Jim Liebelt's Youth Culture Watch

Children Who Have Frequent Nightmares at Greater Risk of Dementia, Parkinson’s by Age 50

The following is excerpted from an online article posted by StudyFinds.

A new study published in The Lancet’s eClinicalMedicine journal showed that children who experience regular bad dreams and nightmares between the ages of seven and 11, may be nearly twice as likely to develop cognitive impairment (the core feature of dementia) by the time they reach age 50. And they may be up to seven times more likely to be diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease by age 50.

The study used data from the well-known 1958 British birth cohort study, which follows the lives of all children born in England, Scotland and Wales during the week of March 3–9, 1958.

When the children were aged seven (1965) and 11 (1969), their mothers answered a range of questions about their health, including whether they had experienced bad dreams in the previous three months (yes/no).

The 6,991 children were categorized on how regularly they experienced bad dreams at ages seven and 11: “never,” “occasional,” or “persistent.” Then, statistical software was used to determine whether the children with more regular bad dreams were more likely to develop cognitive impairment or be diagnosed with Parkinson’s by the time they turned 50 (2008).

The results were clear. The more regularly the children experienced bad dreams, the more likely they were to develop cognitive impairment or be diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.

Remarkably, compared with children who never had bad dreams, those who had persistent bad dreams were 76% more likely to develop cognitive impairment and were 640% more likely to develop Parkinson’s. This pattern was similar for both boys and girls.

These results suggest that having regular bad dreams and nightmares during childhood may increase the risk of developing progressive brain diseases like dementia or Parkinson’s disease later in life. They also raise the intriguing possibility that reducing bad dream frequency during early life could be an early opportunity to prevent both conditions.

Although these findings sound alarming, put in their proper context, they shouldn’t be. Of the roughly 7,000 children included in the study, only 268 (4%) had persistent bad dreams according to their mothers. Among these children, only 17 had developed cognitive impairment or Parkinson’s disease by age 50 (6%).

So it is likely that the vast majority of people who have persistent bad dreams in childhood are not going to develop early-onset dementia or Parkinson’s.

Source: StudyFinds
https://studyfinds.org/children-nightmares-dementia-parkinsons/

Pandemic Stress Literally Caused Teen Brains to Age by Several Years

The following is excerpted from an online article posted by StudyFinds.

Stress from the COVID-19 pandemic led to teenagers’ brains physically aging faster, new research reveals. Stanford University scientists report that pandemic-related stressors have literally altered the brain structure of adolescents, making them appear several years older in comparison to their peers prior to the global health crisis.

In 2020 alone, the study notes that reports of anxiety and depression among adults skyrocketed by over 25 percent. The new findings, published in the journal Biological Psychiatry, reveal that the neurological and mental health impact of COVID on teenagers may have been even worse.

“We already know from global research that the pandemic has adversely affected mental health in youth, but we didn’t know what, if anything, it was doing physically to their brains,” says first author Ian Gotlib, the David Starr Jordan Professor of Psychology in the School of Humanities & Sciences, in a media release.

Gotlib explains that changes in brain structure occur naturally as people age. During puberty and early teenage years, adolescents experience increased growth in both the hippocampus and the amygdala.

By comparing MRI scans from 163 children performed before and during the pandemic, Prof. Gotlib’s study discovered that this developmental process sped up among teenagers who experienced COVID-19 lockdowns.

Until now, accelerated changes in “brain age” have only appeared in children dealing with “chronic adversity” — such as violence or neglect. Prof. Gotlib says that although those experiences have a connection to poor mental health outcomes later in life, it’s still unclear if the changes in brain structure during the pandemic will have the same effect. “It’s also not clear if the changes are permanent,” adds Gotlib, the director of the Stanford Neurodevelopment, Affect, and Psychopathology (SNAP) Laboratory.

“Will their chronological age eventually catch up to their ‘brain age’? If their brain remains permanently older than their chronological age, it’s unclear what the outcomes will be in the future. For a 70- or 80-year-old, you’d expect some cognitive and memory problems based on changes in the brain, but what does it mean for a 16-year-old if their brains are aging prematurely?”

Source: StudyFinds
https://studyfinds.org/pandemic-teen-brains-age-faster/

Anxious Teens May Face Higher Odds for Future Heart Attack

*The following is excerpted from an online article posted on HealthDay.

Middle-aged men who were anxious or depressed teens are at increased risk for heart attack, according to a large, long-term study.

It included more than 238,000 men born between 1952 and 1956 who underwent extensive exams when they were 18 or 19 years old and were followed to age 58.

Men diagnosed with anxiety or depression in their late teens had a 20% higher risk of heart attack than those who didn't, the study showed.

The findings only reflect an association. The link was partly, but not fully, explained by poorer ability to cope with everyday stress and lower physical fitness in teens with mental health conditions, according to findings presented at a virtual meeting of the European Society of Cardiology.

The takeaway: "Be vigilant and look for signs of stress, depression or anxiety that is beyond the normal teenage angst: Seek help if there seems to be a persistent problem," suggested study author Cecilia Bergh, a senior lecturer in health sciences at Orebro University in Sweden.

Better fitness in youth is likely to protect against heart disease, particularly if people stay fit as they age, Bergh said, adding that exercise may also alleviate negative consequences of stress.

Research presented at meetings is typically considered preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Source: HealthDay
https://consumer.healthday.com/cardiovascular-health-information-20/heart-attack-warning-signs-and-risk-news-366/anxious-teens-may-face-higher-odds-for-future-heart-attack-study-760686.html

Playtime with Dad May Improve Children's Self-control

*The following is excerpted from an online article posted on ScienceDaily.

Children whose fathers make time to play with them from a very young age may find it easier to control their behavior and emotions as they grow up, research suggests.

The study, by academics at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, and the LEGO Foundation, pulled together fragmentary evidence from the past 40 years to understand more about how fathers play with their children when they are very young (ages 0 to 3). The researchers wanted to find out whether father-child play differs from the way children play with their mothers and its impact on children's development.

Although there are many similarities between fathers and mothers overall, the findings suggest that fathers engage in more physical play even with the youngest children, opting for activities such as tickling, chasing, and piggy-back rides.

This seems to help children learn to control their feelings. It may also make them better at regulating their own behavior later on, as they enter settings where those skills are important -- especially school.

Paul Ramchandani, Professor of Play in Education, Development and Learning at the University of Cambridge, said: "It's important not to overstate the impact of father-child play as there are limits to what the research can tell us, but it does seem that children who get a reasonable amount of playtime with their father benefit as a group."

Parent-child play in the first years of life is known to support essential social, cognitive, and communication skills, but most research focuses on mothers and infants. Studies that investigate father-child play are often small or do so incidentally. "Our research pulled together everything we could find on the subject, to see if we could draw any lessons," Ramchandani said.

The Cambridge review used data from 78 studies, undertaken between 1977 and 2017 -- most of them in Europe or North America.

In almost all the studies surveyed, there was a consistent correlation between father-child play and children's subsequent ability to control their feelings. Children who enjoyed high-quality playtime with their fathers were less likely to exhibit hyperactivity or emotional and behavioral problems. They also appeared to be better at controlling their aggression, and less prone to lash out at other children during disagreements at school.

Source: ScienceDaily
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/06/200629120137.htm

Research Finds Balance Tests Key in Better Gauging Concussions

*The following is excerpted from an online article posted on MedicalXpress.

As professional football approaches the July start of training camps and prep and college football programs look toward their fall seasons, new research from Florida Tech into concussions among student-athletes may have found a better way to understand the severity of these head injuries: balance tests.

In "Change in Balance Performance Predicts Neurocognitive Dysfunction and Symptom Endorsement in Concussed College Athletes," published in the Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology, Florida Tech Ph.D. students Andrew DaCosta and Andrew Crane, former Florida Tech psychology professor Frank Webbe, and university psychology associate professor Anthony LoGalbo explored the change in balance performance in relation to neurocognitive functioning or symptom endorsement among student-athletes referred for possible concussions.

The researchers found that individuals who normally have great balance but demonstrate a notable decline in balance and report balance problems exhibited poorer post-concussion neurocognitive performance, potentially suggesting a more acute injury.

Additionally, the research, which involved 68 student-athletes from multiple sports including lacrosse, football, soccer, and basketball, highlighted the importance of conducting pre-season or early baseline balance tests to better illuminate any changes that may appear in post-concussion testing.

Source: MedicalXpress
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-06-key-gauging-concussions.html

Autoimmunity on the Rise in the U.S., Teen Findings Most Worrisome

*The following is excerpted from an online article posted on National Institutes of Health.

Autoimmunity, a condition in which the body’s immune system reacts with components of its own cells, appears to be increasing in the United States, according to scientists at the National Institutes of Health and their collaborators.

In a study published in Arthritis and Rheumatology, the researchers found that the prevalence of antinuclear antibodies (ANA), the most common biomarker of autoimmunity, was significantly increasing in the United States overall and particularly in certain groups. These groups include males, non-Hispanic whites, adults 50 years and older, and adolescents. The study is the first to evaluate ANA changes over time in a representative sampling of the U.S. population.

The study included 14,211 participants, 12 years and older, in the U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). The scientists used immunofluorescence, a technique that uses fluorescent dye to visualize antibodies, to examine the frequencies of ANAs in subjects from three time periods. They found that ANA prevalence for 1988-1991 was 11.0%, while for 1999-2004 it was 11.5%, and for 2011-2012 it was 15.9%. These percentages corresponded to 22, 27, and 41 million affected individuals, respectively.

Of the four demographic groups that displayed considerable ANA increases, findings in the adolescent group were the most worrisome to the research team. Young people, ages 12-19, had the largest ANA increases in the study, going from a two-fold to a three-fold increase over the three timeframes.

"The reasons for the increases in ANA are not clear, but they are concerning and may suggest a possible increase in future autoimmune disease," said corresponding and senior author Frederick Miller, M.D., Ph.D., deputy chief of the Clinical Research Branch at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), part of NIH. "These findings could help us understand more about the causes of these immune abnormalities and possibly learn what drives the development of autoimmune diseases and how to prevent them."

Source: National Institutes of Health
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/autoimmunity-may-be-rising-united-states

Generosity Breeds Generosity - 4-Year-Olds Who Receive a Kindness Pay It Forward

*The following is excerpted from an online article posted on MedicalXpress.

Have you ever received an unexpected kindness? A stranger in the car ahead of you paid your highway toll. Or a kind consumer picked up your tab at Starbucks. These actions can set off a chain reaction of kindness, as you pay that kindness forward to the next unsuspecting person in line.

But when does this pay-it-forward mentality first emerge in humans? New research at the University of Virginia found that the phenomenon is first seen in four-year-olds.

In a pair of studies, experimenters worked with two groups. In the first study, three- and four-year-olds were called into a room individually and shown a transparent, locked box containing five enticing, colorful animal stickers. The experimenter then told each child a previous toddler—let's call her Sally—left a note sharing the location of the key to the box, which was hidden in the room. After finding the key, opening the box and collecting their treasures, the toddlers were asked by the experimenter if they would like to share some of their stickers with a new child.

The results were clear. Most of the three-year-olds (80%) did not want to share, while most of the four-year-olds—about 60% of them—did. The study's lead author, Stefen Beeler-Duden, a graduate psychology student, calls this generosity "upstream reciprocity."

In the second study, Beeler-Duden set out to learn what was driving the upstream reciprocity in the four-year-olds. Beeler-Duden broke down gratitude into two key parts: the gift itself and the actions of the person who provided the gift. So Beeler-Duden replicated the sticker experiment with a new group of four-year-olds and then asked them to evaluate Sally, the mysterious helper. Was she good, bad or just OK? He found that the children who positively evaluated Sally shared more stickers. It was, he said, "something like the emotional experience of gratitude."

"Moreover, children's positive evaluations of Sally were correlated with children's upstream reciprocity, that is, how many stickers they shared with the new child," reads part of the new study, published in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology.

So why are four-year-olds more likely than three-year-olds to share their animal stickers?

"It seems that four-year-olds are really paying attention to these different components that are associated with gratitude, noticing not only that they received something nice, but also that this person wanted to help them," Beeler-Duden said, "whereas it seems that three-year-olds are not necessarily tuned fully into these different components just yet."

"It also may be that our sticker game was a little bit too difficult for three-year-olds because there's a lot to keep track of."

Source: MedicalXpress
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-02-generosity-year-olds-kindness.html

Children Who Drink Whole Milk at Lower Risk of Being Overweight or Obese

*The following is excerpted from an online article posted on ScienceDaily.

A systematic review and meta-analysis led by St. Michael's Hospital of Unity Health Toronto found children who drank whole milk had 40 percent lower odds of being overweight or obese compared with children who consumed reduced-fat milk.

The research, published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, analyzed 28 studies from seven countries that explored the relationship between children drinking cow's milk and the risk of being overweight or obese. None of the studies -- which involved a total of almost 21,000 children between the ages of one and 18 years old -- showed that kids who drank reduced-fat milk had a lower risk of being overweight or obese. Eighteen of the 28 studies suggested children who drank whole milk were less likely to be overweight or obese.

The findings challenge Canadian and international guidelines that recommend children consume reduced-fat cow milk instead of whole milk starting at age two to reduce the risk of obesity.

"The majority of children in Canada and the United States consume cow's milk on a daily basis and it is a major contributor of dietary fat for many children," said Dr. Jonathon Maguire, lead author of the review and a pediatrician at St. Michael's Hospital.

"In our review, children following the current recommendation of switching to reduced-fat milk at age two were not leaner than those consuming whole milk."

Source: ScienceDaily
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/12/191230104810.htm

Sugar Causes ‘Major Changes’ to Brain Chemistry Comparable to Drugs

*The following is excerpted from an online article posted on StudyFinds.

Sugar is notorious for providing a jolt of energy followed by a lethargic period. Still, virtually no one thinks of sugar as a legitimate drug, and most parents have no problem giving their kids a few sugary treats at least from time to time. Now, a new study conducted at Aarhus University in Denmark finds that sugar actually influences our brains’ reward centers in essentially the same way as addictive drugs.

The research team had a group of pigs consume sugar water for 12 days and then examined their brain chemistry.

Even the study’s authors admit they were surprised by the extent of their findings.

“There is no doubt that sugar has several physiological effects, and there are many reasons why it is not healthy. But I have been in doubt of the effects sugar has on our brain and behavior, I had hoped to be able to kill a myth,” comments study author Michael Winterdahl, Associate Professor at the AU Department of Clinical Medicine, in a release.

“After just 12 days of sugar intake, we could see major changes in the brain’s dopamine and opioid systems. In fact, the opioid system, which is that part of the brain’s chemistry that is associated with well-being and pleasure, was already activated after the very first intake,” Winterdahl explains.

“If sugar can change the brain’s reward system after only twelve days, as we saw in the case of the pigs, you can imagine that natural stimuli such as learning or social interaction are pushed into the background and replaced by sugar and/or other ‘artificial’ stimuli. We’re all looking for the rush from dopamine, and if something gives us a better or bigger kick, then that’s what we choose,” Winterdahl says.

“It would, of course, be ideal if the studies could be done in humans themselves, but humans are hard to control and dopamine levels can be modulated by a number of different factors. They are influenced by what we eat, whether we play games on our phones or if we enter a new romantic relationship in the middle of the trial, with potential for great variation in the data,” he explains.

The pigs used in this study served as a strong substitute for human subjects because the brain of a pig is fairly complex, similarly shaped to human brains, and large enough to be imaged using human brain scanners.

The study was published in Scientific Reports.

Source: StudyFinds
https://www.studyfinds.org/more-than-a-rush-sugar-causes-major-changes-to-brain-chemistry-comparable-to-drugs/

How Long Will Your Teen Live? Personality Might Tell

*The following is excerpted from an online article posted on HealthDay.

Does your teenager's personality actually predict how long he or she will live?

Yes, claims new research that finds high school students who tend to be calm, empathetic and intellectually curious are more likely to still be alive 50 years later than their peers who are less so.

The finding does not prove that certain traits in adolescence actually cause people to live longer; it only reveals an association between the two.

But the conclusion stems from an in-depth analysis of personality surveys conducted in 1960, involving nearly 27,000 high school students across the United States. Those results were then stacked up against participant deaths due to all causes over nearly 50 years.

"Essentially, we find that high school students who report adaptive personality characteristics -- things like high levels of calmness and low levels of impulsivity -- have a lower risk of death over the ensuing half century," said study author Benjamin Chapman. He is an associate professor in the departments of psychiatry and public health sciences at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York.

In addition to calmness and impulsivity, the initial survey gauged teenage levels of social sensitivity; leadership; energetic disposition; self-confidence; tidiness; sociability; intellectual curiosity; and maturity.

Chapman said his team "looked initially at each trait one by one." That meant that calmness was linked to a reduced risk of early death, whether or not the same teen also possessed other protective or risky traits.

Still, "adolescents who are more sociable tended also to be more self-confident, and so forth," he observed, suggesting that some traits tend to group together in the same person.

Chapman also noted that personality traits were assessed on a spectrum, so that each teen was characterized as having relatively high or low levels of a particular trait. And that meant that the degree to which a teenage trait was associated with a lower premature death risk also fell across a continuum.

For example, highly mature teens saw their long-term risk for an early death fall by about 6 percent for every statistically significant move up along the maturity spectrum; it fell by 8 percent for every notable bump in calmness and energetic disposition.

Bigger trait differences would likely produce even more dramatic protective benefits, the study authors suggested.

The findings were published online in the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health.

The initial personality survey asked more than 377,000 high schoolers to complete a battery of psychological tests back in 1960.

Death records dating up to 2009 were obtained for nearly 27,000 of them. By that point, 13 percent had died. The team did not assess specific causes of death.

And regardless of a teen's ethnic or family background, those who scored higher in terms of energy, empathy, calmness, tidiness, intellectual curiosity and maturity -- as well as lower for impulsivity -- faced a lower risk of death over the 48-year period.

"The insight of this work is that characteristics that we think are not particularly helpful in teens for immediate outcomes -- like getting good grades, getting into college, adjusting socially and emotionally to everyday life -- actually can have very long-term health consequences," said Chapman.

"The good news is that people can and often do change," he added. "There are many points in life between high school and a half-century later where chains of negative events can be halted or reversed in a sense."

Source: HealthDay
https://consumer.healthday.com/kids-health-information-23/adolescents-and-teen-health-news-719/how-long-will-your-teen-live-personality-might-tell-739866.html