Undertaken by Washington State University and University of Washington scientists and published in the journal Pediatrics, the review highlights the important role that exposure to nature plays in children’s health. Importantly, some of the data examined the effects for kids from historically marginalised communities and showed that the benefits of nature exposure may be even more pronounced for them.

Exposure to nature necessary for children’s wellbeing

“By looking at the full scope of existing quantitative evidence, we were able to see the importance of ready access to nature for both physical and mental health outcomes in childhood,” said Amber Fyfe-Johnson, the study’s lead author and an assistant professor with WSU’s Institute for Research and Education to Advance Community Health (IREACH) and the Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine. She added, “Access to nature – and the benefits that come with it – are a necessity, not a nicety. Unfortunately, not all kids are able to have regular nature contact. This is due partly to urbanisation, increased screen time and more sedentary indoor lifestyles.”

Lack of exposure to nature disproportionately impacts historically marginalised communities that typically have fewer nearby residential parks and access to outdoor spaces, Fyfe-Johnson added. Families with limited resources and transportation options also face barriers to accessing parks and natural areas outside the city.

Important to define what outdoor time means

Although these findings may seem self-evident to some, and the American Academy of Pediatrics routinely recommends outdoor play time, convincing data on the health benefits associated with nature exposure have been lacking, due partly to inconsistencies in study methodologies and definitions of outdoor time.

The authors of the study point out that not all time spent outside is equal: a parking lot is not a park, and an urban playground without natural elements is not a garden. And without strong evidence to support the benefits to kids of spending time outside, in nature, there has been little political will to enact or enforce policies that ensure equitable nature contact, said Fyfe-Johnson.

She points to prior evidence suggesting that contact with nature and greenspace may offer even greater health benefits to disadvantaged populations by counteracting some of the toxic effects of poverty. “We sincerely hope our work will help lead to improved access to nature and health outcomes for kids, in addition to reducing health disparities in childhood,” she said.

The post Exposure to nature necessary for children’s wellbeing appeared first on Complete Wellbeing.

A new study led by UC Berkeley has found a way to track the flow of our internal thought processes and signal whether our minds are focused, fixated or wandering.

Using an electroencephalogram (EEG) to measure brain activity while people performed mundane attention tasks, researchers identified brain signals that reveal when the mind is not focused on the task at hand or wandering aimlessly, especially after concentrating on an assignment.

Random chain of thoughts increase alpha brain waves

Specifically, increased alpha brain waves were detected in the prefrontal cortex of more than two dozen study participants when their thoughts jumped from one topic to another, providing an electrophysiological signature for unconstrained, spontaneous thought. Alpha waves are slow brain rhythms whose frequency ranges from 9 to 14 cycles per second.

Meanwhile, weaker brain signals known as P3 were observed in the parietal cortex, further offering a neural marker for when people are not paying attention to the task at hand.

“For the first time, we have neurophysiological evidence that distinguishes different patterns of internal thought, allowing us to understand the varieties of thought central to human cognition and to compare between healthy and disordered thinking,” said study senior author Robert Knight, a UC Berkeley professor of psychology and neuroscience.

Tuning out helps the brain relax and explore

The findings, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) journal, suggest that tuning out our external environment and allowing our internal thoughts to move freely and creatively are a necessary function of the brain and can promote relaxation and exploration.

Moreover, EEG markers of how our thoughts flow when our brains are at rest can help researchers and clinicians detect certain patterns of thinking, even before patients are aware of where their minds are wandering.

“This could help detect thought patterns linked to a spectrum of psychiatric and attention disorders and may help diagnose them,” said study lead author Julia Kam, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Calgary. She launched the study as a postdoctoral researcher in Knight’s cognitive neuroscience lab at UC Berkeley.

Another co-author on the paper is Zachary Irving, an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Virginia who explored the psychological and philosophical underpinnings of mind-wandering as a postdoctoral scholar at UC Berkeley.

“If you focus all the time on your goals, you can miss important information. And so, having a free-association thought process that randomly generates memories and imaginative experiences can lead you to new ideas and insights,” said Irving, whose philosophical theory of mind-wandering shaped the study’s methodology.

Irving worked with Alison Gopnik, a UC Berkeley developmental psychologist and philosophy scholar who is also a co-author of the study.

“Babies and young children’s minds seem to wander constantly, and so we wondered what functions that might serve,” Gopnik said. “Our paper suggests mind-wandering is as much a positive feature of cognition as a quirk and explains something we all experience.”

How the study was conducted

To prepare for the study, 39 adults were taught the difference between four different categories of thinking: task-related, freely moving, deliberately constrained and automatically constrained.

Next, while wearing electrodes on their heads that measured their brain activity, they sat at a wacomputer screen and tapped left or right arrow keys to correspond with left and right arrows appearing in random sequences on the screen.

When they finished a sequence, they were asked to rate on a scale of one to seven — whether their thoughts during the task had been related to the task, freely moving, deliberately constrained or automatically constrained.

One example of thoughts unrelated to the task and freely moving would be if a student, instead of studying for an upcoming exam, found herself thinking about whether she had received a good grade on an assignment, then realised she had not yet prepared dinner, and then wondered if she should exercise more, and ended up reminiscing about her last vacation, Kam said.

The responses to the questions about thought processes were then divided into the four groups and matched against the recorded brain activity.

An important step

When study participants reported having thoughts that moved freely from topic to topic, they showed increased alpha wave activity in the brain’s frontal cortex, a pattern linked to the generation of creative ideas. Researchers also found evidence of lesser P3 brain signals during off-task thoughts.

“The ability to detect our thought patterns through brain activity is an important step toward generating potential strategies for regulating how our thoughts unfold over time, a strategy useful for healthy and disordered minds alike,” Kam said.

The post Brain waves can reveal where your mind meanders appeared first on Complete Wellbeing.

During the last 20 years, neuroscience research has revealed that the cerebral cortex constantly generates predictions on what will happen next, and that neurons in charge of sensory processing only encode the difference between our predictions and the actual reality.

Did you hear that?

Now, a team of neuroscientists of TU Dresden headed by Prof Dr Katharina von Kriegstein presents new findings that show that not only the cerebral cortex, but the entire auditory pathway, represents sounds according to prior expectations.

For their study, the team used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure brain responses of 19 participants while they were listening to sequences of sounds. The participants were instructed to find which of the sounds in the sequence deviated from the others. Then, the participants’ expectations were manipulated so that they would expect the deviant sound in certain positions of the sequences.

The neuroscientists examined the responses elicited by the deviant sounds in the two principal nuclei of the subcortical pathway responsible for auditory processing: the inferior colliculus and the medial geniculate body. Although participants recognised the deviant faster when it was placed on positions where they expected it, the subcortical nuclei encoded the sounds only when they were placed in unexpected positions.

The brain is always predicting

These results can be best interpreted in the context of predictive coding, a general theory of sensory processing that describes perception as a process of hypothesis testing. Predictive coding assumes that the brain is constantly generating predictions about how the physical world will look, sound, feel, and smell like in the next instant, and that neurons in charge of processing our senses save resources by representing only the differences between these predictions and the actual physical world.

Dr Alejandro Tabas, first author of the publication, states on the findings: “Our subjective beliefs on the physical world have a decisive role on how we perceive reality. Decades of research in neuroscience had already shown that the cerebral cortex, the part of the brain that is most developed in humans and apes, scans the sensory world by testing these beliefs against the actual sensory information. We have now shown that this process also dominates the most primitive and evolutionary conserved parts of the brain. All that we perceive might be deeply contaminated by our subjective beliefs on the physical world.”

New possibilities in neuroscience

These new results open up new ways for neuroscientists studying sensory processing in humans towards the subcortical pathways. Perhaps due to the axiomatic belief that subjectivity is inherently human, and the fact that the cerebral cortex is the major point of divergence between the human and other mammal’s brains, little attention has been paid before to the role that subjective beliefs could have on subcortical sensory representations.

Given the importance that predictions have on daily life, impairments on how expectations are transmitted to the subcortical pathway could have profound repercussion in cognition. Developmental dyslexia, the most wide-spread learning disorder, has already been linked to altered responses in subcortical auditory pathway and to difficulties on exploiting stimulus regularities in auditory perception.

The new results could provide with a unified explanation of why individuals with dyslexia have difficulties in the perception of speech, and provide clinical neuroscientists with a new set of hypotheses on the origin of other neural disorders related to sensory processing.

The post What we hear depends on what we expect to hear appeared first on Complete Wellbeing.

In more dire circumstances, however, the brain’s fear response can be critical for survival. “Being able to fear is the ability to sense the danger and is the driving force to figure out a way to escape or fight back,” said Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Professor Bo Li.

VIDEO: Watching a mouse think about fear and pleasure

Li’s team is probing the brain circuits that underlie fear, using sophisticated neuroscience tools to map their connections and tease out how specific components contribute to learning fear. A deeper understanding of these circuits could lead to better ways to control the overactive or inappropriate fear responses experienced by people with anxiety disorders.

Many of their studies begin with the amygdala, an almond-shaped structure that is considered the hub for fear processing in the brain. While the amygdala was once thought to be devoted exclusively to processing fear, researchers are now broadening their understanding of its role.

Amygdala: beyond fear response

Li’s team has found that the amygdala is also important for reward-based learning, and as they trace its connections to other parts of the brain, they are uncovering additional complexity. Li said: “It is important for formation of fearful memory, but it’s also important for interacting with other brain systems in a different behavior context. We think that this circuit that we discovered that plays a role in regulating fearful memory is only a tip of the iceberg. It is indeed important for regulating fearful memory, but probably is also involved in more complex behavior.”

Li and his colleagues were surprised recently to find that the amygdala communicates with a part of the brain best known for its role in controlling movement. The structure, called the globus pallidus, was not known to be involved in fear processing or memory formation. But when the researchers interfered with signaling between the amygdala and the globus pallidus in the brains of mice, they found that the animals failed to learn that a particular sound cue signaled an unpleasant sensation. Based on their experiments, this component of the fear-processing circuitry might be important for alerting the brain “which situations are worth learning from,” Li said.

Li’s team and collaborators at Stanford University reported recent findings in the Journal of Neuroscience.

The post New understanding of brain’s fear response appeared first on Complete Wellbeing.

“Although scientists are still learning how the SARS-CoV-2 virus is able to invade the brain and central nervous system, the fact that it’s getting in there is clear. Our best understanding is that the virus can cause insult to brain cells, with potential for neurodegeneration to follow on from there,” said Professor Kevin Barnham from the Florey Institute of Neuroscience & Mental Health.

The silent wave

In a review paper published on 22^nd September 2020, researchers put spotlight on the potential long-term neurological consequences of COVID-19, dubbing it the ‘silent wave’. They are calling for urgent action to be taken to have available more accurate diagnostic tools to identify neuro-degeneration early on and a long-term monitoring approach for people who have been infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

The researchers report that neurological symptoms in people infected with the virus have ranged from severe, such as brain hypoxia (lack of oxygen), to more common symptoms such as loss of smell.

“We found that loss of smell or reduced smell was on average reported in three out of four people infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus. While on the surface this symptom can appear as little cause for concern, it actually tells us a lot about what’s happening on the inside and that is that there’s acute inflammation in the olfactory system responsible for smell,” explained Florey researcher Leah Beauchamp.

Early diagnosis is key

Inflammation is understood to play a major role in the pathogenesis of neurogenerative disease and has been particularly well studied in Parkinson’s. Further research into these illnesses may prove critical for future impacts of SARS-CoV-2.

“We believe that loss of smell presents a new way forward in detecting someone’s risk of developing Parkinson’s disease early. Armed with the knowledge that loss of smell presents in around 90% of people in the early stages of Parkinson’s disease and a decade ahead of motor symptoms, we feel we are on the right track,” added Ms Beauchamp.

Clinical diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease currently relies on presentation of motor dysfunction, but research shows that by this time 50-70% of dopamine cell loss in the brain has already occurred.

“By waiting until this stage of Parkinson’s disease to diagnose and treat, you’ve already missed the window for neuroprotective therapies to have their intended effect. We are talking about an insidious disease affecting 80,000 people in Australia, which is set to double by 2040 before even considering the potential consequences of COVID, and we currently have no available disease-modifying therapies,” said Professor Barnham.

Aiming for cost-effective screening protocol

The researchers hope to establish a simple, cost-effective screening protocol aiming to identify people in the community at risk of developing Parkinson’s, or who are in early stages of the disease, at a time when therapies have the greatest potential to prevent onset of motor dysfunction. They plan to put the proposal forward for funding from the Australian Government’s Medical Research Future Funding scheme.

Additionally, the team have developed two neuroprotective therapies currently under investigation and have identified a cohort of subjects who are ideally suited to study the treatments. Through their research they gained new evidence that people with REM sleep behaviour disorder have a higher predisposition to go on to develop Parkinson’s disease.

“We have to shift community thinking that Parkinson’s not a disease of old age. As we’ve been hearing time and time again, the coronavirus does not discriminate—and neither does Parkinson’s,” said Professor Barnham.

“We can take insight from the neurological consequences that followed the Spanish Flu pandemic in 1918 where the risk of developing Parkinson’s disease increased two to three-fold. Given that the world’s population has been hit again by a viral pandemic, it is very worrying indeed to consider the potential global increase of neurological diseases that could unfold down track.”

He added, “The world was caught off guard the first-time, but it doesn’t need to be again. We now know what needs to be done. Alongside a strategized public health approach, tools for early diagnosis and better treatments are going to be key.”

The post Does COVID-19 increase the risk of Parkinson’s disease? appeared first on Complete Wellbeing.

Researchers at NYU Grossman School of Medicine have found a link between high body mass index (BMI) and changes in two brain areas, the prefrontal cortex and anterior insula. These regions play a key role in decision-making and behavior. Disruptions in these areas of the brain have earlier been linked to attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism, and overeating.

Link between obesity and brain of fetus

The investigators examined 197 groups of metabolically active nerve cells in the fetal brain. Using millions of computations, the study authors divided the groups into 16 meaningful subgroups based on over 19,000 possible connections between the groups of neurons. They found only two areas of the brain where their connections to each other were statistically strongly linked to the mother’s BMI.

“Our findings affirm that a mother’s obesity may play a role in fetal brain development, which might explain some of the cognitive and metabolic health concerns seen in children born to mothers with higher BMI,” says Moriah Thomason, PhD, the Barakett Associate Professor in the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at NYU Langone Health.

Previous studies showing an association between obesity and brain development had mostly looked at cognitive function in children after birth. The new investigation is believed to be the first to measure changes in fetal brain activity in the womb, and as early as six months into pregnancy.

According to Thomason, this approach was designed to eliminate the potential influence of breast feeding and other environmental factors occurring after birth and to examine the earliest origins of negative effects of maternal BMI on the developing child’s brain.

Thomason believes that understanding how the condition may impact early brain development is more important than ever especially in the wake of increasing rates of obesity.

The investigation process

For the investigation, the research team recruited 109 women who were all between six and nine months’ pregnant and their BMIs were between 25 and 47. According to the National Institutes of Health, women are considered “overweight” if they have a BMI of 25 or higher and are “obese” if their BMI is 30 and higher.

The research team used MRI imaging to measure fetal brain activity and map patterns of communication between large numbers of brain cells clustered together in different regions of the brain. Then, they compared the study participants to identify differences in how groups of neurons communicate with each other based on BMI.

The investigators caution that their study was not designed to draw a direct line between the differences they found and ultimate cognitive or behavioral problems in children. The study only looked at fetal brain activity. But, Thomason says, they now plan to follow the participants’ children over time to determine whether the brain activity changes lead to ADHD, behavioural issues, and other health risks.

The study was published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry.

The post Obesity during pregnancy may impede fetal brain development appeared first on Complete Wellbeing.

“There is strong evidence that children are happier, healthier, function better, know more about the environment, and are more likely to take action to protect the natural world when they spend time in nature.” said Dr Chawla.

These findings support the idea that young people should have easy access to wild areas, parks, gardens, green neighborhoods, and naturalised grounds at schools.

Connection not necessarily positive

However, the review also found that a connection with nature is not necessarily always positive.

“My review shows that connecting with nature is a complex experience that can generate troubling emotions as well as happiness.” said Dr Chawla. “We need to keep in mind that children are inheriting an unravelling biosphere, and many of them know it. Research shows that when adolescents react with despair, they are unlikely to take action to address challenges.”

The good news is that there is overlap in the strategies used to increase children’s feelings of connection with nature and supporting them with difficult dimensions of this connection. These strategies include helping young people learn what they can do to protect the natural world, as individuals and working collectively with others, and sharing examples of people who care for nature.

Children need to be heard

Research covered in the review found that young people are more likely to believe a better world is possible when friends, family and teachers listen sympathetically to their fears and give them a safe space to share their emotions.

One of the most surprising findings from the review was the complete disconnect between researchers studying the benefits of childhood connection to nature and those studying responses to environmental threats. “People who study children’s connection with nature and those who study their coping with environmental risk and loss have been pursuing separate directions without referencing or engaging with each other.” said Dr Chawla. “I am arguing that researchers on both sides need to be paying attention to each other’s work and learning from each other”.

Read the full review

The post The importance of childhood connection to natural world appeared first on Complete Wellbeing.

This belief just got a shot in its arm. New research shows how a person’s pupils respond to threatening images reveals if they have suffered a traumatic experience in the past.

The post Your eyes are the window to your past trauma appeared first on Complete Wellbeing.

A clinical research study reported in the latest issue of the Journal of Maternal-Fetal and Neonatal Medicine opens new doors for newborn babies needing emergency blood transfusion. Newborn babies are often very susceptible to a variety of conditions such as low blood oxygen, infections, low birth weight and low blood hemoglobin. Such babies have a very high risk of serious complications, and almost 50 percent of such babies succumb to their illness. Close medical care, including blood transfusion is often essential as a life saving measure for such babies.

Typically, blood group compatibility is mandatory before a donor’s blood can be transfused to the baby. Since there are four major blood groups [A, B, AB and O], finding a perfect donor could be quite challenging in emergency situations. This is a significant issue in developing parts of the world, including many parts of India, where prompt blood bank service is out of reach for most. Thousands of newborn babies die each year due to unavailability of blood.

In the reported study, mother’s blood was used as an emergency treatment for her newborn baby. Dr Sanjay Gokhale, the lead author, reports that there were 51 neonates in the study, all of whom received the blood transfusion from their mothers, irrespective of ABO match. 13 out of 51 babies had ABO mismatch with their mothers and did very well. Dr Gokhale is a consultant pediatrician and neonatologist with over 30 years of extensive clinical and research expertise.

The authors have postulated the concept of “Feto-Maternal” immune tolerance to explain these findings. In simple terms, since the baby grows in mother’s womb for nine months, baby’s immune system does not react to the mother’s red blood cells, including the blood group mismatch—at least in the immediate newborn period. While the authors suggest the need of a larger study to verify these findings, it does offer a glimmer of hope and if confirmed and accepted as a guideline, these findings could support use of mother’s blood for newborn babies needing emergency transfusions. This will be especially beneficial in situations with a lack of ABO compatible donor blood.

The post Novel Treatment for Newborn Babies Needing Emergency Blood Transfusion appeared first on Complete Wellbeing.

Our bodies are marvellously skilled in maintaining balance. When our body’s temperature escalates, for instance, we sweat to cool down; or, when our blood pressure levels fall, our hearts pound to compensate.

Medical researchers are finding that almost everything from blood pressure to brain function varies rhythmically with the cycles of the sun, moon, and the seasons. What’s more, their insights are yielding new and better strategies: the planned use of time in medicine. This is called chronotherapy, or chronomedicine – zeroing-in on time as a strategy for medicinal treatment.

The inner clock

Chronotherapy is distinctly related to studying and interpreting our inner “timepiece:” the bio-clock, whose functioning is evident through the sleep-wake cycle. It is also closely associated with other mechanisms such as regulation of body temperature, tolerance to pain, sensitivity to drugs, hormonal levels, a variety of emotional deviations, at the time of new and full moon nights, and so on. Complex? Not at all, if only we examine the exact chemistry – whatever is known by way of history, theory, and scientific evidence – of the inner clock that runs us all.

What drives the bio-clock has fascinated mankind from the days of Aristotle. What we really know today is that every function of the bio-clock rises and falls with a kind of expected regularity, tuned as bio-rhythms are to a finer, as yet undiscovered, balance. So delicate is this balance that if a bio-clock goes wrong, it can lead to symptoms of depression, among other illnesses.

The existence of the bio-clock was first demonstrated by Erwin Bunning, in 1939. His research, confirmed by other investigators later, demonstrated that there existed a solitary, master circadian [circa = about; diem = day] clock in all animals, including man, coupled to a series of “subordinate oscillators.”

Research has shown that the pineal gland and its hormone, melatonin, are both needed for maintaining the normal phase and amplitude of different body rhythms and their synchronisation with one another. For example, the level of melatonin in depressed patients has revealed not only decreased values, but also a marked variation in body rhythms.

Melatonin is a chemical messenger. It functions as a chrono-biotic substance: one which has the capacity to reset desynchronised bodily rhythms back to normal by penetrating though all cells and tissues. One outstanding example of the mechanism is “jet-lag,” which, in real terms, is the inability of the air traveller to resynchronise his/her body rhythms with the time of his/her destination, immediately. This is precisely the reason why melatonin has become a sort of a craze, as a low-dose supplement, for reducing “jet-lag” without the hazards, or side-effects, of prescription sleeping pills.

Cyclical tempo

It’s all about cyclical tempo, or regularity, that makes us tick as a species, including the ability to correct bio-clocks that have gone wrong for whatever reason. It’s also not without reason that Frank Brown, after a lifetime of research in the field, was led to the conclusion that many different, subtle geophysical factors, including cyclical changes of the geomagnetic field, could be used by a variety of animals, including man, to reset their internal bio-clocks. In other words, this could relate to the time of the tides, or the day, the phases of the moon, the time of the year etc.

The post Why the timing for taking your medicine matters appeared first on Complete Wellbeing.