Researchers find breastfeeding linked to higher neurocognitive testing scores
2021-04-27
(Press-News.org) New research finds that children who were breastfed scored higher on neurocognitive tests. Researchers in the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience at the University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC) analyzed thousands of cognitive tests taken by nine and ten-year-olds whose mothers reported they were breastfed, and compared those results to scores of children who were not.
"Our findings suggest that any amount of breastfeeding has a positive cognitive impact, even after just a few months." Daniel Adan Lopez, Ph.D. candidate in the Epidemiology program who is first author on the study recently published in the journal Frontiers in Public Health. "That's what's exciting about these results. Hopefully from a policy standpoint, this can help improve the motivation to breastfeed."
Hayley Martin, Ph.D., a fourth year medical student in the Medical Scientist Training Program and co-author of the study, focuses her research on breastfeeding. "There's already established research showing the numerous benefits breastfeeding has for both mother and child. This study's findings are important for families particularly before and soon after birth when breastfeeding decisions are made. It may encourage breastfeeding goals of one year or more. It also highlights the critical importance of continued work to provide equity focused access to breastfeeding support, prenatal education, and practices to eliminate structural barriers to breastfeeding."
Researchers reviewed the test results of more than 9,000 nine and ten-year-old participants in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study. Variations were found in the cumulative cognitive test scores of breastfed and non-breastfed children. There was also evidence that the longer a child was breastfed, the higher they scored.
"The strongest association was in children who were breastfed more than 12 months," said Lopez. "The scores of children breastfed until they were seven to 12 months were slightly less, and then the one to six month-old scores dips a little more. But all scores were higher when compared to children who didn't breastfeed at all." Previous studies found breastfeeding does not impact executive function or memory, findings in this study made similar findings.
"This supports the foundation of work already being done around lactation and breastfeeding and its impact on a child's health," said Ed Freedman, Ph.D., the principal investigator of the ABCD study in Rochester and lead author of the study. "These are findings that would have not been possible without the ABCD Study and the expansive data set it provides."
INFORMATION:
Additional co-authors include John Foxe, Ph.D. and Yunjiao Mao with URMC, and Wesley Thompson of University of California San Diego. URMC is one of 21-sites across the country collecting data for the ABCD study, the largest long-term study of brain development and child health. The study is funded by the National Institutes of Health.
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2021-04-27
A team of scientists has found that women's football was common across Japan between the Meiji restoration and the start of the Second World War. In the process, they also uncovered the oldest known photograph of women playing football in Japan, from 1916.
The history of men's football in Japan is well documented. In particular, the introduction of association football into Japan in the late 19th and 20th centuries has been extensively investigated. The same degree of attention had not been paid to women's football.
A team of researchers from six institutions, including Associate Professor Yoshihiro ...
2021-04-27
AMHERST Mass. - Scientists have long sought to invent materials that can respond to the external world in predictable, self-regulating ways. Now, new research conducted at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and appearing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences brings us one step closer to that goal. For their inspiration, the scientists looked to nature.
Lampreys swimming, horses walking, and insects flying: each of these behaviors is made possible by a network of oscillators--mechanisms that produce a repetitive motion, such as wriggling a tail, taking a stride, or flapping a wing. What's more, these natural oscillators can respond to their environment in predictable ways. In ...
2021-04-27
Much as yeast serves in bakeries as single-celled helper, the bacterium Escherischia coli is a must in every biotechnology lab. A team led by Prof. Dr. Barbara Di Ventura, professor of biological signaling research at the University of Freiburg, has developed a new so-called optogenetic tool that simplifies a standard method in biotechnology: Instead of feeding the bacteria with sugar as commonly done, the researchers can now simply shine light on them. Di Ventura, Prof. Dr. Mustafa Hani Khammash from ETH Zurich/Switzerland and their teams, foremost first authors Edoardo Romano and Dr. Armin Baumschlager, ...
2021-04-27
A combination of inexpensive oral medications may be able to treat fatigue-inducing anemias caused by chronic diseases and inflammation, a new discovery from the University of Virginia School of Medicine suggests.
This type of anemia is the second-most common kind, and it can be an added burden for organ-transplant recipients and people with autoimmune disorders, as well as patients battling cancer or kidney disease and others. In addition to causing severe fatigue, the anemia can trigger headaches, dizziness, rapid heartbeat and sweating.
"Not only do these anemias cause unpleasant ...
2021-04-27
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted health disparities for people of color, who have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic. People with opioid use disorder (OUD) faced unique challenges when many mental health and addiction services were forced to scale back operations or temporarily close when social distancing guidelines were put in place.
A group of researchers in the College of Agriculture, Health and Natural Resources recently published their findings in the Journal of Substance Abuse and Treatment about the experiences of racial-ethnic minorities during the COVID-19 pandemic among people with OUD.
Doctoral ...
2021-04-27
The Middle East and North Africa Region (MENA) is a climate change hot spot where summers warm much faster than in the rest of the world. Some parts of the region are already among the hottest locations globally. A new international study predicts that ignoring the signals of climate change and continuing business-as-usual will lead to extreme and life-threatening heatwaves in the region. Such extraordinary heat events will have a severe impact on the people of the area.
The study, which aims at assessing emerging heatwave characteristics, was led by scientists from the Climate and Atmosphere Research Center (CARE-C) of The Cyprus Institute and the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, with the contribution of researchers from the CMCC Foundation - Euro-Mediterranean ...
2021-04-27
People with certain blood types are more likely to have blood clots or bleeding conditions, kidney stones, or pregnancy-induced hypertension, suggests a study published today in eLife.
The study confirms previously identified connections between certain blood types and the risk of blood clots and bleeding, and makes a new connection between kidney stones and having type B blood as compared to O. The discoveries may lead to new insights on how a person's blood type may predispose them to developing a certain disease.
Previous studies have found that people with blood type A or B were more likely to have cardiovascular disease or experience ...
2021-04-27
TROY, N.Y. -- When combined with drugs currently used to treat hepatitis C, the antiviral remdesivir is 10 times more effective in treating cells infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.
Published this week in Cell Reports, this finding -- from Gaetano Montelione, a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and his collaborators at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and the University of Texas at Austin -- raises the potential for repurposing available drugs as COVID-19 antivirals in cases where a vaccine isn't practical or effective.
Remdesivir, which blocks viral replication by interfering with a viral polymerase, must ...
2021-04-27
ADELPHI, Md. -- Army researchers developed a technique that allows robots to remain resilient when faced with intermittent communication losses on the battlefield.
The technique, called α-shape, provides an efficient method for resolving goal conflicts between multiple robots that may want to visit the same area during missions including unmanned search and rescue, robotic reconnaissance, perimeter surveillance and robotic detection of physical phenomena, such as radiation and underwater concentration of lifeforms.
Researchers from the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command, known as DEVCOM, Army Research Laboratory and the University of Nebraska, Omaha ...
2021-04-27
In a uniquely deep and detailed look at how the commonly used anesthetic propofol causes unconsciousness, a collaboration of labs at The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT shows that as the drug takes hold in the brain, a wide swath of regions become coordinated by very slow rhythms that maintain a commensurately languid pace of neural activity. Electrically stimulating a deeper region, the thalamus, restores synchrony of the brain's normal higher frequency rhythms and activity levels, waking the brain back up and restoring arousal.
"There's a folk psychology or tacit assumption that what anesthesia does is simply 'turn off' the brain," said ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] Researchers find breastfeeding linked to higher neurocognitive testing scores