Good quality sleep helps children cope with stress
Adequate sleep reduces children’s stress and impulsive behaviour, says a recent study conducted by the University of Georgia. The researchers, led by Linhao Zhang, a doctoral student at the university’s College of Family and Consumer Sciences, studied data from a Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study of 11,858 children aged nine-ten years. Sleep problems, such as sleep latency and impulsive behavior, were checked at multiple time points over the course of two years. When children got less than the recommended nine hours of sleep or took more than 30 minutes to fall asleep, there was a strong link to impulsive behaviour such as “acting without a plan, seeking thrills and lacking perseverance”.
“A lot of adolescents don’t have enough time to sleep, and they are sleep deprived. This study shows why it is important to promote longer sleep duration by delaying school start times or establishing routines so that adolescents know, ‘OK, after this event, I’m going to bed,’” says Zhang.
Microplastics exposure causes significant behavioural changes
Infiltration of microplastics is as widespread in the body as it is in the environment, including food chains, leading to changes in brain activity and human behaviour, reveals a study published in the International Journal of Molecular Science (August). Researchers of the University of Rhode Island, USA, studied neurobehavioural effects and inflammatory responses to exposure to microplastics, and accumulation of microplastics in body tissues, including the brain. They found that microplastic exposure induces behavioural changes and alterations in immune markers in liver and brain tissues.
“Given that in this study the microplastics were delivered orally via drinking water, detection in tissues such as the gastrointestinal tract or in liver and kidneys was always probable,” says Jaime Ross, assistant professor of biomedical and pharmaceutical sciences at the Ryan Institute for Neuroscience and College of Pharmacy, University of Rhode Island.
However, she adds that the detection of microplastics in the heart and lungs, suggests that they are going beyond the digestive system and likely undergoing systemic circulation. “The brain blood barrier is supposed to be very difficult to permeate. It is a protective mechanism against viruses and bacteria, yet these particles were able to get in there. They were actually deep in brain tissue,” she says.
Adding zinc to soil can prevent childhood stunting
Childhood stunting could be prevented by adding zinc to farmland soil, says a study conducted by Stanford University researchers who studied health data from almost 300,000 children and 1 million women in India. The study published in Scientific Reports (August) demonstrates that zinc in soil prevents childhood stunting while iron maintains healthy haemoglobin levels. The researchers found that adding micronutrient-enriched fertilisers to soil resulted in 11 less cases of stunting per 1,000, and concluded that fortifying soil with minerals could be a beneficial health intervention.
“Understanding this could help to identify better approaches to solving child stunting in India which is one of the biggest and longest standing challenges in global food security,” says David Lobell, professor of earth system science at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability.
Gut problems linked to childhood allergies
Health disorders related to gut bacteria are the likely result of four childhood allergies that afflict more than 33 percent of the population worldwide — eczema, hay fever, asthma and food allergies, according to a study conducted by the University of British Columbia and published in Nature Communications (August).
The research study surveyed more than 1,000 children, aged 0-5 years, half of whom had one of these allergies. The researchers found that each allergy condition correlated with a characteristic bacterial footprint that signified a compromised stomach lining as well as heightened inflammation in the gut. “Developing therapies that change these interactions during infancy may therefore prevent the onset of all sorts of allergic diseases in childhood, which often last a lifetime,” says Stuart Turvey, professor of pediatrics at the University of British Columbia. He adds that the study findings could lead to methods of predicting whether a child will develop allergies, and ways to prevent them from developing at all.
