Domestic abuse may affect children in womb
2014-12-16
(Press-News.org) EAST LANSING, Mich. --- Domestic violence can affect children even before they're born, indicates new research by Michigan State University scientists.
The study is the first to link abuse of pregnant women with emotional and behavioral trauma symptoms in their children within the first year of life. Symptoms include nightmares, startling easily, being bothered by loud noises and bright lights, avoiding physical contact and having trouble experiencing enjoyment.
"For clinicians and mothers, knowing that the prenatal experience of their domestic violence can directly harm their babies may be a powerful motivator to help moms get out of these abusive situations," said Alytia Levendosky, psychology professor and study co-author.
The study of 182 mothers ages 18-34 found a surprisingly strong relationship between a mother's prenatal abuse by a male partner and postnatal trauma symptoms in her child. The researchers examined the women's parenting styles and also took into account risk factors such as drug use and other negative life events, marital status, age and income.
Levendosky said prenatal abuse could cause changes in the mother's stress response systems, increasing her levels of the hormone cortisol, which in turn could increase cortisol levels in the fetus.
"Cortisol is a neurotoxic, so it has damaging effects on the brain when elevated to excessive levels," Levendosky said. "That might explain the emotional problems for the baby after birth."
A clinical psychologist for nearly 20 years, Levendosky has counseled many domestic violence survivors who didn't believe the abuse would affect their child until the child was old enough to understand what was going on.
"They might say things like, 'Oh, I have to leave my partner when my baby gets to be so-and-so age - you know, 3 or 4 years old - but until then, you know, it's not really affecting him, he won't really remember it,'" she said. "But I think these findings send a strong message that the violence is affecting the baby even before the baby is born."
INFORMATION:
The study appears in the research journal Child Abuse & Neglect. Levendosky's co-researchers include Brittany Lannert, a former doctoral student, and psychology professors Anne Bogat and Joseph Lonstein.
[Attachments] See images for this press release:
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2014-12-16
New Rochelle, NY, December 16, 2014--Veterans of the U.S. armed forces who have received a diagnosis consistent with transgender status are more likely to have serious suicidal thoughts and plans and to attempt suicide. A new study shows that this group has a higher risk of suicide death than the general population of veterans, as described in an article in LGBT Health, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The article is available free on the LGBT Health website until January 16, 2015.
Based on data gathered from the VA National Patient Care ...
2014-12-16
Scientists from the Institute of Food Research and the University of East Anglia have discovered how certain gut bacteria can protect themselves and others in the gut from antibiotics.
The bacteria produce compounds, called cephalosporinases, which inactivate and destroy certain antibiotics such as penicillin derivatives and cephalosporins, protecting themselves and other beneficial bacteria that live in close proximity. However, they may also give protection from these antibiotics to harmful bacteria, such as Salmonella.
The gut is home to hundreds of trillions of bacteria, ...
2014-12-16
No visit to Rome is complete without a visit to the Pantheon, Trajan's Markets, the Colosseum, or the other spectacular examples of ancient Roman concrete monuments that have stood the test of time and the elements for nearly two thousand years. A key discovery to understanding the longevity and endurance of Roman architectural concrete has been made by an international and interdisciplinary collaboration of researchers using beams of X-rays at the Advanced Light Source (ALS) of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).
Working ...
2014-12-16
Researchers at the Norris Cotton Cancer Center and University of Hawaii Cancer Center find that one-third of Hawaiian adolescents have tried e-cigarettes, half of whom have never used another tobacco product.
"This is a markedly different pattern of use compared to their peers in the continental U.S., where teen e-cigarette use is less than half that rate and e-cigarette users are mainly also cigarette smokers (dual-users)," reported James D. Sargent, MD, a pediatrician at Dartmouth Hitchcock's Norris Cotton Cancer Center in a paper published December 15, 2014 in the ...
2014-12-16
Average chloride concentrations often exceed toxic levels in many northern United States streams due to the use of salt to deice winter pavement, and the frequency of these occurrences nearly doubled in two decades.
Chloride levels increased substantially in 84 percent of urban streams analyzed, according to a U.S. Geological Survey study that began as early as 1960 at some sites and ended as late as 2011. Levels were highest during the winter, but increased during all seasons over time at the northern sites, including near Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Chicago, Illinois; Denver, ...
2014-12-16
ATLANTA--The Paleolithic diet, or caveman diet, a weight-loss craze in which people emulate the diet of plants and animals eaten by early humans during the Stone Age, gives modern calorie-counters great freedom because those ancestral diets likely differed substantially over time and space, according to researchers at Georgia State University and Kent State University.
Their findings are published in The Quarterly Review of Biology.
"Based on evidence that's been gathered over many decades, there's very little evidence that any early hominids had very specialized diets ...
2014-12-16
Los Angeles, CA (November 16, 2014) A new article reports that despite a clear lack of research on male survivors of Ebola, the current recommended practice of waiting at least three months after recovery to have unprotected sex should be upheld. This study was published today in Reproductive Sciences, a SAGE journal.
"Our exercise demonstrated that the current recommendations to prevent the sexual spread of Ebola are based on one mere observation," the researchers wrote. "Despite the evident need to conduct more research, for now, health care professionals should strongly ...
2014-12-16
PHILADELPHIA - As the main component of connective tissue in the body, fibroblasts are the most common type of cell. Taking advantage of that ready availability, scientists from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, the Wistar Institute, Boston University School of Medicine, and New Jersey Institute of Technology have discovered a way to repurpose fibroblasts into functional melanocytes, the body's pigment-producing cells. The technique has immediate and important implications for developing new cell-based treatments for skin diseases such as ...
2014-12-16
Two studies published in the January issue of Anesthesiology, the official medical journal of the American Society of Anesthesiologists® (ASA®), shed new light on the prevalence of transfusion-related acute lung injury (TRALI) and transfusion-associated circulatory overload (TACO), the number one and two leading causes of blood transfusion-related deaths in the United States. According to researchers, postoperative TRALI is significantly underreported and more common than previously thought, with an overall rate of 1.4 percent. While the rate of TACO was found ...
2014-12-16
Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the most common form of dementia and is characterized by the formation of β-amyloid plaques throughout the brain. Proteins known as chemokines regulate inflammation and the immune response. In both patients with AD and mouse AD models, the chemokine CXCL10 is found in high concentrations in the brain and may contribute to AD. A new study in the Journal of Clinical Investigation indicates that activation of the CXCL10 receptor, CXCR3, contributes to AD pathology. Using a murine model of AD, Michael Heneka and colleagues at the University ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] Domestic abuse may affect children in womb
