A study published in Nature – International Journal of Science confirms that individuals with extra copies of chromosome 21, as found in individuals with Down syndrome, have genes that block certain types of cancer growth. This may have far-reaching implications in the therapies we use to treat cancer.

Most types of cancer are rare in individuals with Down syndrome and they are shown to have a far lower mortality rate than those in the general population.

Late cancer researcher Judah Folkman, MD, who founded the Vascular Biology Program at Children’s Hospital Boston, first proposed that these individuals may benefit from an extra gene that blocks angiogenesis (or the development of certain blood vessels that create an environment for cancer growth), as they are also less likely to develop other diseases related to this same type of growth, such as macular degeneration.

This study confirms Dr. Folkman’s theory and provides new insight for the development of specific, targeted treatments. The research proved that the same cells in both mice and humans followed the same type of angiogenesis suppression, meaning they might point to a new and exciting type of cancer therapy.

NACD has been dedicated over the last several decades to addressing issues that impact children and adults with Down syndrome. We seek to change public opinion as well as the opinions of parents and professionals about their potential. Studies like this just confirm what we have always known—that these individuals have many undiscovered gifts to offer and uncover.

References

1. Kwan-Hyuck Baek, Alexander Zaslavsky, Ryan C. Lynch, Carmella Britt, Yoshiaki Okada, Richard J. Siarey, M. William Lensch, In-Hyun Park, Sam S. Yoon, Takashi Minami, Julie R. Korenberg, Judah Folkman, George Q. Daley, William C. Aird, Zygmunt Galdzicki & Sandra Ryeom. Down’s syndrome suppression of tumour growth and the role of the calcineurin inhibitor DSCR1. Nature, 2009; DOI: 10.1038/nature08062
2. Children’s Hospital Boston. “Why Do People With Down Syndrome Have Less Cancer? Research In Mice And Human Stem Cells Suggests New Therapeutic Targets.” ScienceDaily. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/05/090520140359.htm (accessed June 18, 2018).

The post NACD Science Corner Vol. 14 – Why Do People with Down Syndrome Have Less Cancer? appeared first on NACD International | The National Association for Child Development.

A newly published study explored the effects of reading to your child versus having them use other media, such as watching a cartoon or listening to an audiobook.

“In a single generation, the explosion of screen-based media has transformed the experience of childhood, from TV and videos, to an unlimited range of content available at any time via portable devices that can be challenging to monitor,” said Dr. John S. Hutton, one of the authors of the study. “The emergence of these technologies has far outpaced our ability to quantify its effects on child development, human relationships, learning and health, fueling controversies among parents, educators and clinical providers…” Hutton is a researcher and pediatrician at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital where he studies the processes of learning how to read.

In the study, 27 children, each around age 4, were observed in an FMRI machine. They were given the stories three different ways: audio only; the illustrated pages of a storybook with an audio voiceover; and an animated cartoon.

Using only audio, the language parts of the brain were activated, but there was less overall interaction. There was evidence the children were not fully understanding the information.

With the cartoons (animated images with audio), there was a lot of brain activity and perception, but not a lot of interconnectivity between the various types of processing. “The language network was working to keep up with the story,” says Hutton. “Our interpretation was that the animation was doing all the work for the child. They were expending the most energy just figuring out what it means.” Comprehension of the story was found to be the least effective when viewing the cartoons.

When shown illustrations along with being read the story, instead of only paying attention to the words, the children’s comprehension of the story was helped by the illustrations. “Give them a picture and they have a cookie to work with,” he explains. “With animation it’s all dumped on them all at once and they don’t have to do any of the work.”

In the illustrated book version of the test, researchers noted better connectivity between all the brain networks: visual, imagery, language and more.

Reading to children seems to have the added effect of stimulating their imagination more as they attempt to “fill in the blanks” between the audio and the simple illustrations. If their language and auditory processing development is not yet developed or is falling behind, it may be that reading to them using a book with illustrations will help them keep up and comprehend better.

The overall implication of the study appears to show that for kids who have a hard time keeping up with the auditory and visual information coming in with an animated cartoon, may be helped by using the illustrations to form a better mental picture of what they are reading and hearing. Not to mention the physical and emotional bond that is formed by reading to your child.

While it’s not always possible to read to your child and certain cartoons can be stimulating and also educational, mixing in some one-on-one reading time using books with illustrations can be an effective way to build your child’s visual and auditory processing.

Sources

NPR.org – Learning & Tech – What’s Going On In Your Child’s Brain When You Read Them A Story? by Anya Kamenetz – May 24, 2018

Assessment of Screen-Based Media Use in Children: Development and Psychometric Refinement of the ScreenQ – John Hutton, Jonathan Dudley,Tzipi Horowitz-Kraus, Thomas DeWitt, Scott Holland

The post NACD Science Corner Vol. 13 – Is Reading to Your Child Better Than Using Other Media? appeared first on NACD International | The National Association for Child Development.

A recent research article published in The Journal of Family Psychology reported the use of guilt-inducing parenting causes distress and anger that is still measurable the next day. Guilt-inducing parenting is when a parent tries to impact a child’s behavior by trying to make them feel guilty. An example might be when a child won’t eat his dinner and the parent says, “I work all day long in order to buy that food for you, and you are just going to waste it?” Other examples would include any manner in which the parent displays he/she is ashamed of a child’s bad behavior. The study was conducted with 152 children in the first grade by using a diary questionnaire filled out every day for a week by both the mother and father. Although the research demonstrates that there are ill-effects of guilt-inducing parenting from either the mother or father, the effects from the father appear to be especially bad on the child. The report also describes that guilt-inducing parenting is more typical for parents who are exhausted or undergoing distress themselves.

When a child engages in inappropriate behavior, what could a parent do instead? The parent should give the child a consequence and consistently give the child the consequence every time the child misbehaves. Indeed, the study reported that such direct limit-setting parenting does not have the long-lasting negative effects that guilt-inducing parenting has. There is no need to have a long discussion with the child about the behavior beyond what not to do and why the behavior is inappropriate, because any discussion beyond that can be self-defeating and possibly turns the behavior into a negative attention-getting behavior. Meanwhile, the parents should define clear, concise expectations and provide positive reinforcement for good behavior. Look for your child doing what is good, and praise your child for that. Overall, NACD emphasizes creating a positive environment, which is defined by four positive responses to every negative response the child receives.

To learn more about how you can establish a positive environment in your home, please read our article here.

Source

Parent induces guilt, child shows distress (2013). AlphaGalileo Foundation. Academy of Finland. http://www.alphagalileo.org/ViewItem.aspx?ItemId=129647&CultureCode=en

The post Science Corner Vol. 9 – Evidence That Sending a Child on a Guilt Trip Has Long-Lasting, Negative Effects appeared first on NACD International | The National Association for Child Development.

The Tucson Children’s Assessment of Sleep Apnea Study was published this year in the journal SLEEP [1]. In this study of 263 youth, sleep study and neurobehavioral data was collected twice, five years apart. Twenty-one of the children had persistent sleep apnea throughout the entire study. These children were six times more likely to have behavioral problems when compared to children with no sleep issues. Parent-reported behavioral problems were significantly higher for the children with sleep apnea; these observed problems included hyperactivity, attention deficits, aggressiveness, poorer communication, lower social competency, diminished self-care, and compromised adaptive skills. The study also reported an association between sleep apnea and lower academic function. The children with persistent sleep apnea were three times more likely to have learning problems and seven times more likely to have grades of C or lower than youth who never had sleep apnea. This study and others [2] conclude that children with sleeping issues may develop learning problems, disruptive behaviors, and other ADHD symptoms if sleeping issues are left untreated.

The National Association for Child Development has known that sleeping issues affect the global development of a child, due largely to a lack of adequate oxygen being delivered to the brain during sleep. Sleep apnea is a breathing problem in which the airflow is limited and obstructed during sleep, resulting in less oxygen to the brain [3]. The importance of oxygen for the brain cannot be overstated. The brain uses about three times as much oxygen as muscles in the body do, and brain function and performance are directly linked to oxygen availability [4]. NACD highly recommends that parents with a child experiencing any symptoms of sleep apnea, such as snoring, take the child to a doctor to be evaluated. It is also a good idea to frequently check the child’s oxygen saturation level. A quick, easy, inexpensive way to track oxygen saturation levels at home is with a pulse oximeter.

To find out more about sleep apnea, including common symptoms and treatments used by doctors, please read our article here.


To find out more about the importance of oxygen for the brain, please read our article here.

To find out more about pulse oximeters, please read our article here.

Sources

1. Perfect, M.M., et al. (2013). Risk of behavioral and adaptive functioning difficulties in youth with previous and current sleep disordered breathing. SLEEP, 36(4), 517-525.
2. Beebe, D.W., et al. (2010). The association between sleep disordered breathing, academic grades, and cognitive and behavioral functioning among overweight subjects during middle to late childhood. SLEEP, 33, 1447-1456.
3. Riggs, S. (2012). Sleeping and breathing problems. NACD Journal, 25(3).
4. Joo, E.Y. (2010). Reduced brain gray matter concentration in patients with obstructive sleep apnea syndrome. SLEEP, 33, 235-41.

The post Science Corner Vol. 7 – Sleep Apnea and Its Association to Behavior, Learning Problems and ADHD appeared first on NACD International | The National Association for Child Development.

It might not be that shocking to find homeschoolers get more sleep than their public school peers, but a new study which featured 2,600 adolescents around the nation found homeschoolers get on average 90 minutes more sleep per night!

Just to put that into perspective, 90 minutes a night over the course of a 5-day school week equates to 1 entire night of extra sleep. Ninety minutes is also the length of an entire extra REM cycle, which means homeschooled students have a huge advantage when it comes to consolidating the information learned the previous day into long-term memory, recovering from the physical and mental demands of the previous day, and having increased vitality and focus to face the next day head-on. It has long been known that when puberty begins, the internal biological clock normally has a sleep-phase delay in which adolescents naturally go to bed later at night, and consequently, wake up later in the morning. Yet, in spite of this understanding, most middle schools and high schools start school even earlier in the day compared to elementary. It’s no wonder only 24.5% of public school adolescents are meeting their daily sleep requirement! Homeschooling simply gives the flexibility in scheduling to allow the child to wake up not when the alarm clock goes off, but when the biological clock goes off. To read more about NACD’s programs for homeschoolers click here.

Source:

Hughes, T. (2013, March 15). Study: Home-schoolers better rested than other students. Retrieved from http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/na5on/2013/03/14/home-school-sleep-study/1986781/ Dawson, P. (2005). Sleep and Adolescents. National Association of School Psychologists.

The post Science Corner Vol. 3 – The Sleep Advantage of Homeschooling: Scientifically Verified appeared first on NACD International | The National Association for Child Development.

Last summer, a group of researchers
 published a study in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience in which they
used fMRI technology to show
auditory working memory training
 (such as the auditory sequential processing activities in Simply Smarter) resulted in physical changes 
to the brain. In addition to showing
 auditory working memory can be
 trained, this research was able to demonstrate such training is more
than just learning a skill, but literally 
transforms the brain and the mind. These findings are consistent with Bob 
Doman and NACD’s 40+ years of experience in the development of tools for building processing and working memory. The researchers also found that physically altering the brain did not take very much time—only eight training sessions in 2 weeks!

Over the course of two weeks, a group of normal, healthy college students had a total of only eight training sessions that consisted of performing auditory working memory activities. Previously, they had taken part in an fMRI pretest alongside a matched control group; and at the end of the two-week training, they took part in an fMRI posttest that was conducted in the same manner as the pretest. The tests measured brain activation of all the participants as they performed auditory and visual working memory tasks and control tasks. When the fMRI posttest data was compared to pretest data, measured changes in the brain were observed in certain brain sections of the “fronto-parietal working memory network” for the treatment group but not the control group. These physical changes were also accompanied by an improvement in the performance of auditory memory tasks.

Other findings concluded that auditory training by itself did not significantly enhance visual functioning and vice versa, which is again consistent with NACD’s methodology of addressing both auditory and visual sequential processing.

Please explore the NACD Foundation initiative the Simply Smarter Project, as well as NACD’s Cognition Coach app and Simply Smarter.

Source:

Schneiders, J.A., et al. (2012). The impact of auditory working memory training on the fronto-parietal working memory network. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 6, 173. doi: 0.3389/fnhum.2012.00173

The post Science Corner Vol. 2: Working Memory Training Physically Changes Brain for the Better, fMRI Neuroimaging Study Finds appeared first on NACD International | The National Association for Child Development.

Have you ever wondered what it is exactly about the extra chromosome 21 that makes cognitive development in children with Down syndrome so challenging? Just this March researchers at the Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute published research that may have cracked the code on this one. The researchers have found that a protein called sorting nexin 27, or just SNX27, is reduced in the brains of humans with Down syndrome. SNX27 is a protein that directs important communication proteins to where they need to be inside brain cells. Essentially, if these communication proteins are not properly directed by SNX27, then the brain cells do not communicate as well, and learning and memory are impaired.

Chromosome 21 produces a regulating molecule called miR-155, and so the extra chromosome 21 produces an excess of this regulating molecule. Too much miR-155 indirectly over-regulates SNX27, causing a shortage in SNX27, and consequently, a deficit in cognitive development.

Fortunately, there is still some SNX27 protein in the brain cells of children with Down syndrome, and their brain cells can still communicate! The more any given brain cells communicate, the better those brain cells function together. Brain cells that have impaired communication need better input, and by better we mean more frequent, intense, and specific input. For four decades NACD has been basing its targeted intervention programs for Down syndrome children and adults off this science.

For more information on NACD programs for Down syndrome, please check us out here:

NACD Down Syndrome Website

Source:

Wang, X., et al. (2013). Loss of sorting nexin 27 contributes to excitatory synaptic dysfunction by modulating glutamate receptor recycling in Down’s syndrome.
Nature Medicine. doi:10.1038/nm.3117

The post Science Corner Vol. 1: Cracking the Code Behind the Cognitive Development Challenges of Down syndrome appeared first on NACD International | The National Association for Child Development.