Preterm babies do not habituate to repeated pain

Preterm infants do not get used to repeated pain in the way that full-term infants, children and adults do habituate to pain, finds a study led by UCL (University College London) researchers.

The authors of the new Current Biology paper say that if preterm infants have not yet developed the mechanism that enables people to get used to moderate pain, medical procedures in their first few weeks of life could potentially impact their development.

Lead author Dr Lorenzo Fabrizi (UCL Neuroscience, Physiology & Pharmacology) said: "The way that we can get used to things can be seen as the simplest example of behavioural and brain plasticity, and it is a basic part of memory and learning. Pain habituation is important because it enables us to preserve physical, emotional, and cognitive resources by not overreacting to pain that is unavoidable or not life-threatening.

"Our findings suggest that the ability to get used to repeated pain might develop during the third trimester of pregnancy, so that babies born prematurely have not yet developed this ability that full-term babies have right from birth."

The study involved 20 infants at University College London Hospitals (UCLH). Half of them were preterm (and tested while still younger than 35 weeks gestational age*), while the other half were either born at full term (seven infants) or preterm but tested at term age (three infants). The two groups were comparable in terms of their actual postnatal age, as the preterm babies had a median age of 14 days, compared to 10 days among the full-term (or term age) group.

The researchers were measuring the infants' responses to a painful but clinically required heel lance (blood test), which was conducted twice (three to 18 minutes apart) for each infant (two lances are sometimes required to collect enough blood; this is not needed for most infants so only those that needed a second lance were included in the study).

Heel lances can elicit substantial pain responses in infants, but it was not previously known whether this decreases on repeated lances. To understand this, the researchers recorded the infants' brain activity with EEG (electroencephalography) electrodes placed on the scalp, and their heart rates using ECG (electrocardiography), while also monitoring their facial expressions and reflexes in withdrawing the leg.

The researchers found that the brain activity was not as strong immediately after the second heel lance, compared to the first, suggesting a habituation response, but this was only the case for full-term infants. They found a similar pattern for heart rate and facial expressions, as preterm infants reacted just as strongly to both heel lances, while the full-term infants appeared to habituate to the pain.

The team says this habituation response might be due to the full-term infants anticipating the imminent pain when they receive a second heel lance, so their reaction is less pronounced, or it may instead or additionally be due to their brains modulating their reflexive survival responses.

They add that habituation to pain might protect the full-term infants, but not those who were pre-term, from potential consequences to their development.

First author Dr Mohammed Rupawala (UCL Neuroscience, Physiology & Pharmacology) said: "While unpleasant and painful clinical procedures are necessary for many young infants, there is the potential to impact their development, such as by altered pain perception, or potentially reduced grey matter or disrupted white matter in the brain."

Co-author Dr Judith Meek, consultant neonatologist at UCLH, said: "This work raises awareness of the extra vulnerability of premature babies to pain. Clinicians need to do their best to protect them from repeated painful experiences. This should be regarded as an essential component of brain oriented newborn care."

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Spontaneous baby movements have purpose

Spontaneous, random baby movements aid development of their sensorimotor system, according to new research led by the University of Tokyo. Detailed motion capture of newborns and infants was combined with a musculoskeletal computer model, to enable researchers to analyze communication among muscles and sensation across the whole body. Researchers found patterns of muscle interaction developing based on the babies' random exploratory behavior, that would later enable them to perform sequential movements as infants. Better understanding how our sensorimotor system develops could help us gain insight into the origin of human movement as well as earlier diagnosis of developmental disorders.

If you've spent time with a baby, you'll probably have noticed that they hardly keep still. Right from birth -- and even in the womb -- babies start to kick, wiggle and move seemingly without aim or external stimulation. These are called "spontaneous movements" and researchers believe that they have an important role to play in the development of the sensorimotor system, i.e., our ability to control our muscles, movement and coordination. If we can better understand these seemingly random movements and how they are involved in early human development, we might also be able to identify early indicators for certain developmental disorders, such as cerebral palsy.

Currently, there is limited knowledge about how newborns and infants learn to move their body. "Previous research into sensorimotor development has focused on kinematic properties, muscle activities which cause movement in a joint or a part of the body," said Project Assistant Professor Hoshinori Kanazawa from the Graduate School of Information Science and Technology. "However, our study focused on muscle activity and sensory input signals for the whole body. By combining a musculoskeletal model and neuroscientific method, we found that spontaneous movements, which seem to have no explicit task or purpose, contribute to coordinated sensorimotor development."

First, the team recorded the joint movements of 12 healthy newborns (less than 10 days old) and 10 young infants (about 3 months old) using motion capture technology. Next, they estimated the babies' muscle activity and sensory input signals with the aid of a whole-body, infant-scale musculoskeletal computer model which they had created. Finally, they used computer algorithms to analyze the spatiotemporal (both space and time) features of the interaction between the input signals and muscle activity.

"We were surprised that during spontaneous movement, infants' movements "wandered" and they pursued various sensorimotor interactions. We named this phenomenon 'sensorimotor wandering,'" said Kanazawa. "It has been commonly assumed that sensorimotor system development generally depends on the occurrence of repeated sensorimotor interactions, meaning the more you do the same action the more likely you are to learn and remember it. However, our results implied that infants develop their own sensorimotor system based on explorational behavior or curiosity, so they are not just repeating the same action but a variety of actions. In addition to this, our findings provide a conceptual linkage between early spontaneous movements and spontaneous neuronal activity."

Previous studies on humans and animals have shown that motor behavior (movement) involves a small set of primitive muscular control patterns. These are patterns that can typically be seen in task-specific or cyclic movements, like walking or reaching. The results of this latest study supports the theory that newborns and infants can acquire sensorimotor modules, i.e., synchronized muscle activities and sensory inputs, through spontaneous whole-body movements without an explicit purpose or task. Even through sensorimotor wandering, the babies showed an increase in coordinated whole-body movements and in anticipatory movements. The movements performed by the infant group showed more common patterns and sequential movements, compared to the random movements of the newborn group.

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A 10,000-year-old infant burial provides insights into the use of baby carriers and family heirlooms in prehistory

If you've taken care of an infant, you know how important it is to find ways to multitask. And, when time is short and your to-do list is long, humans find ways to be resourceful -- something caregivers have apparently been doing for a very, very long time.

The authors of a new article published in the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory argue that they have found evidence of the use of baby carriers 10,000 years ago at the Arma Veirana site in Liguria, Italy. The research, led by Arizona State University's Claudine Gravel-Miguel, PhD, also includes the University of Colorado Denver's Jamie Hodgkins, PhD, an Associate Professor of Anthropology, and a co-principal investigator on the excavation of Arma Veirana.

Because material used to make the first baby carriers does not preserve well in the archaeological record and because prehistoric baby burials are very uncommon, evidence for prehistoric baby carriers is extremely rare. The site -- which includes the oldest documented burial of a female infant in Europe, a 40- to 50-days-old baby, nicknamed Neve -- has both. Researchers used innovative analytical methods to extract hard-to-obtain information about perforated shell beads found at the site.

The study used a high-definition 3D photogrammetry model of the burial combined with microscopic observations and microCT scan analyses of the beads to document in detail how the burial took place and how the beads were likely used by Neve and her community in life and in death.

The results of this research show that the beads were likely sewn onto a piece of leather or cloth that was used to wrap Neve for her burial. This decoration contained more than 70 small, pierced shell beads and four big, pierced shell pendants, the likes of which have yet to be found elsewhere. Most of the beads bear heavy signs of use that could not have been produced during Neve's short life, demonstrating they were handed down to her as heirlooms.

"Given the effort that had been put into creating and reusing these ornaments over time, it is interesting that the community decided to part with these beads in the burial of such a young individual, said Gravel-Miguel. "Our research suggests that those beads and pendants likely adorned Neve's carrier, which was buried with her."

Relying on ethnographic observations of how baby carriers are adorned and used in some modern hunter-gatherer societies, this research suggests that Neve's community may have decorated her carrier with beads in order to protect her against evil. However, it is possible that her death signaled that those beads had failed, and it would have been better to bury the carrier rather than reuse it.

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Properties of 'baby talk' similar across many languages

A study by the University of York and Aarhus University has revealed that baby talk displays similar properties across 36 languages.

'Baby talk' or infant directed speech (IDS) refers to the way caregivers talk to young infants, and generally includes a high-pitched, slow-paced, animated speech.

This spontaneous, automatic and intuitive way of speaking has been studied for decades to understand why human beings communicate in this way with infants and what it might suggest about child development.

The York and Aarhus team addressed the question of whether IDS had a universal quality -- does it, for example, have the same properties in English as it does in other languages? They also addressed whether this changes as the child's grasp on language and speech increases.

Using a meta-analytic method, they examined all previous studies that investigated sound properties of IDS and asked what these revealed about its function in child language development. They found that certain features of IDS, such as pitch, melody, and articulation rates have the same properties across most of the world's languages.

How much caregivers exaggerate the differences between vowel sounds, however, was markedly different across the languages.

Christopher Cox, who led the study and is a joint PhD student at the University of York's Department of Language & Linguistic Science and Aarhus University's Department of Linguistics & Cognitive Science, said: "We use a higher pitch, more melodious phrases, and a slower articulation rate when talking to infants compared to how we talk to adults, and this appears to be the same across most languages.

"In the English language, caregivers typically exaggerate the difference in vowel sounds in infant directed speech, but this seemed to vary across other languages. More work is needed to understand why that is, but we might expect, for example, that speakers of languages with lots of vowels would be more inclined to clarify this speech signal for their children."

Languages that have been studied so far have focused on English and European languages, but to understand more about the instinctive use of IDS and how it helps in child development, the researchers argue more work is needed in understudied, non-Western languages.

The study also showed that IDS changes over time, as infants get a better grasp on language and speech. Most features of IDS gradually become more similar to adult speech style -- such as pitch and speed of delivery -- but other features, such as the high pitch melodic sounds and exaggerated vowels continue into early life.

Associate Professor Riccardo Fusaroli, co-author of the study from Aarhus University, said: "These results really highlight the interactive nature of this speech style, with caregivers providing dynamic and tailored feedback to their children's vocalisations and reacting to infants' changing developmental needs."

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After stroke in an infant's brain, right side of brain compensates for loss of language in left side

A clinical study conducted by researchers at Georgetown University Medical Center found that, for children who had a major stroke to the left hemisphere of their brain within days of their birth, the infant's brain was 'plastic' enough for the right hemisphere to acquire the language abilities ordinarily handled by the left side while also maintaining its own language abilities as well.

The left hemisphere of the brain is normally responsible for sentence processing (understanding words and sentences as we listen to speech). The right hemisphere of the brain is normally responsible for processing the emotion of the voice -- is it happy or sad, angry or calm. This study sought to answer the question "what happens when one of the hemispheres is injured at birth?"

The findings appear in PNAS the week of October 10, 2022.

The participants in this study developed normally during pregnancy. But around birth they had a significant stroke, one that would have debilitating outcomes in adults. In infants, a stroke is much rarer but does happen in roughly one out of every four thousand births.

The researchers studied perinatal arterial ischemic stroke, a type of brain injury occurring around the time of birth in which blood flow is cut off to a part of the brain by a blood clot. The same type of stroke occurs much more commonly in adults. Previous studies of brain injury in infants have included several types of brain injury, but the focus in this study on a specific type of injury enabled the authors to find more consistent effects than in previous work.

"Our most important conclusion is that plasticity in the brain, specifically the ability to reorganize language to the opposite side of the brain, is definitely possible early in life," says Elissa Newport, Ph.D., director of the Center for Brain Plasticity and Recovery at Georgetown Medical Center, professor in the departments of Neurology and Rehabilitation Medicine and first author of this study. "However, this early plasticity for language is restricted to one brain region. The brain is not able to reorganize injured functions just anywhere as more dramatic reorganization is not possible even in early life. This gives us great insights into the regions we might be able to focus on for potential breakthroughs in developing techniques for recovery in adults as well."

The investigators recruited people from across the United States who all had medium to large strokes to the cortex region of their left hemisphere around the time of birth. To assess long-term outcomes in their language abilities, participants were given language tests at 9 to 26 years of age and were compared to their close-in-age healthy siblings. They were also scanned in an MRI to reveal which brain areas were involved in sentence comprehension.

The participants and their healthy siblings all completed the language tasks almost perfectly. The major difference was that the stroke participants processed sentences on the right side of the brain while their siblings processed sentences on the left side. The stroke participants showed a very consistent pattern of language activation in the right hemisphere, regardless of the extent or location of damage from the stroke to the left hemisphere. Only one of the 15 participants, who had the smallest stroke, did not show clear right hemisphere dominant activation.

"It is also notable that many years after their strokes our participants are all such highly functioning adults. Some are honor students and others are working toward or have gotten their master's degrees," says Newport. "Their achievements are remarkable, especially since some of their parents had been told when they were born that their strokes would produce life-long impairments."

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Infants, young children finally get relief from eczema's terrible itch

The first study to treat moderate-to-severe eczema in infants and children 6 months to 5 years old with a biologic drug (monoclonal antibody) rather than immune-suppressing medications shows the drug was highly effective in reducing the signs and symptoms of moderate-to-severe eczema, report researchers involved in a new multi-site international phase III study led by Northwestern Medicine.

A 16-week course of dupilumab, a medication that targets a key immune pathway in allergies, resulted in more than half the children having at least a 75% reduction in signs of eczema and highly significant reductions in itch with improved sleep.

This is the first large-scale, randomized, placebo-controlled trial of a monoclonal antibody in any skin disease, including eczema, in children as young as 6 months. The study, which included 31 sites in Europe and North America, will be published Sept. 15 in The Lancet.

"Preschoolers who are constantly scratching, awake multiple times a night with their parents, irritable and markedly curtailed in their ability to do what other children their ages can do improved to the extent that they sleep through the night, change their personalities and have a normal life -- as babies and children should," said lead study author Dr. Amy Paller, chair of dermatology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and an attending physician at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago.

Eczema, also known as atopic dermatitis, is a chronic inflammatory skin disorder characterized by red, dry, often oozing skin and itch that can profoundly affect the lives of affected patients and their families.

An estimated 19% or more of all children under 6 years of age have eczema and 85 to 90% of individuals affected overall with eczema have the onset of disease during the first five years of life.

The children's debilitating itch leads to sleep disturbance, poor neurocognitive development and, on average, a full night of sleep lost per week.

"The ability to take this drug will significantly improve the quality of life for infants and young children who suffer tremendously with this disease," Paller said. "Atopic dermatitis or eczema is so much more than just itchy skin. It is a devastating disease. The quality of life of severe eczema -- not only for the child but also parents -- is equivalent to many life-threatening diseases."

As a result of this study, this medication is now available to infants and preschoolers as young as 6 months of age. It has "an outstanding safety profile" and does not even require any laboratory tests before starting the medication, Paller said.

Although one-half to two-thirds of young children with eczema have mild symptoms, which can be handled with steroid ointment and moisturizers, the other one-third or more have moderate-to-severe disease and require more aggressive management.

"Up to now, all we have had to treat more severe eczema is immune-suppressing medications, such as oral steroids, which we try to avoid in children, because they are associated with so many side effects and thus are not a preferred treatment for a chronic skin disease," Paller said. "The potential long-term impact on the development of the immune system in young children is also of concern with these immunosuppressants."

During the past few years, a new medication has become available called dupilumab, which is the first "biologic" drug to treat eczema in a targeted manner, meaning a narrow attack on just what scientists have found is causing the manifestations of the disease in skin. This medication was found to be effective and safe in studies with adults, then adolescents, then other school-aged children.

"But the group in whom we worry the most about safety -- those under 5 -- had not been tested and were unable to get this medication," Paller said.

The parent or a health care provider gives the child a monthly shot to administer the medication.

"The effect for most of these younger children is dramatic and at least as good as we've seen with the risky immunosuppressant medications," Paller said.

Potential added benefit by treating associated allergies

This medication has also been shown to be effective for treating asthma, gastrointestinal manifestations of allergy and other allergy-mediated problems but is not yet approved for these indications in infants and young children.

In fact, 66% of children in this trial had developed their eczema during the first six months of life and, by the time of initiating the dupilumab, more than 80% had already developed at least one allergic disorder, such as asthma or food allergy.

"By treating more aggressively to calm the immune system activation in these young children with early, severe eczema, we may also reduce the risk of their developing a range of allergic problems, changing their life beyond improving eczema," Paller said. "These associated allergic issues most often begin after the eczema starts."

Children were randomized to receive either a placebo injection or the dupilumab (weight-based dosing) every four weeks for 16 weeks. Only children who were not responding adequately to topical medications were allowed to enroll, and they had to be of a high severity, even with the topical medications.

As a result of the study, Paller said, scientists and physicians can start to better understand the relationships between eczema and a variety of allergic disorders and can consider the possibility of using this medication for other disorders that affect these very young children.

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Why breast-fed premature infants have a healthier gut than formula-fed ones

Human breastmilk has long been considered "liquid gold" among clinicians treating premature infants in a newborn intensive care unit (NICU). Breastmilk-fed "preemies" are healthier, on average, than those fed formula. Why is that true, however, has remained a mystery.

New research from the University of Maryland School of Medicine's (UMSOM) Institute for Genome Sciences (IGS), published online in the journal mBio in June found it is not just the content of breastmilk that makes the difference. It is also the way the babies digest it.

The research, led by Bing Ma, PhD, Assistant Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at UMSOM and a researcher at IGS, discovered a strain of the Bifidobacterium breve bacteria or B. breve in the gut of breastfed babies who received higher volumes of breastmilk than their counterparts. Those preemies had better nutrient absorption because they developed an intact intestinal wall, one week after birth. B. breve was much less prevalent in both formula-fed babies and breastfed babies with "leaky gut." Babies with leaky gut do not develop a barrier to protect against bacteria and digested food from getting into the bloodstream. For the first time, the team also found that the way B. breve metabolizes breastmilk keeps breastfed babies healthier and allows them to gain weight by strengthening their underdeveloped intestinal barrier.

An immature or "leaky" gut can lead to necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC), which is the third leading cause of newborn death in United States and worldwide. In fact, NEC impacts up to 10 percent of premature babies with a devasting mortality rate as high as 50 percent.

"Our discovery could lead to promising and practical clinical interventions to strengthen the babies' gut and, therefore, increase survival rates of the most vulnerable preemies," said Dr. Ma.

Bifidobacterium in the gut or microbiome has long been known to have health benefits. It includes a diverse set of strains that have very different properties. Some strains are only found in adults; some are mostly in adolescence. One strain, Bifidobacterium infantis, has been seen predominantly in full-term infants.

The researchers followed 113 premature babies who were born between 24 and 32 weeks' gestation. This study found Bifidobacterium breve (B. breve) only in preemies who had improved gut barrier function within one week after birth. Dr. Ma and her colleagues discovered that Bifidobacterium breve is genetically equipped to digest nutrients within the cell membrane rather than the more typical external digestion process in which bacteria secrete digestive enzymes onto nutrients to break them down.

At the most basic level, the gut microbiome in these breastfed preemies with more B. breve metabolizes carbohydrates differently than it does formula. The researchers say they hypothesize that this process of metabolism then strengthens and matures the intestinal barrier faster, protecting fragile newborns from disease.

"We now know that it is not the breastmilk alone that helps preemies develop their intestinal barrier faster," Dr. Ma said. "We will need to find the best way to prophylactically administer B. breve early in life, rather than rely on transmission from breastmilk or even the mother's gut or vaginal microbiota during the birthing process. This is especially critical in formula-fed preemies."

Dr. Ma said that more studies are needed to determine if the B. breve originated in the breastmilk, gut, mother's vagina, or even environment.

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How breastfeeding offers immune benefits

When infants breastfeed, they receive an immune boost that helps them fight off infectious diseases, according to recent research from Binghamton University Associate Professor of Anthropology Katherine Wander.

She is the lead author of "Tradeoffs in milk immunity affect infant infectious disease risk," published this June in Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health. Co-authors include Masako Fujita from Michigan State University's Anthropology Department, Siobhan Mattison from the University of New Mexico's Anthropology Department and the National Science Foundation; and Frida Mowo, Ireen Kiwelu and Blandina Mmbaga in Tanzania, whose associations include the Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Centre and the Kilimanjaro Clinical Research Institute. Binghamton University graduate students were also part of the research team, with tasks ranging from data collection in Tanzania to data-cleaning and analysis. They include Margaret Duris, Megan Gauck, Tessa Hopt, Katherine Lacy, Angela Foligno, Rebecca Ulloa and Connor Dodge.

For the project, the research team studied almost 100 mother and baby pairs in rural Kilimanjaro. Prolonged breastfeeding is the norm in this population and infectious diseases during infancy are very common, even compared to other areas of East Africa. This makes Kilimanjaro an ideal setting to begin to understand how immune protection from milk might affect infectious disease risk, Wander said.

"You most often hear about the immune system of milk in terms of transferring maternal antibodies to infants via milk -- which is probably very important -- but it seems there's much more going on as well. The immune system of milk is a whole system, capable of mounting immune responses," Wander said. "We're only beginning to understand the full extent and role of the immune system of milk."

Milk and immunity

Mother's milk contains everything needed to mount immune responses, from antibodies to multiple types of immune cells and more. While they originate from the mother's immune system, these components of milk appear to be curated rather than selected at random from the mother's blood, although that mechanism remains poorly understood, Wander explained.

To test the impact of milk's immune system on infant health, the researchers combined a few milliliters of milk with a small amount of bacteria, then placed the mixture in an incubator overnight. They then measured the increase of interleukin-6, an immune cell communication molecule that promotes inflammation. This in-vitro response gives an indication of how the milk's immune system is likely to respond to bacteria encountered in the infant's body -- the gut, for example.

The research team also followed the Tanzanian infants to assess whether those who received milk that mounted stronger immune responses during the in-vitro tests were at lower risk for infectious diseases. That appeared to be the case: infants whose mothers' milk mounted larger responses to Salmonella had fewer infectious diseases, particularly respiratory infections such as pneumonia.

But milk that mounted larger responses to Salmonella also tended to mount stronger responses to a benign strain of E. coli, which is common in the human intestinal tract, and these responses weren't beneficial to infants. Infants who received milk that mounted stronger responses to E. coli were at higher risk for gastrointestinal infections. This may indicate that inappropriate responses by milk's immune system -- for example, to bacteria normally present in the gut -- can be disruptive. Gut bacteria play an important role in preventing diarrhea and other infectious disease, the authors note.

While all immune responses have tradeoffs, the downside of milk -- both immediate and common -- was a surprising discovery.

"With so much at stake, we really expected the immune system of milk to be very finely tuned to protecting infants against infection," Wander said.

Researchers expected to see, at most, negative effects of inappropriate immune responses somewhere down the line, such as in slower growth or less than ideal microbial flora. But differentiating between microbial friend or foe is a tricky business even for adults' mature immune systems, as is eliminating an infection without damaging the person's own tissues. So, the authors say, maybe they shouldn't have been surprised to see these tradeoffs play out in infants, as well.

In addition to reducing risk for respiratory infectious, milk immune responses may help "train" the infant's developing immune system to respond to dangerous bacteria. More research is needed to determine how immune development calibrates to input, such as experience with infectious diseases, microbial flora and the immune system within milk.

"These findings are interesting, but the implications for public health and healthcare will only become clear with additional research," said co-author Mmbaga of the Kilimanjaro Clinical Research Institute. "We need to understand how milk immune responses are affected by things we can design public health programs around, like HIV infection or malnutrition."

This research may have applications that go beyond infancy and breastfeeding. Figuring out how the immune system has evolved to strike a balance between protection and harm could help shed light on health problems from infant diarrhea and pneumonia to autoimmune diseases.

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What lies behind a baby’s eyes

We give meaning to our world through the categorisation of objects. When and how does this process begin? By studying the gaze of one hundred infants, scientists at the Institut des Sciences Cognitives Marc Jeannerod (CNRS/Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1) have demonstrated that, by the age of fourth months, babies can assign objects that they have never seen to the animate or inanimate category. These findings, published in PNAS on 15 February 2022, reveal measurable changes in neural organisation, which reflect the transition from simply viewing the world to understanding it.

The way babies look at the world is a great mystery. What do they really see? What information do they get from seeing? One might think they look at things that stand out the most -- by virtue of size or colour, for example. But when do babies begin to see and interpret the world like adults?

To answer this question, researchers from the Institut des Sciences Cognitives Marc Jeannerod (CNRS / Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1) studied one hundred babies aged between 4 and 19 months. The scientists recorded the babies' eye movements and the durations of their gaze as they looked at pairs of pictures representing animate or inanimate things from eight different categories (e.g., human faces and natural or artificial objects). The data obtained from eye tracking on babies were matched with measures of brain activity obtained from a group of adults using fMRI, in order to determine the correspondence between the categorical object organisation emerging from the babies' eyes and that mapped on the adults' visual cortex.

The methodology used in the study has revealed the transition from the visual exploration guided by the salience of objects, in the youngest babies, to an object representation towards the mature categorical organisation of the adult brain, in the older babies. Already at four months, babies can distinguish between animate and inanimate objects. For instance, they can tell that a man and a crocodile, being animals, are more similar to each other than they are to a tree, which is an inanimate object. This ability appears astonishing as, at that age, babies are unlikely to know what a tree or crocodile is.

Between 10 and 19 months of age, more refined categories emerge and the infants' organisation of objects into categories increasingly approaches that in the adult brain. Children in this age range immediately recognise a soft, furry object with a face as a nonhuman animal.

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Impact of COVID-19 social isolation measures on early development

An international consortium with researchers from 13 countries has investigated the impact of Covid-19 related social isolation measures on 2,200 young infants and toddlers between 8 and 36 months of age. Their findings provide insights into the effects of lockdown on language acquisition and screen time in the generation of youngsters growing up during this extraordinary period. A study on the impact of lockdown-related activities on language development, led by the University of Oslo, was published in the journal Language Development Research. A second study on the increase in screen-time during lockdown and its impact on language development, led by the University of Göttingen with the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen and the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland, was published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Shortly after lockdown began in early March 2020 across 13 countries, parents were asked to complete an online questionnaire containing questions on the child's age, exposure to different languages, number of siblings and vocabulary development. Parents were then contacted again at the end of the lockdown (for that family or in that area, in general). They were asked about the activities that they undertook with their child during lockdown, the amount of time their child had access to screens both during lockdown and before, as well as questions on how much screen time they typically had themselves and their attitudes towards children's screen time. Parents were also asked to complete a standardized vocabulary checklist indicating the number of words their child understood and/or said at the beginning, and again, at the end of lockdown so that an increase in the number of words gained over lockdown could be calculated.

The studies find that, during lockdown, children who were read to more frequently were reported by their caregivers to have learned more words, relative to their peers who were read to less frequently. However, children with increased exposure to screens learned to say fewer words, relative to their peers with less screen time. In addition, while children were exposed to more screen time during lockdown than before, overall, children were reported to have gained more words than expected during lockdown, relative to pre-pandemic levels. The increase in screen time during lockdown was greater if lockdown was longer, and in families with fewer years of education, and where parents reported using screens for longer themselves.

"Identifying the effects of parent-child activities on the child's vocabulary growth is a significant finding, given that we assessed changes in children's vocabularies over an average period of just over one month in our study," says Professor Julien Mayor, University of Oslo.

"While this suggests that the relatively short isolation did not detrimentally impact language in young children, we should be cautious in assuming this would apply during normal times or to longer lockdowns, given the extraordinary circumstances that children and their parents faced during this time," adds Associate Professor Natalia Kartushina, University of Oslo.

Indeed, the authors attribute increased screen time precisely to the unprecedented circumstances that families found themselves in during lockdown, including but not limited to the closure of day care centres, sport facilities and play groups for children. "Many caregivers were in the novel situation of caring for and entertaining their young infants at home all day without recourse to other activities and in addition to their other responsibilities. Allowing your child increased screen time is an understandable solution to this unprecedented situation, in which caregivers were juggling multiple responsibilities -- meetings at work or chores that require concentration, together with a small child who needs entertaining. We've all done it during lockdown," says Professor Nivedita Mani, University of Göttingen.

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Spicy breast milk?

Breast milk is the first food that babies consume. Various studies have suggested that the "taste experience" in early childhood influences eating behavior in adults. Unlike standardized infant formula, natural milk does not taste and smell the same every day. The differences are largely due to the maternal diet.

No one-to-one transfer

However, the taste and aroma of food consumed by the mother are not transferred one-to-one to her milk. Research has already shown that odor and taste active substances from garlic or coffee partly enter the mother's milk as an odor active metabolic product, while flavors from fish oil or nursing tea were of little to no significance in this respect.

The extent to which pungent substances from chili, ginger, or pepper are found in breast milk has been even less researched than aroma and taste substances. For this reason, a scientific team led by TUM has now investigated whether these substances are transferred from food to breast milk and if so, which ones.

Piperine detectable after just one hour

Through extensive mass spectrometric analyses, the team has shown that already one hour after consumption of a standardized curry dish, piperine is detectable in breast milk for several hours. "The observed maximum concentrations of 14 to 57 micrograms per liter were about 70- to 350-fold below the taste perception threshold of an adult," says Professor Corinna Dawid, who heads the Chair of Food Chemistry and Molecular Sensory Science at TUM commissarial for Professor Thomas Hofmann.

Roman Lang, who was initially involved in the study as a scientist at TUM and later at the Leibniz Institute for Food Systems Biology (LSB) adds, "It seems rather unlikely to us that the infants consciously perceive the sharpness. Nevertheless, it is conceivable that regular, low-threshold activation of the "pungent receptor" TRPV1 could help to increase tolerance for such substances later on."

Pungents from ginger or chili as well as the secondary plant compound curcumin, which is also abundant in curry, did not enter milk, according to the research. "We were particularly surprised by the latter, since piperine is supposed to significantly increase the bioavailability of curcumin according to the results of other studies," reports Roman Lang, who heads the Biosystems Chemistry & Human Metabolism research group at the LSB.

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Gut bacteria influence brain development

Extremely premature infants are at a high risk for brain damage. Researchers have now found possible targets for the early treatment of such damage outside the brain: Bacteria in the gut of premature infants may play a key role. The research team found that the overgrowth of the gastrointestinal tract with the bacterium Klebsiella is associated with an increased presence of certain immune cells and the development of neurological damage in premature babies.

Complex interplay: the gut-immune-brain axis

The early development of the gut, the brain and the immune system are closely interrelated. Researchers refer to this as the gut-immune-brain axis. Bacteria in the gut cooperate with the immune system, which in turn monitors gut microbes and develops appropriate responses to them. In addition, the gut is in contact with the brain via the vagus nerve as well as via the immune system. "We investigated the role this axis plays in the brain development of extreme preterm infants," says the first author of the study, David Seki. "The microorganisms of the gut microbiome -- which is a vital collection of hundreds of species of bacteria, fungi, viruses and other microbes -- are in equilibrium in healthy people. However, especially in premature babies, whose immune system and microbiome have not been able to develop fully, shifts are quite likely to occur. These shifts may result in negative effects on the brain," explains the microbiologist and immunologist.

Patterns in the microbiome provide clues to brain damage

"In fact, we have been able to identify certain patterns in the microbiome and immune response that are clearly linked to the progression and severity of brain injury," adds David Berry, microbiologist and head of the research group at the Centre for Microbiology and Environmental Systems Science (CMESS) at the University of Vienna as well as Operational Director of the Joint Microbiome Facility of the Medical University of Vienna and University of Vienna. "Crucially, such patterns often show up prior to changes in the brain. This suggests a critical time window during which brain damage of extremely premature infants may be prevented from worsening or even avoided."

Comprehensive study of the development of extremely premature infants

Starting points for the development of appropriate therapies are provided by the biomarkers that the interdisciplinary team was able to identify. "Our data show that excessive growth of the bacterium Klebsiella and the associated elevated ??-T-cell levels can apparently exacerbate brain damage," explains Lukas Wisgrill, Neonatologist from the Division of Neonatology, Pediatric Intensive Care Medicine and Neuropediatrics at the Department of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine at the Medical University of Vienna. "We were able to track down these patterns because, for a very specific group of newborns, for the first time we explored in detail how the gut microbiome, the immune system and the brain develop and how they interact in this process," he adds. The study monitored a total of 60 premature infants, born before 28 weeks gestation and weighing less than 1 kilogram, for several weeks or even months. Using state-of-the-art methods -- the team examined the microbiome using 16S rRNA gene sequencing, among other methods -- the researchers analysed blood and stool samples, brain wave recordings (e.g. aEEG) and MRI images of the infants' brains.

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Hundreds of antibiotic resistant genes found in the gastrointestinal tracts of Danish infants

Hundreds of antibiotic resistant genes found in the gastrointestinal tracts of Danish infants.

Danish one-year-olds carry several hundred antibiotic resistant genes in their bacterial gut flora according to a new study from the University of Copenhagen. The presence of these genes is partly attributable to antibiotic use among mothers during pregnancy.

An estimated 700,000 people die every year from antibiotic resistant bacterial infections and diseases. The WHO expects this figure to multiply greatly in coming decades. To study how antibiotic resistance occurs in humans' natural bacterial flora, researchers from the University of Copenhagen's Department of Biology analysed stool samples from 662 Danish one-year-old children.

Within the samples, the researchers discovered 409 different genes, providing bacteria with resistance to 34 types of antibiotics. Furthermore, 167 of the 409 genes found are resistant to multiple types of antibiotics, including those classified as 'critically important' by the WHO for being able to treat serious diseases in the future.

"It's a wake-up call that one-year-old children are already carrying gut bacteria that are resistant to very important types of antibiotics. New resistant bacteria are becoming more widespread due to increased antibiotic consumption. The horror scenario is that we will one day lack the antibiotics needed to treat life-threatening bacterial infections such as pneumonia or foodborne illnesses," explains Department of Biology professor Søren Sørensen, who led the study.

Antibiotic use during pregnancy is an important factor

The important factor for whether an infant had more antibiotic-resistant genes in bacteria in the gut was if the child's mother had been administered antibiotics during late pregnancy or if the year-old infant had received antibiotics in the months prior to the collection of their stool samples.

"We found a very strong correlation between a mother's antibiotic treatment during late pregnancy and of infants and gut bacteria with many resistant genes, although it appears that other influences come into play as well," says Xuan Ji Li of the Department of Biology, the study's lead author.

At the same time, the researchers found a link between how well-developed the gut flora of children were and the concentration of resistant bacteria. Well-developed gut flora equated with a lesser incidence of resistant bacteria. Previous studies from the same group of children demonstrated that the development of gut flora is linked to asthma risk later in life.

E. coli collect resistant genes

Escherichia coli (E. coli) is common in the intestine and can lead to intestinal infections. But in this study, the researchers also learned that E. coli appears to act as a main collector and a potential spreader of antibiotic-resistant genes to other gut bacteria.

The researchers also found E. coli in infants with high concentrations of resistance genes in their intestinal tracts.

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Sign-language exposure impacts infants as young as 5 months old

 While it isn't surprising that infants and children love to look at people's movements and faces, recent research from Rochester Institute of Technology's National Technical Institute for the Deaf studies exactly where they look when they see someone using sign language. The research uses eye-tracking technology that offers a non-invasive and powerful tool to study cognition and language learning in pre-verbal infants.

NTID researcher and Assistant Professor Rain Bosworth and alumnus Adam Stone studied early-language knowledge in young infants and children by recording their gaze patterns as they watched a signer. The goal was to learn, just from gaze patterns alone, whether the child was from a family that used spoken language or signed language at home.

They tested two groups of hearing infants and children that differ in their home language. One "control" group had hearing parents who spoke English and never used sign language or baby signs. The other group had deaf parents who only used American Sign Language at home. Both sets of children had normal hearing in this study. The control group saw sign language for the first time in the lab, while the native signing group was familiar with sign language.

The study, published in Developmental Science, showed that the non-signing infants and children looked at areas on the signer called "signing space," in front of the torso. The hands predominantly fall in this area about 80 percent of the time when signing. However, the signing infants and children looked primarily at the face, barely looking at the hands.

According to the findings, the expert sign-watching behavior is already present by about 5 months of age.

"This is the earliest evidence, that we know of, for effects of sign-language exposure," said Bosworth. "At first, it does seem counter-intuitive that the non-signers are looking at the hands and signers are not. We think signers keep their gaze on the face because they are relying on highly developed and efficient peripheral vision. Infants who are not familiar with sign language look at the hands in signing space perhaps because that is what is perceptually salient to them."

Another possible reason why signing babies keep their gaze on the face could be because they already understand that the face is very important for social interactions, added Bosworth.

"We think the reason perceptual gaze control matures so rapidly is because it supports later language learning, which is more gradual," Bosworth said. "In other words, you have to be able to know where to look before you learn the language signal."

Bosworth says more research is needed to understand the gaze behaviors of deaf babies who are or are not exposed to sign language.

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Masculine traits linked to better parenting for some dads

 In some men, having traditional masculine characteristics such as competitiveness and adventurousness was linked to being better fathers to infants, a new study found.

But the men in this study -- highly educated and from dual-earner couples -- combined those stereotypically masculine traits with the belief that they should be nurturing, highly involved fathers.

The researchers were surprised that traits often seen as old-fashioned male stereotypes were linked to more positive parenting behaviors, said study lead author Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan, professor of psychology at The Ohio State University.

It suggests that some men are looking for new ways to be fathers, Schoppe-Sullivan said.

"These men are combining traditional aspects of masculinity with new nurturing ideals to create new fathering identities. They may be in the midst of transforming fatherhood."

The study was published this week in the journal Psychology of Men and Masculinities.

The seven stereotypical masculine characteristics linked to positive parenting in this study -- competitive, daring, adventurous, dominant, aggressive, courageous and stands up to pressure -- are generally seen as positive traits, Schoppe-Sullivan noted.

But a negative masculine attitude that the researchers also measured in this study -- hostile sexism -- was not linked to positive parenting. In addition, the quality of fathers' parenting of their infants was unrelated to the belief that men should be primary economic providers in the family.

The men in the study were participating in the New Parents Project, a long-term study led by Schoppe-Sullivan that is investigating how dual-earner couples adjust to becoming parents for the first time.

In the third trimester of their partners' pregnancy, the expectant fathers completed a variety of questionnaires. They were asked to rate themselves on a four-point scale (not at all like me to very much like me) on the seven stereotypically masculine characteristics.

Hostile sexism was rated by asking male participants how much they agreed with 11 statements like "Feminists are making unreasonable demands of men." Participants were also asked whether men or women should provide the majority of income for the family.

Their nurturing father role beliefs were measured by asking men to rate how much they agreed with nine statements like "Men should share with child care such as bathing, feeding and dressing the child."

Nine months after the child was born, the researchers watched the fathers interact with their infants by themselves and with the mother. The researchers rated the fathers on their positive parenting behavior and on how well they co-parented together with mothers.

Results showed, as the researchers had predicted, that men who believed they should have a nurturing father role had higher-quality interactions with their child and were better at co-parenting with their partner.

But the researchers were surprised to find that the more men said they fit the stereotypical definition of "real men," the more they were also rated as showing good parenting behavior.

"The fathers who see themselves as competitive and adventurous and the other masculine traits tended to be really engaged with their kids. They were not checked out," Schoppe-Sullivan said.

It may be that men who used these traditionally masculine characteristics to succeed in their careers are trying to find ways to apply them to their jobs as parents.

"These dads may be saying that being a father is an important job, too, and I'm going to use the same traits that help me succeed at work to make me a successful father," she said.

Schoppe-Sullivan emphasized that the fathers in this sample were highly educated and had partners who also worked. The findings here may not apply to all fathers.

But the results are encouraging, she said.

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Infants' language skills more advanced than first words suggest

 Babies can recognise combinations of words even before they have uttered their first word, a study suggests, challenging ideas of how children learn language.

Assessments in 11-12 month-olds show that infants at the cusp of talking are already processing multiword phrases such as 'clap your hands'.

Researchers say the study is the first to provide evidence that young children can pick up and understand multiword sequences before they can talk or begin producing such combinations themselves.

The findings suggest that babies learn individual words and more complex phrases at the same time, which challenges the perspective that they progress from single words to phrases and sentences, experts say.

It may also explain why adults who learn a new language in later life by focusing on individual words often do not achieve native-like proficiency.

Linguists at the University of Edinburgh assessed 36 infants' language learning behaviour in a series of attention tests using recorded adult speech.

They looked at how the babies responded to multiword combinations of three-word sequences used in parent-child conversations.

The researchers compared the infants' responses using a testing method called central fixation, which measures infants' looking behaviour in response to sounds.

They assessed if the babies could distinguish more frequently used three-word sequences such as 'clap your hands' from similar but less common phrases such as 'take your hands'.

On average, fixation times were longer for the frequently used phrases. This pattern was found in 23 of the 36 infants.

Researchers say this suggests babies who are still learning their first words are simultaneously learning word combinations.

This development happens months before parents hear their children's first attempts at sequences of words, experts say.

Dr Barbora Skarabela, of the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Languages Sciences, said: "Previous research has shown that young infants recognise many common words. But this is the first study that shows that infants extract and store more than just single words from everyday speech. This suggests that when children learn language, they build on linguistic units of varying sizes, including multiword sequences, and not just single words as we often assume. This may explain why adults learning a second language, who tend to rely on individual words, often fall short of reaching native-like proficiency in the way they string words together into phrases and sentences."

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How critical part of lung forms at cellular level

Researchers from Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) have determined what happens at a cellular level as the lung alveolus forms and allows newborns to breathe air. Understanding this process gives researchers a better sense of how to develop therapies and potentially regenerate this critical tissue in the event of injury. The findings were published online today by the journal Science.

The lung develops during both embryonic and postnatal stages, during which lung tissue forms and a variety of cell types perform specific roles. During the transition from embryo to newborn is when the alveolar region of the lung refines its primary function of exchanging gas, which includes the critical process of ridding the body of carbon dioxide.

Despite these critical steps involved in the formation of the lung, little is known about what happens at a cellular and genomic level. Not only is the lung alveolar critical, it can also suffer damage caused by pathogens such as influenza and the SARS-CoV2 virus that causes COVID-19. Knowing which cells are involved in the formation of healthy lung tissue at birth may provide a basis for therapies that help regenerate this critical portion of the lung.

"Extensive morphological changes properly shape the alveolar niche, but prior to this study, the research community was unsure as to the extent of cellular signaling involved to promote its proper architecture," said first author Jarod A. Zepp, PhD, a research faculty member of the Division of Pulmonary and Sleep Medicine at CHOP and an Assistant Professor at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. "Recent advances in technology allowed us to assess the intracellular communication that drives the generation of this critical portion of the lung."

The study team used a multimodal approach to investigate intercellular relationships that drive the formation of the alveolus. They discovered that alveolar type 1 (AT1) epithelial cells, which form the outer layer of the alveolus tissue, represent a signaling hub that coordinates cell development, especially during the transition to air breathing. They also traced the lineage of AT1 cells and show that they align with myofibroblasts, which are a special cell type involved in tissue remodeling. Finally, the researchers also demonstrated that AT1-restricted ligands, or secreted binding molecules, are required to form these myofibroblasts and the alveolus.

"Our study reveals the complexity of the cell-types and their extensive communication with one another as they form this critical part of the lung," Zepp said. "The recent COVID-19 pandemic has provided the research community with an increased appreciation of the intercellular communication that helps form the alveolar structure and maintain its function and provides us with vital clues on how we might be able to repair damaged tissue at a cellular level."

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From melody to language

 In the first few months of their lives, babies cry, babble, gurgle and make a variety of other peculiar sounds. It can be difficult to imagine that they are actually laying the foundations for later speech with these utterances. However, there is a determining element that proves that even their cries can be assigned to a particular language: the speech melody -- or, more accurately: prosody.

"Every language is characterised by specific musical elements, which we call prosody," says Kathleen Wermke. Prosody, in simple terms, is the combination of intonation (melody) and rhythm. Earlier studies have shown that even newborns are able to distinguish different languages, like German or French, using prosodic cues, particularly melody. With the help of these musical elements, infants recognise the respective language long before they are able to perceive its special features such as consonants, vowels or syllables.

Study with more than 67,000 baby sounds

Kathleen Wermke is a Professor at the Würzburg University Hospital at the Department of Orthodontics and Head of the Center for Pre-speech Development and Developmental Disorders. Together with scientists from the USA and New Zealand, she has now examined the vocalisations of a total of 277 infants over the first six months of life in more detail. In total, the team analysed more than 67,500 cry vocalisations -- the so-called hungry-crying -, cooing and babbling sounds.

"We have found a clear developmental pattern towards more complexity," Wermke summarises the result of the study, which has now been published in the journal Scientific Reports. According to the study, this increasing degree of complexity is an important building block on the way to language development. According to the research team, these findings do not only significantly improves our understanding of the early preparatory processes for language acquisition, it also makes it possible to identify potential signs of a language development disorder.

Complexity increases over the course of the first six months

In their study, the team distinguished between two types of vocalisations in babies: cry and non-cry vocalisations in technical language. Or, to put it another way, the "communicative" crying uttered in the presence of the mother, which results from discomfort such as hunger and when there is a desire for contact. And, on the other hand, the sounds a baby makes when it feels comfortable and interacts vocally. "The aim of the study was to conduct an objective developmental analysis of prosodic antecedents in the form of melodies in healthy infants from birth to 6 months of age in all their vocalisations," says Wermke. Her hypothesis was: both types of vocalisation show a characteristic developmental increase in complex melodies.

In fact, the evaluation shows that the melodies of spontaneous cries become increasingly complex during the first 180 days of life; complex meaning that simple melodies (single-arc) are increasingly replaced by multiple-arc melodies, i.e. the foundation for the richness of variants of later intonation patterns in speech is already laid during crying. The development was comparable for phonetic utterances that fall under the category of "comfort vocalisations." The degree of complexity also increased in these, but with a temporary decline at around 140 days of age.

Rapid brain growth is the foundation

"Already at the end of the first month of life, the cry repertoire of the babies studied shows a complex melody in more than half of the cases," says Wermke. From single-arc to multiple-arc melodies in 30 days: this developmental programme is based on an early maturity of the neurophysiological mechanisms underlying melody production. In fact, the brains of newborns also grow tremendously fast during this time, and newborns show amazing coordination between breathing and phonation. Furthermore, the scientists believe that the early occurrence of complex cry melodies indicates that infants have already undergone a kind of training, a "preparatory" intrauterine development before birth, in order to start with the development of melodies immediately after or at the starting signal "birth."

Wermke and her co-authors have an explanation for this slight decrease in complexity between the ages of four and five months: "During this time, infants expand their repertoire of vocalic utterances to include new components that interact with the overall melodic contour, namely vowel- and consonant-like elements," says Kathleen Wermke. At the same time, the larynx and vocal tract are changing, which entails a series of adaptation processes in sound production. In addition to this, infants also begin to produce their first syllable combinations in babbling during this phase. "This new developmental period evidently causes a temporary 'regression' in melody development to establish vocal development on a higher hierarchical level. Thereafter, the infant begins to intentionally imitate intonation patterns of the surrounding language(s) in consonant-vowel syllable sequences in babbling.

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Mothers pass on allergies to offspring

 Mothers can pass allergies to offspring while they are developing in the womb, researchers from the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), KK Women's and Children's Hospital (KKH) and Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore reported this week in the journal Science.

The study, which employed an animal model conducted according to the National Advisory Committee for Laboratory Animal Research (NACLAR) guidelines, shows that the key antibody responsible for triggering allergic reactions, immunoglobulin E (IgE), can cross the placenta and enter the fetus. When inside the fetus, the antibody binds to fetal mast cells, a type of immune cell that releases chemicals that trigger allergic reactions, from runny noses to asthma. After birth, newborn mice develop allergic reactions to the same type of allergen as their mothers at the time of first exposure -- unlike adult mice, which require two exposures. Studies in the laboratory also showed that maternal IgE can bind to human fetal mast cells, indicating they might cross the placenta in humans in a similar way.

Dr Florent Ginhoux, Senior Principal Investigator at A*STAR's Singapore Immunology Network (SIgN), a senior co-author of the study, said, "There is currently a significant lack of knowledge on mast cells that are present early on in the developing fetus. Here, we discovered that fetal mast cells phenotypically mature through the course of pregnancy, and can be sensitised by IgE of maternal origin that cross the placental barrier. The study suggests that a highly allergic pregnant mother may potentially transfer her IgE to her baby that consequently develop allergic reactions when exposed to the first time to the allergen."

"Allergies begin very early in life," said Associate Professor Ashley St. John, an immunologist at Duke-NUS' Emerging Infectious Diseases Programme and a senior co-author of the study. "Infants experience allergic responses closely linked with the mother's allergic response in ways that cannot only be explained by genetics. This work emphasises one way that allergic responses can pass from the mother to the developing fetus, and shows how allergies can then persist after birth."

As part of the study, following NACLAR guidelines, researchers exposed mice to ragweed pollen, a common allergen, prior to pregnancy. Mice that developed a sensitivity to the pollen had offspring that also showed an allergic reaction to ragweed. The sensitivity is allergen-specific; the offspring did not react to dust mites, another common allergen.

Notably, the transfer of sensitivity appears to fade with time. The newborn mice had allergic reactions when tested at four weeks, but less or none at six weeks.

The experimental studies were backed up with cellular tests and imaging, which showed maternal IgE bound to fetal mast cells, triggering the mast cells to release chemicals in reaction to an allergen, a process called degranulation.

This study further showed that the IgE transfer across the placenta requires the help of another protein, FcRN. Mice with FcRN knocked out lacked maternal IgE attached to their mast cells, and did not develop allergies after birth.

The study findings potentially open new intervention strategies to limit such transfer to minimise the occurrence of neonatal allergies. Currently, between 10 to 30 per cent of the world's population are affected by allergies. This number is set to continue rising and a solution preventing allergies being passed from mother to child could potentially bring those numbers down over time.

"Our research has really exciting findings that may explain the high incidence of early onset atopic dermatitis (eczema) in children of mothers with clinically proven eczema, which parallel findings in our local birth cohort findings," said Professor Jerry Chan, Senior Consultant, Department of Reproductive Medicine at KKH, Senior National Medical Research Council Clinician Scientist, and Vice Chair of Research with the Obstetrics and Gynaecology Academic Clinical Programme at the SingHealth Duke-NUS Academic Medical Centre. "From a clinical point of view, developing a further understanding in placental transfer of IgE, and the mechanism of fetal mast cell activation would be key to developing strategies to reduce the chance of eczema or other allergies from being transferred from mother to baby."

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Children use both brain hemispheres to understand language, unlike adults

 Infants and young children have brains with a superpower, of sorts, say Georgetown University Medical Center neuroscientists. Whereas adults process most discrete neural tasks in specific areas in one or the other of their brain's two hemispheres, youngsters use both the right and left hemispheres to do the same task. The finding suggests a possible reason why children appear to recover from neural injury much easier than adults.

The study published Sept. 7, 2020 in PNAS focuses on one task, language, and finds that to understand language (more specifically, processing spoken sentences), children use both hemispheres. This finding fits with previous and ongoing research, led by Georgetown neurology professor Elissa L. Newport, PhD, a former postdoctoral fellow Olumide Olulade, MD, PhD, and neurology assistant professor Anna Greenwald, PhD.

"This is very good news for young children who experience a neural injury," says Newport, director of the Center for Brain Plasticity and Recovery, a joint enterprise of Georgetown University and MedStar National Rehabilitation Network. "Use of both hemispheres provides a mechanism to compensate after a neural injury. For example, if the left hemisphere is damaged from a perinatal stroke -- one that occurs right after birth -- a child will learn language using the right hemisphere. A child born with cerebral palsy that damages only one hemisphere can develop needed cognitive abilities in the other hemisphere. Our study demonstrates how that is possible."

Their study solves a mystery that has puzzled clinicians and neuroscientists for a long time, says Newport.

In almost all adults, sentence processing is possible only in the left hemisphere, according to both brain scanning research and clinical findings of language loss in patients who suffered a left hemisphere stroke.

But in very young children, damage to either hemisphere is unlikely to result in language deficits; language can be recovered in many patients even if the left hemisphere is severely damaged. These facts suggest that language is distributed to both hemispheres early in life, Newport says. However, traditional scanning had not revealed the details of these phenomena until now. "It was unclear whether strong left dominance for language is present at birth or appears gradually during development," explains Newport.

Now, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) analyzed in a more complex way, the researchers have shown that the adult lateralization pattern is not established in young children and that both hemispheres participate in language during early development.

Brain networks that localize specific tasks to one or the other hemisphere start during childhood but are not complete until a child is about 10 or 11, she says. "We now have a better platform upon which to understand brain injury and recovery."

The study, originally run by collaborators William D. Gaillard, MD, and Madison M. Berl, PhD, of Children's National Medical Center, enrolled 39 healthy children, ages 4-13; Newport's lab added 14 adults, ages 18-29, and conducted a series of new analyses of both groups. The participants were given a well-studied sentence comprehension task. The analyses examined fMRI activation patterns in each hemisphere of the individual participants, rather than looking at overall lateralization in group averages. Investigators then compared the language activation maps for four age groups: 4-6, 7-9, 10-13, and 18-29. Penetrance maps revealed the percentage of subjects in each age group with significant language activation in each voxel of each hemisphere. (A voxel is a tiny point in the brain image, like a pixel on a television monitor.) Investigators also performed a whole-brain analysis across all participants to identify brain areas in which language activation was correlated with age.

Researchers found that, at the group level, even young children show left-lateralized language activation. However, a large proportion of the youngest children also show significant activation in the corresponding right-hemisphere areas. (In adults, the corresponding area in the right hemisphere is activated in quite different tasks, for example, processing emotions expressed with the voice. In young children, areas in both hemispheres are each engaged in comprehending the meaning of sentences as well as recognizing the emotional affect.)

Newport believes that the "higher levels of right hemisphere activation in a sentence processing task and the slow decline in this activation over development are reflections of changes in the neural distribution of language functions and not merely developmental changes in sentence comprehension strategies."

She also says that, if the team were able to do the same analysis in even younger children, "it is likely we would see even greater functional involvement of the right hemisphere in language processing than we see in our youngest participants (ages 4-6 years old).

"Our findings suggest that the normal involvement of the right hemisphere in language processing during very early childhood may permit the maintenance and enhancement of right hemisphere development if the left hemisphere is injured," Newport says.

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