scholarly journals Brain Morphometry and Diminished Physical Growth in Bangladeshi Children Growing up in Extreme Poverty: a Longitudinal Study

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ted K. Turesky ◽  
Talat Shama ◽  
Shahria Hafiz Kakon ◽  
Rashidul Haque ◽  
Nazrul Islam ◽  
...  

AbstractDiminished physical growth is a common marker of malnutrition and it affects approximately 200 million children worldwide. Despite its importance and prevalence, it is not clear whether diminished growth affects brain development and neurocognitive outcomes. Further, diminished growth is more common in areas of extreme poverty, raising the possibility that it may serve as a mechanism for previously shown links between poverty and brain development. To address these questions, 79 children growing up in an extremely poor, urban area of Bangladesh underwent MRI at 6 years. Structural brain images were submitted to Mindboggle software, a Docker-compliant and highly reproducible tool for tissue segmentation and regional estimations of volume, surface area, cortical thickness, travel depth, and mean curvature. Diminished growth predicted brain morphometry and mediated the link between poverty and brain morphometry most consistently for white matter and subcortical volumes. Meanwhile, brain volume in left pallidum and right ventral diencephalon mediated the relationship between diminished growth and full-scale IQ. These findings offer malnutrition as one possible mechanism by which poverty affects brain development and neurocognitive outcomes in areas of extreme poverty.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ted K Turesky ◽  
Laura Pirazzoli ◽  
Talat Shama ◽  
Shahria Hafiz Kakon ◽  
Rashidul Haque ◽  
...  

Over 300 million children grow up in environments of extreme poverty, and the biological and psychosocial hazards endemic to these environments often expose these children to infection, disease, and consequent inflammatory responses. Chronic inflammation in early childhood has been associated with diminished cognitive outcomes and despite this established relationship, the mechanisms explaining how inflammation affects brain development are not well known. Importantly, chronic inflammation is very common in areas of extreme poverty, raising the possibility that it may serve as a mechanism explaining the known relationship between low socioeconomic status (SES) and atypical brain development. To examine these potential pathways, seventy-nine children growing up in an extremely poor, urban area of Bangladesh underwent structural MRI scanning at six years of age. Structural brain images were submitted to Mindboggle software, a Docker-compliant and high-reproducibility tool for tissue segmentation and regional estimations of volume, surface area, cortical thickness, sulcal depth, and mean curvature. Concentration of C-reactive protein was assayed at eight time points between infancy and five years of age and the frequency with which children had elevated concentrations of inflammatory marker served as the measure of chronic inflammation. SES was measured with years of maternal education and income-to-needs. Chronic inflammation predicted total brain volume, total white matter volume, average sulcal depth, and bilateral putamen volumes. Chronic inflammation also mediated the link between maternal education and bilateral putamen volumes. These findings suggest that chronic inflammation is associated with brain morphometry globally and in the putamen, and further suggests that inflammation may be a potential mechanism linking SES to brain development.


Author(s):  
Ted K. Turesky ◽  
Talat Shama ◽  
Shahria Hafiz Kakon ◽  
Rashidul Haque ◽  
Nazrul Islam ◽  
...  

Author(s):  
Ruyu Liu ◽  
Caitlyn G Edwards ◽  
Corinne N Cannavale ◽  
Isabel R Flemming ◽  
Morgan R Chojnacki ◽  
...  

Abstract Background Breastfeeding is associated with healthier weight and nutrient status in early life. However, the impact of breastfeeding on carotenoid status beyond infancy, and the influence of adiposity, is unknown. Objective The aim of the study was to retrospectively investigate the relationship between breastfeeding and carotenoid status, and the mediating effect of weight status and adiposity on this relationship among school-aged children. Methods This was a secondary analysis of baseline data collected from a randomized-controlled clinical trial. (ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT03521349). 7–12-year-old (n = 81) children were recruited from East-Central Illinois. Dual-energy x-ray absorptiometry (DXA) was used to assess visceral adipose tissue (VAT) and whole-body adiposity (%Fat). Weight was obtained to calculated body mass index percentile (BMI %ile). Skin carotenoids were assessed via reflection spectroscopy. Macular carotenoids were assessed as macular pigment optical density (MPOD). Dietary, birth, and breastfeeding information was self-reported by parents. Results Skin carotenoids were inversely related to %Fat (P < 0.01), VAT (P < 0.01) and BMI %ile (P < 0.01). VAT and BMI %ile significantly mediated this relationship between exclusive breastfeeding duration and skin carotenoids, following adjustment for dietary carotenoids, energy intake, and mother education. Conclusions Weight status and adipose tissue distribution mediate the positive correlation between exclusive breastfeeding duration and skin carotenoids among children aged 7–12 years. The results indicate the need to support breastfeeding and healthy physical growth in childhood for optimal carotenoid status.


2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 212-234
Author(s):  
Joseph J. Merry ◽  
Donna Bobbitt-Zeher ◽  
Douglas B. Downey

In many parts of the world, fertility has declined in important ways in the past century. What are the consequences of this demographic change? Our study expands the empirical basis for understanding the relationship between number of siblings in childhood and social outcomes among adults. An important recent study found that for each additional sibling an individual grows up with, the likelihood of divorce as an adult declines by 3%. We expand this work by (a) determining whether the original pattern replicates in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health and (b) extending the analysis beyond divorce to consider whether growing up with siblings is related to prosocial adult behaviors (relationships with parents, friends, and views on conflict management with one’s partner). Our results confirm a negative association between number of siblings and divorce in adulthood. We find mixed results related to other prosocial adult behaviors.


2014 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 154-164 ◽  
Author(s):  
Danya Glaser

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to outline brain structure and development, the relationship between environment and brain development and implications for practice. Design/methodology/approach – The paper is based on a selected review of the literature and clinical experience. Findings – While genetics determine the sequence of brain maturation, the nature of brain development and functioning is determined by the young child's caregiving environment, to which the developing brain constantly adapts. The absence of input during sensitive periods may lead to later reduced functioning. There is an undoubted immediate equivalence between every mind function – emotion, cognition, behaviour and brain activity, although the precise location of this in the brain is only very partially determinable, since brain connections and function are extremely complex. Originality/value – This paper provides an overview of key issues in neurodevelopment relating to the development of young children, and implications for policy and practice.


Sociologija ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 263-285 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sladjana Dragisic-Labas ◽  
Milana Ljubicic

In this paper we explore the relationship between financial and residential independence of young people and some aspects of their psychological separation from parents. Namely, the adequate psychological separation of the youth from their parents is affected by the characteristics of family dynamics as a whole, by family narratives, and also by the ecosystem conditions (opportunities) for the financial and housing independence from parents. In order to examine these findings, which have been confirmed almost without exception in the foreign literature, we bring young people who live with their parents into the focus of this study, comparing them with their peers who have become independent in this respect. The analysis included a total of 1627 respondents aged 19-35 years, 909 of whom lived with their parents. We were interested in whether there were any significant differences in terms of statistics between these two diverse housing categories of respondents, considering material possibilities of the physical separation and some aspects of psychological separation from parents. These are: emotional, conflicting, and functional independence, and lack of privacy in the family. We obtained the following findings: there are clear differences in some aspects of psychological separation among those young people who continue living at their parents' home and those who chose (had a possibility of) physical separation. These findings must be interpreted from a broader, ecosystem perspective, in anticipation of the possible implications of the overall (non)independence of young people for their life outcomes.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hongkai Wang ◽  
Yang Tian ◽  
Yang Liu ◽  
Zhaofeng Chen ◽  
Haoyu Zhai ◽  
...  

AbstractStatistical Parametric Mapping (SPM) is a computational approach for analysing functional brain images like Positron Emission Tomography (PET). When performing SPM analysis for different patient populations, brain PET template images representing population-specific brain morphometry and metabolism features are helpful. However, most currently available brain PET templates were constructed using the Caucasian data. To enrich the family of publicly available brain PET templates, we created Chinese-specific template images based on 116 [18F]-fluorodeoxyglucose ([18F]-FDG) PET images of normal participants. These images were warped into a common averaged space, in which the mean and standard deviation templates were both computed. We also developed the SPM analysis programmes to facilitate easy use of the templates. Our templates were validated through the SPM analysis of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s patient images. The resultant SPM t-maps accurately depicted the disease-related brain regions with abnormal [18F]-FDG uptake, proving the templates’ effectiveness in brain function impairment analysis.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Huaiguang Liu ◽  
Liheng Zhang ◽  
Shiyang Zhou ◽  
Li Fang

The microstructure is the key factor for quality discriminate of coke. In view of the characteristics of coke optical tissue (COT), a segmentation method of coke microstructures based on adaptive clustering was proposed. According to the strategy of multiresolution, adaptive threshold binarization and morphological filtering were carried out on COT images with lower resolution. The contour of the COT body was detected through the relationship checking between contours in the binary image, and hence, COT pixels were picked out to cluster for tissue segmentation. In order to get the optimum segmentation for each tissue, an advanced K -means method with adaptive clustering centers was provided according to the Calinski-Harabasz score. Meanwhile, Euclidean distance was substituted with Mahalanobis distance between each pixel in HSV space to improve the accuracy. The experimental results show that compared with the traditional K -means algorithm, FCM algorithm, and Meanshift algorithm, the adaptive clustering algorithm proposed in this paper is more accurate in the segmentation of various tissue components in COT images, and the accuracy of tissue segmentation reaches 94.3500%.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lea L. Backhausen ◽  
Juliane H. Froehner ◽  
Herve Lemaitre ◽  
Eric Artiges ◽  
Marie-Laure Paillere-Martinot ◽  
...  

Adolescent subcortical structural brain development might underlie psychopathological symptoms, which often emerge in adolescence. At the same time, sex differences exist in psychopathology, which might be mirrored in underlying sex differences in structural development. However, previous studies showed inconsistencies in subcortical trajectories and potential sex differences. Therefore, we aimed to investigate the subcortical structural trajectories and their sex differences across adolescence using for the first time a single cohort design, the same quality control procedure, software and a general additive mixed modeling approach. We investigated two large European sites from ages 14 to 24 with 503 participants and 1408 total scans from France and Germany as part of the IMAGEN project including four waves of data acquisition. We found significantly larger volumes in males versus females in both sites and across all seven subcortical regions. Sex differences in age-related trajectories were observed across all regions in both sites. Our findings provide further evidence of sex differences in longitudinal adolescent brain development of subcortical regions and thus might eventually support the relationship of underlying brain development and different adolescent psychopathology in boys and girls.


2007 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-133 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nada Polovina ◽  
Jelena Stanisic

Family-school cooperation is a very complex process that can be studied at different levels in a number of different ways. This study has covered only some aspects of cooperation between parents and teachers, based on school documentation of a Belgrade elementary school. The study covered analyses of 60 Attendance Registers pertaining to 60 classes with 1289 students from Grade 1 through Grade 8 during an academic year. The unit of analysis included: parents attendance at PTA meetings and individual meetings between parents and teachers. In addition to the frequency of parents? visits to school, the relationship between such registered parents' visits and overall academic performance, grades in conduct, excused and unexcused absence from classes were also considered. The research findings indicated interference between development factors (attitude change in parent-child relationship and growing-up) and parents? informal "theory of critical grades" i.e. transitional processes in schooling. The findings confirmed that parents? individual visits to school were mainly meant to offer an excuse for the student?s absence from school, while attendance at PTA meetings was linked to poor grades in conduct and missed classes (both excused and unexcused). The findings also showed that parents pursued visiting strategies which were pragmatic, less time-consuming and less emotionally draining ones. The closing part refers to discussions on practical use of the study and possible further research. .


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