cigarettes, are more likely to smoke as a way to reduce stress and feelings of depression, and use smoking as a diet tool. In fact, many women who try to quit smoking often relapse because of concerns about gaining weight.

"Cigarette smoking and having a family history of alcoholism had different effects on sweet-taste perception and food cravings," said Julie A. Mennella, a senior researcher at Monell and coauthor of the study. "Women who smoked cigarettes were less sensitive to sweet taste than women who never smoked.

This means that women who smoke required higher concentrations of a sweet solution in order to detect sweet taste; we also found that the more years a woman has smoked cigarettes, the less sensitive she will be to sweet taste." Whether the reduced sensitivity for sweet tastes helps smokers control their weight is an important question that needs further study, she added.

"Distortions of perception of sweet taste and craving for sweets have been reported in patients with various psychiatric conditions -- depression, substance abuse, eating disorders, premenstrual syndrome, several forms of obesity etc.