PRESS-NEWS.org - Press Release Distribution
PRESS RELEASES DISTRIBUTION

Picture books can boost physical activity for youth with autism

University of Missouri researcher says the exercise guides can also be used by low-income families to promote a healthy lifestyle

Picture books can boost physical activity for youth with autism
2021-02-26
(Press-News.org) COLUMBIA, Mo. - While physical activity is important for everyone, research has shown people with developmental disabilities do not exercise as often as their typically developed peers. In an effort to close this disparity, a researcher at the University of Missouri recently created fitness picture books that help youth with autism exercise more frequently while offering low-income families a simple resource for workout motivation when outdoor fitness equipment might not be accessible.

"There is so much research geared toward helping individuals with autism improve their academic performance, social skills and communication skills, but we also need to remember how important physical activity is for living a healthy lifestyle," said Lorraine Becerra, an assistant teaching professor at the MU College of Education. "There are numerous health benefits of exercise, such as pumping blood in your body, better sleep and reduced risk of obesity. Also, if we can get kids with autism more physically engaged, they are more likely to run around and play with their peers, so there are other aspects of their life we can improve as well."

Becerra is also a behavior analyst at the Thompson Center for Autism and Neurodevelopmental Disorders. Since some of her former clients with autism had body mass indexes that had risen to unhealthy levels due to excessive sedentary behavior, their caregivers asked Becerra to develop creative ways to encourage their children to exercise more.

So, in a recent research study, Becerra created fitness picture books that contained step-by-step images of various exercises, such as jumping jacks, bear crawls and lunges. The picture books were successfully utilized to increase the amount of time the individuals with autism engaged in physical activity.

Having previously worked in low-income school districts with limited financial resources, Becerra understands the need to find cost-efficient methods to help kids with autism exercise more frequently.

"It's important to remember that some schools might not have a jungle gym or many age-appropriate resources for kids to play with," Becerra said. "The great thing about the picture books is they provide simple, engaging exercises that can be done in a wide variety of settings, like a school playground, backyard or even an empty field at a park. It is also a quick and easy way for caregivers or teachers to provide organized structure during flexible free time, such as during recess."

With recent advancements in technology and entertainment, youth are increasingly spending more of their time sitting in front of televisions, iPads and personal electronic devices. Becerra is passionate about reminding youth -- particularly individuals on the autism spectrum -- about the importance of scheduling time for physical activity.

"These lifelong habits start when you are young," Becerra said. "Making time to run around and establish those exercise routines early in life will help youth maintain those habits in their adolescent and adult years."

INFORMATION:

"The effect of photographic activity schedules on moderate-to-vigorous physical activity in children with autism spectrum disorder" was recently published in the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis.


[Attachments] See images for this press release:
Picture books can boost physical activity for youth with autism

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

Cancer: a new killer lymphocyte enters the ring

Cancer: a new killer lymphocyte enters the ring
2021-02-26
Treatments for beating tumours are mainly based on CD8 T lymphocytes, which specialise in detecting and eliminating intracellular infections and in killing cancer cells. A large proportion of patients, however, do not respond to these treatments. This prompted a research team from the Swiss Cancer Centre Léman (SCCL, Switzerland) to bring together the universities of Geneva (UNIGE) and Lausanne (UNIL), the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research (LICR), EPFL and CHUV to investigate CD4 T lymphocytes. While these play a supporting role with CD8 T cells, their ability to eliminate tumour cells directly has been a matter of controversy. Using innovative nanoimaging technologies designed at the EPFL laboratory, the scientists found that when the CD4 T lymphocytes ...

When using pyrite to understand Earth's ocean and atmosphere: Think local, not global

2021-02-26
The ocean floor is vast and varied, making up more than 70% of the Earth's surface. Scientists have long used information from sediments at the bottom of the ocean -- layers of rock and microbial muck -- to reconstruct the conditions in oceans of the past. These reconstructions are important for understanding how and when oxygen became available in Earth's atmosphere and ultimately increased to the levels that support life as we know it today. Yet reconstructions that rely on signals from sedimentary rocks but ignore the impact of local sedimentary processes do so at their own peril, according to geoscientists including David Fike in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. Their new study published Feb. ...

New insights into an ancient protein complex

2021-02-26
Cells rely on membranes to protect themselves from the outside world. But these membranes can't be fully closed because nutrients and other molecules have to be able to pass through. To achieve this, cell membranes have many types of channels and pores. Also, there are receptors, antennas if you like, imbedded in the membrane that continuously monitor the outside world and signal to the cell interior. Extensive collaboration between five VIB groups resulted in a better understanding of the machinery that plants use to regulate the protein composition of their outer membrane. This discovery, published in Science Advances, enhances our basic knowledge of how the plasma membrane composition can be adapted based on external stimuli, an essential ...

Meteorites remember conditions of stellar explosions

Meteorites remember conditions of stellar explosions
2021-02-26
A team of international researchers went back to the formation of the solar system 4.6 billion years ago to gain new insights into the cosmic origin of the heaviest elements on the period-ic table. Led by scientists who collaborate as part of the International Research Network for Nuclear Astrophysics (IReNA) (irenaweb.org) and the Joint Institute for Nuclear Astrophysics - Center for the Evolution of the Elements (JINA-CEE) (jinaweb.org), the study is published in the lat-est issue of the journal Science (science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6532/945). Heavy elements we encounter in our everyday life, ...

Cerium sidelines silver to make drug precursor

Cerium sidelines silver to make drug precursor
2021-02-26
HOUSTON - (Feb. 26, 2021) - Save your silver! It's better used for jewelry than as a catalyst for drugs. Rice University scientists have developed a greatly simplified method to make fluoroketones, precursors for drug design and manufacture that typically require a silver catalyst. Rice chemist Julian West and graduate students Yen-Chu Lu and Helen Jordan introduced a process for the rapid and scalable synthesis of fluoroketones that have until now been challenging and expensive to make. Their open-access work graces the cover of the Feb. 21 issue of the Royal Society of ...

Researchers identify characteristics of highest utilizers for mental health hospital services

Researchers identify characteristics of highest utilizers for mental health hospital services
2021-02-26
Dropping out of high school, having schizophrenia, or being diagnosed with a co-occurring personality disorder increases the likelihood of someone becoming a "high utilizer" of inpatient psychiatric hospital services, according to a new study by researchers at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth). A high utilizer is someone who has been admitted three or more times within one year. The research was published today in The Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved. For their findings, researchers used machine learning to analyze deidentified electronic ...

Research reveals how bacteria defeat drugs that fight cystic fibrosis

Research reveals how bacteria defeat drugs that fight cystic fibrosis
2021-02-26
MISSOULA - University of Montana researchers and their partners have discovered a slimy strategy used by bacteria to defeat antibiotics and other drugs used to combat infections afflicting people with cystic fibrosis. The research was published Feb. 23 in the journal Cell Reports. Cystic fibrosis is a life-threatening disease that causes persistent lung infections and limits a person's ability to breathe over time. A common strain of bacteria, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, often thrives in the lungs of people with cystic fibrosis, as well as in wounds from burns or diabetic ulcers. Once a P. aeruginosa infection is established, ...

Sensing robot healthcare helpers being developed at SFU

Sensing robot healthcare helpers being developed at SFU
2021-02-26
Robots that could take on basic healthcare tasks to support the work of doctors and nurses may be the way of the future. Who knows, maybe a medical robot can prescribe your medicine someday? That's the idea behind 3D structural-sensing robots being developed and tested at Simon Fraser University by Woo Soo Kim, associate professor in the School of Mechatronic Systems Engineering. "The recent pandemic demonstrates the need to minimize human-to-human interaction between healthcare workers and patients," says Kim, who authored two recent papers on the subject - a perspective on the technology and a demonstration of a robots' usefulness in healthcare. "There's an opportunity for sensing robots to measure ...

Agents of food-borne zoonoses confirmed to parasitise newly-recorded in Thailand snails

Agents of food-borne zoonoses confirmed to parasitise newly-recorded in Thailand snails
2021-02-26
Parasitic flatworms known as agents of food-borne zoonoses were confirmed to use several species of thiarid snails, commonly found in freshwater and brackish environments in southeast Asia, as their first intermediate host. These parasites can cause severe ocular infections in humans who consume raw or improperly cooked fish that have fed on infected snails. The study, conducted in South Thailand by Thai and German researchers and led by Kitja Apiraksena, Silpakorn University, is published in the peer-reviewed open-access journal Zoosystematics and Evolution. "Trematode infections are major public health problems affecting humans in southeast Asia," explain the scientists. "Trematode infections depend not only on the habit of people, but also on the presence of first ...

New tools find COVID patients at highest risk of mechanical ventilation and death

2021-02-26
BOSTON - Two novel calculators for predicting which patients admitted to the hospital with COVID-19 are at greatest risk of requiring mechanical ventilation or of in-hospital death have been developed and validated by Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). In a study published in The Lancet's EClinicalMedicine, researchers describe how these models could enable clinicians to better stratify risk in COVID-infected patients to optimize care and resource utilization in hospitals faced with ICU capacity constraints. "Information that can accurately predict severity of the clinical course at the time of hospital admission has been limited," says senior author Rajeev Malhotra, MD, a cardiologist at MGH and investigator in the MGH Cardiovascular Research Center. ...

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:

Lipids with potential health benefits in herbal teas

Synergically improved energy storage performance and stability in sol–gel processed BaTiO3/(Pb,La,Ca)TiO3/BaTiO3 tri-layer films with a crystalline engineered sandwich structure

International collaboration enabled participatory stock assessment on glass eel fisheries in West Java, Indonesia

Enhanced melanoma vaccine offers improved survival for men

Nearly one-third of patients with TBI have marginal or inadequate health literacy

Genetic causes of cerebral palsy uncovered through whole-genome sequencing

Modesty and boastfulness – perception depends on usual performance

Do sweeteners increase your appetite? New evidence from randomised controlled trial says no 

Women with obesity do not need to gain weight during pregnancy, new study suggests

Individuals with multiple sclerosis face substantially greater risk of hospitalisation and death from COVID-19, despite high rates of vaccination

Study shows obesity in childhood associated with a more than doubling of risk of developing multiple sclerosis in early adulthood

Rice Emerging Scholars Program receives $2.5M NSF grant to boost STEM education

Virtual rehabilitation provides benefits for stroke recovery

Generative AI develops potential new drugs for antibiotic-resistant bacteria

Biofuels could help island nations survive a global catastrophe, study suggests

NJIT research team discovering how fluids behave in nanopores with NSF grant

New study shows association of historical housing discrimination and shortfalls in colon cancer treatment

Social media use may help to empower plastic surgery patients

Q&A: How to train AI when you don't have enough data

Wayne State University researchers uncover potential treatment targets for Zika virus-related eye abnormalities

Discovering Van Gogh in the wild: scientists unveil a new gecko species

Small birds spice up the already diverse diet of spotted hyenas in Namibia

Imaging detects transient “hypoxic pockets” in the mouse brain

Dissolved organic matter could be used to track and improve the health of freshwaters

Indoor air quality standards in public buildings would boost health and economy, say international experts

Positive associations between premenstrual disorders and perinatal depression

New imaging method illuminates oxygen's journey in the brain

Researchers discover key gene for toxic alkaloid in barley

New approach to monitoring freshwater quality can identify sources of pollution, and predict their effects

Bidirectional link between premenstrual disorders and perinatal depression

[Press-News.org] Picture books can boost physical activity for youth with autism
University of Missouri researcher says the exercise guides can also be used by low-income families to promote a healthy lifestyle