Food supplements so preggers can drink safely

Some researchers have found that a dietary supplement called CDP-Choline, which  is sold commercially as a brain booster and studied academically for stroke and traumatic brain injury, may prevent the fetal skull and brain damage that occurs when mom drinks early in her pregnancy, at least in mice. The really bad time to drink is "four weeks after conception when neural crest cells emerge for a few days before morphing into other cell types that help form numerous organs," when she may not know she's pregnant.

As I read this, it might be a good idea for a woman who might become pregnant and who likes a couple of glasses of wine once in a while to take this supplement, in case the one night since college she has four glasses of wine and a margarita is during the window of neural crest cell emergence of a fetus she doesn't know she's carrying. It might be nice insurance.

More bad things you can do to kids: nicotine, TV, and cortisol, oh, my!

This month's Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine (a JAMA journal) is devoted to early experience and it's effects later in life, all nicely summarized on Science Daily.

One study looked at prenatal maternal use of cocaine, an opiate, marijuana, alcohol, and nicotine and sleep problems in the kids. Of these, only nicotine caused sleep problems. It's not so much that other drugs are turning out to be less damaging to fetuses than we thought (although there is some of that) as that tobacco is turning out to be worse than we thought.

In another study, mothers with bad enough anxiety to make them be taking selective serotonin uptake inhibitors during pregnancy had 3 year olds with increased withdrawal, anxiety, and depression. Some of it is due to a gene variant.

In another study, too much TV at 29 months of age is associated with all sorts of bad stuff in fourth grade:

"Each additional hour (per day) of television in early childhood corresponded to a

• 7 percent unit decrease in classroom engagement, 
• 6 percent unit decrease in math achievement, 
• 10 percent unit increase in victimization by classmates, 
• 13 percent unit decrease in time spent doing weekend physical activity, 
• 9 percent unit decreases in activities involving physical effort, 
• 9 percent higher scores for consumption of soft drinks and 
• 10 percent higher scores for consumption of snacks, as well as a 
• 5 percent unit increase in BMI."

Another study compared kids who stayed with their parents after CPS became involved with kids who went into foster care. "Children who still lived with their parents had different patterns of cortisol production than those in foster care, with flatter slopes in waking to bedtime values," which has god knows what effects on an adult, but you can't imagine them to be good. On the other hand, it shows foster care works, in this respect.

Another study looked at twin pairs where one weighed 20% more than the other at birth. The bigger twin was more likely to have conduct problems at age 3 or 4. The association was stronger with dizygotic twins than between monozygotic twins. So which thing causes which? Or more likely, what initial condition cascades to produce both of them.

Which kids really like a sweet taste

(C)hildren's response to intense sweet taste is related to both a family history of alcoholism and the child's own self-reports of depression.

The way they did this was to pick kids with a genetic disposition to alcoholism and have them taste water with 5 different concentrations of table sugar, and they asked them which one they liked best. Most of these kids liked 18% sugar, which is somewhat higher than a Coke. (And isn't that depressing all by itself; most of these kids liked things sweeter than Coke.) Kids who reported being depressed or who were in families with a history of alcoholism preferred 24% sugar, more than twice what's in a Coke.

Half of the kids (49%) had a history of alcoholism, which they defined as as having a parent, sibling, grandparent, aunt, or uncle who had been diagnosed as being alcohol dependent. I think this probably understated the amount of alcoholism, because a lot of drunks don't get diagnosed as alcohol dependent, but it's interesting that only half of the kids who were genetically disposed to alcoholism had even one relative who had been diagnosed. I've got more drunks than that in my own family.

I've asked before what we would do when we can predict which kids are genetically disposed to alcoholism. I guess one answer is you do more research.

Roots of FASD math deficits

Okay, I'm officially confused. The article I quoted in the previous post talked about prenatal alcohol exposure (PAE), but this one talks about fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD), also a new term to me. I'm used to fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS), which makes it obvious I'm not in the loop. As usual, Wikipedia clears it up somewhat: FAS was the first term for prenatal alcohol exposure and is the only term recognized in the big book of bad stuff. Now we know it is more complicated, and it is considered a subset of FASD. There are other related initialisms. PAE doesn't come up as a separate category in Wikipedia.

But to the study at hand, it seems that, even if you take into account their general cognitive deficits, kids with FASD have math-specific deficits. This article looks into why that is the case, and they find it in abnormalities in the white matter of several parts of the brain, which they discovered through diffusion tensor imaging of 12 kids.

"We found that four different brain areas show correlations between structure and mathematical ability in children with FASD," said Lebel. "Two of these regions in the left parietal area are very similar to previous findings in healthy children and in a rare genetic disorder, suggesting that these regions are key areas for math across diverse populations. The two other regions -- the cerebellum and the brainstem -- might be unique to children with FASD in terms of math-structure relationships.

Socializing kids with prenatal alcohol exposure

The first thing that struck me about this article in Science Daily is that what I am used to calling fetal alcohol syndrome is now being called prenatal alcohol exposure. So instead of emphasizing the condition of a person, they now emphasize the cause of the condition. It is as though instead of saying someone had a burn, we said they had been exposed to great heat. It's true, but it's not what I mean when I say someone or something was burned, and one doesn't necessarily follow from the other. As I understand it, there are periods in pregnancy when exposure to alcohol has serious effects on a fetus and periods when it does not. (You just can't know which was which until you can examine the baby.) So a kid that was prenataly exposed to alcohol may or may not have symptoms I would call fetal alcohol syndrome.

That said, the content of the study is very interesting. It seems kids exposed to prenatal alcohol misread social cues and frequently think people are hostile to them when they are not (another biological influence on behavior). In this study of 50 subjects and 50 controls, ages 6 to 12, those who got Children's Friendship Training less frequently falsely thought other kids were being hostile to them.

I hope it's replicated. It's always nice when someone figures out how to make a few people's lives better.

Predicting alcoholism; then what do you do?

What would you do if you could say from a simple test that this group of kids over here is 8 times more likely to become alcoholics or drug addicts than the rest of the kids? As a matter of public policy or child development, what would you do for them differently than you would do for kids without the bad gene?

A bunch of kids were followed for 11 years to track potential risk factors for alcoholism. The study, published in Biological Psychiatry and described on Science Daily,  chose

children with either high or low familial risk for developing alcohol dependence and followed them annually over an eleven-year span. During this time, they repeatedly evaluated a series of thirteen predictors that are thought to influence familial risk, including educational achievement scores, personality variables, self-esteem, and anxiety, along with specific neurobiological variables (P300 amplitude, a brain neuroelectric potential, and postural body sway).