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According to a recent University of Missouri study, sad moms frequently take longer to answer to their children during back-and-forth dialogues. The findings will be used to conduct more research to see whether the shortened response time affects children’s language development, vocabulary, or academic outcomes in the long run.

Nicholas Smith, an assistant professor in the MU School of Health Professions, and his colleagues listened to audio recordings of over 100 families participating in the Early Head Start programme, a federal child development programme for children whose families’ income is at or below the federal poverty line.

Some of the moms involved were struggling with depression, and Smith’s team documented how much time passed between responses for a mother and her child during back-and-forth dialogue. “We found that the time gap in between responses, in general, gets shorter between mother and child as the child ages, and we also found the mom’s timing tended to predict the child’s timing and vice versa,” Smith said.

“Mothers and children are in sync. Children who were slower to respond to their mom often had moms who were slower to respond to the child, and children who were faster to respond to their mom had moms who were faster to respond to the child. The significant new finding was that the moms who were more depressed took longer to respond to their child compared to moms who were less depressed.”

In the longitudinal study, using audio recordings, they compared the response time of back-and-forth dialogue between mothers and their children when the children were 14 months old and 36 months old. Going forward, Smith plans to further study the dialogue response timing for the same individuals that were recorded in this study when the children were in pre-kindergarten and also when they were in fifth grade to examine how these effects play out later on in the children’s development.

“The overall objective we are hoping to accomplish is to better understand how mother-child interaction works as well as the underlying mechanisms and potential factors at play,” Smith said. “Once we identify what factors drive successful development outcomes and what factors potentially impair development, we can better identify at-risk children and then tailor potential interventions toward those that can benefit from them the most.”

Article By: Dr. Sayoni Roy Chowdhury, Consultant, Pediatric Neurology, Madhukar Rainbow Children’s Hospital

A febrile seizure is a seizure occurring in a healthy young child that is accompanied by a fever (100.4°F or more). Fever can be due to an underlying infection, commonly upper respiratory tract or gastrointestinal infection.
Febrile seizures are the most common cause of seizures in childhood, affecting 2 to 5% of the pediatric population. Most febrile seizures are self-limited and do not bear an impact on children’s neurodevelopmental trajectory.

What are the symptoms of febrile seizures?
Febrile seizures typically affect children between 1-2 years of age, ranging from 6 months to 5 years. They commonly occur on the 1st day of a febrile illness. The most frequent symptoms are:
• Generalized jerking/stiffening of all four limbs or one-half of the body
• Loss of consciousness
• Uprolling of eyeballs, frothing from the angle of mouth, bladder or bowel incontinence may be associated with jerks
A child might feel drowsy or fall asleep after the event, but after a short while, returns back to normal.
Febrile seizures can be classified as simple or complex. Simple febrile seizures last for a few seconds up to 15 minutes and occur once in 24 hours. Complex febrile seizures, on the contrary, are longer (> 15 minutes), may affect one-half of the body and can even recur within a day.

What are the causes of febrile seizures?
The exact cause of febrile seizures is hitherto unknown. Certain viral infections and genetic susceptibility are common risk factors that may affect a vulnerable, growing brain under the stress of a fever.
Nearly, one-third of children with febrile seizures may experience a recurrence. The risk factors frequently implicated in recurring febrile seizures include age younger than 1.5 years, shorter fever duration (< 1 hour) prior to the seizure, temperature less than 104°F and first-degree relative (parents or siblings) with a history of febrile seizures.

What are the complications of febrile seizures?
Febrile seizures don’t pose any long-term negative impact on the cognitive abilities. However, a very small proportion of children may be exposed to the risk of subsequent epilepsy (future unprovoked seizures) in those with complex febrile seizures, atypical age of onset of febrile seizures (age > 3 years), family history of epilepsy, neurodevelopmental abnormality and shorter fever duration (<1 hour) before seizure onset.

How to diagnose febrile seizures?
Febrile seizure is a clinical diagnosis. Evaluation should begin with a focused history and comprehensive examination, looking for focal neurologic signs and determining the cause of the fever. A well-appearing child with a simple febrile seizure doesn’t need any diagnostic testing. However, lumbar puncture (cerebrospinal fluid study) may be considered in infants with incomplete/unknown immunization status or if the child was pretreated with antibiotics as signs of meningitis (central nervous system infection) may be less reliable in these situations. In children with complex febrile seizures, neurologic examination aids us in the decision for need of further investigations like neuroimaging, lumbar puncture.
Once a child is diagnosed with febrile seizure, the prime focus should be on anticipatory guidance for parents. The emphasis should be on reassuring parents about the benign nature of febrile seizures, favorable prognosis and home management of seizures.

Following a claim that it had abandoned the search, World Health Organization (WHO) chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Wednesday (local time) that the organisation will keep pressing until it gets an answer to how the Covid-19 outbreak began.

“We need to continue to push until we get the answer,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters, referring to the search for the origins of the virus that first began spreading in China in late 2019. Solving the mystery of where the SARS-CoV-2 virus came from and how it began spreading among humans is considered vital for averting future pandemics.
“Knowing how this pandemic started is very, very important and very crucial,” said Ghebreyesus.

Notably, the WHO chief statement comes after an article on the Nature website alleged that the organization is faced with a lack of cooperation from China, where the outbreak began in late 2019, and the WHO had given up on the search.

Ghebreyesus said he had recently sent a letter to a top official in China “asking for cooperation because we need cooperation and transparency in the information… in order to know how this started.”

The two main theories that have been hotly debated have centred on the virus naturally spilling over from bats to an intermediary animal and into humans or The Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens (SAGO) was created “to conduct an independent assessment of the origins of COVID-19, but also to work more broadly to establish a framework to understand the origins of any future epidemic and pandemic pathogen, and the origins in which it emerges,” said Van Kerkhove, Infectious Disease Epidemiologist; COVID-19 Technical Lead, Emerging Diseases and Zoonoses Lead, WHO Health Emergencies Programme.

“We will continue to ask for countries to depoliticize this work, but we need cooperation from our colleagues in China to advance this,” she said.

Tedros said there were two reasons for not abandoning the origins search.
The first was scientific, he said: “We need to know how this started in order to prevent the next one.”
“The second (is) moral: millions of people lost their lives, and many suffered, and the whole world was taken hostage by a virus. “It’s morally very important to know how we lost our loved ones,” added WHO chief.

The WHO conducted the first phase of the study by dispatching a team of international experts to Wuhan, China, in January 2021 to write a first-phase report in collaboration with their Chinese colleagues.

While the initial plan was to send a second team, Van Kerkhove stated that the WHO had changed tactics and opted to form a team of scientists with a broader scope to examine new viruses and study ways to prevent future pandemics, while continuing to investigate the origins of COVID-19.

Researchers from the University of Illinois at Chicago evaluated 80 people with nonalcoholic fatty liver disease and discovered that those who followed an alternate-day fasting diet and exercised were able to improve their health.
The researchers report in Cell Metabolism that over a three-month period, people who exercised and alternated feast and fast days (eating without restriction one day and 500 calories or less the next) had increased insulin sensitivity and decreased liver fat, weight, and ALT, or alanine transaminase enzymes, which are markers for liver disease.

Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease is characterised by the accumulation of fat and inflammation in patients who consume little to no alcohol. The disease affects approximately 65% of obese adults, and it is strongly linked to the development of insulin resistance and Type 2 diabetes. If left untreated, fatty liver disease can progress to more serious complications such as cirrhosis or liver failure, but there are few effective treatment options.

Krista Varady, the study’s author, called the findings “pretty amazing.”

“When we compared the results of our study groups, we saw clearly that the most improved patients were in the group that followed the alternate-day fasting diet and exercised five days a week,” said Varady, professor of nutrition at the College of Applied Health Sciences.

“The people who only dieted or only exercised did not see the same improvements, which reinforces the importance of these two relatively inexpensive lifestyle modifications on overall health and on combating chronic diseases like fatty liver disease.”

Participants in the clinical trial were randomly assigned to one of four groups: alternate-day fasting, aerobic exercise, a combined group, or a control group in which no changes were made to their behaviours. Diet group participants tracked their food intake, while exercise group participants used an elliptical machine in Varady’s lab for one hour five days a week.

Varady said the study did not test whether alternate-day fasting was better or worse than other diets when combined with exercise, but she was surprised by how few people dropped out.

“Alternate-day fasting and exercise interventions can be difficult for people to stick to and in prior studies we have seen significant dropout. It was very interesting to see that in this trial we had very high adherence to the interventions,” said Varady, who thought the study’s implementation at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 could be a plausible explanation for the variation.

The study authors also noted that there were no serious safety events during the trial — the patients were able to safely maintain the diet and exercise for the three-month study, which Varady believes is an indicator that the intervention may be a good option for people with fatty liver disease who want to improve their health without pharmaceuticals, which can have side effects.

The authors write in their paper, “Effect of alternate day fasting combined with aerobic exercise on non-alcoholic fatty liver disease: A randomized controlled trial,” which is the first to look at the effect of intermittent fasting combined with exercise on non-alcoholic fatty liver disease outcomes: “Our findings also indicate that the combination intervention was effective for reducing body weight, fat mass, waist circumference, ALT, fasting insulin, insulin resistance, and increasing insulin sensitivity, among patients with obesity and NAFLD, versus controls.”

An international team of researchers lead by Lithuanian experts adds to the growing body of data that intracranial pressure is important in normal-tension glaucoma, which accounts for up to 50% of all glaucoma cases. A recent clinical study discovered that low intracranial pressure is linked to impaired patient vision, particularly in the nose zone.

Optic nerve degeneration produces glaucoma, one of the main causes of blindness in persons over the age of 60. In glaucoma patients, increased pressure inside the eye (called intraocular pressure or IOP) is frequently noted. However, not everyone who has ocular hypertension develops glaucoma. Furthermore, glaucoma can develop in the presence of normal IOP.

According to several research, the prevalence of so-called normal tension glaucoma (NTG) among patients in the global population ranges from 30 to 90%.  “Contemporary medicine has methods to treat elevated eye pressure and to slow or even stop the damage to the optic nerve. However, these methods do not work in the case of normal tension glaucoma. There is a growing awareness among the scientific community, that glaucoma is a condition caused by two pressures – inside the eye and the skull,” says professor Arminas Ragauskas from Kaunas University of Technology (KTU), Lithuania.

Ragauskas, the Head of KTU’s Health Telematics Science Institute, invented the non-invasive intracranial pressure measuring method employed in the study.

He goes on to explain that the optic nerve is anatomically connected to the brain and is surrounded by cerebrospinal fluid. Intracranial pressure (ICT), which is pressure within our skull measured in cerebrospinal fluid, and intraocular pressure (IOP) can both impact the optic nerve’s health. Recently, researchers have focused on the balance between the two pressures, known as translaminar pressure differential (TPD), and its relationship to the development of glaucoma.

A new study including 80 patients with early-stage normal tension glaucoma (NTG) was done by researchers from Lithuanian, Israeli, and American universities. Between January and October 2018, 300 NTG patients were sent to the Eye Clinic at the Lithuanian University of Health Sciences.

Several measures were taken throughout the investigation, including intraocular pressure (IOP), intracranial pressure (ICP), and visual field perimetry. TPD = IOP – ICP was used to compute the translaminar pressure differential (TPD). There were five zones in the visual field: nasal, temporal, peripheral, central, and paracentral.

The study found multiple statistically significant associations between intracranial pressure, TPD, and changes in visual field. The greater the TPD, the more substantial the impairment to the patient’s visual field. The nasal zone had the most substantial visual field reductions.

“Visual field loss means only one thing – a person is becoming blind. That’s why it is so important to understand the causes of this condition and to reverse it. We are all aware of the dire outcome,” says Prof Ragauskas.

According to the researchers, greater TPD might be considered a risk factor for the detrimental development of normal tension glaucoma. Because TPD is computed by subtracting ICP from IOP, the lower the intracranial pressure reading, the greater the TPD. Thus, decreased intracranial pressure may be a risk factor in normal-tension glaucoma.

“The idea that brain pressure is related to the visual field is not new. Several years ago, we conducted a series of experiments studying the links between visual field and intracranial pressure, using the non-invasive technology developed here, at KTU. In the conferences that followed, I saw how our new idea was met with excitement by the international community of ophthalmologists,” says Prof Ragauskas.

The link between intracranial pressure and glaucoma opens up new possibilities for medical practitioners to investigate the cause and potential therapy of this condition. In addition, data supporting this concept has come in from research organisations operating all around the world in recent years. Prof Ragauskas claims that his study has contributed to the expanding amount of data on the subject, both directly and indirectly.

The intracranial pressure was measured in the above-mentioned study using a two-depth Transcranial Doppler (Vittamed UAB, Lithuania) created by Prof Ragauskas’ team at the Kaunas University of Technology laboratories. Unlike the traditional method of monitoring intracranial pressure, which entails drilling a tiny hole into the patient’s skull, Prof Ragauskas’ innovation uses ultrasound to measure brain pressure non-invasively through the eye. The invention’s industrial uses were patented in the United States and Europe.

“We are not competing with invasive methods, but heading towards an entirely new direction. At the moment, I see that ophthalmology is the field where our technology is needed most, and we are using it for research purposes. However, we are constantly developing our invention and have recently patented a couple of new applications, which might be used in other contexts where measuring intracranial pressure is crucial. For example, in long-term space missions,” says KTU professor Ragauskas.

A new study shows how cannabidiol (CBD), a molecule found in cannabis, reduces seizures in numerous types of treatment-resistant paediatric epilepsy. The present study, led by experts from NYU Grossman School of Medicine, showed that CBD blocked signals transmitted by lysophosphatidylinositol, a molecule (LPI). LPI is present in neurons, which are brain cells, and is assumed to boost nerve transmissions as part of regular operation.

However, sickness can cause LPI to be hijacked and cause seizures. The study, which was published online on February 13 in Neuron, validated a prior result that CBD inhibits LPI’s capacity to enhance nerve impulses in a brain area known as the hippocampus. The recent findings imply, for the first time, that LPI decreases anti-seizure signals, further explaining the benefit of CBD therapy.

“Our results deepen the field’s understanding of a central seizure-inducing mechanism, with many implications for the pursuit of new treatment approaches,” said corresponding author Richard W. Tsien, chair of the Department of Physiology and Neuroscience at NYU Langone Health.

“The study also clarified how CBD counters seizures, but more broadly how circuits are balanced in the brain,” added Tsien. “Related imbalances are present in autism and schizophrenia so that the paper may have a broader impact.”

The findings focus on how each neuron “fires” to send an electrical pulse along an extension of itself until it reaches a synapse, which is the gap that joins it to the next cell in a neural pathway. When the pulse reaches the cell’s end before the synapse, it causes the release of neurotransmitters, which float over the gap and effect the next cell in line. When such signals overlap, the cell is either encouraged to fire (excited) or inhibited from firing (inhibition). The right balance of the two is critical for brain function; too much excitement induces seizures.

The new study examined multiple rat models to investigate seizure processes, generally by monitoring information-carrying electrical current flows with fine-tipped electrodes. Other studies investigated the effect of LPI by genetically eliminating its major signalling partner or by detecting LPI release after seizures.

The researchers discovered that either genetically modifying mice to lack GPR55 or pre-treatment with plant-derived CBD prior to seizure-inducing stimuli inhibited LPI-mediated effects on both excitatory and inhibitory synaptic transmission. While previous research has indicated GPR55 as a CBD seizure-reduction target, the new study revealed a more comprehensive, hypothesised mechanism of action.

The authors believe that CBD inhibits a “positive feedback loop” in which seizures boost LPI-GPR55 signalling, which presumably stimulates more seizures, which raises LPI and GPR55 levels. The postulated vicious loop is one method that might explain recurring epileptic seizures, however further research is required to prove this.

Furthermore, while the present study focused on the plant-based cannabinoid CBD, the authors point out that LPI is part of a signalling network that includes “endocannabinoids” such as 2-Arachidonoylglycerol (2-AG), which occur naturally in human tissues. CBD also regulates LPI and 2-AG target receptors, although their activities at the synapse vary. While LPI amplifies incoming electrical impulses, endocannabinoids such as 2-AG respond to increased brain activity by decreasing neurotransmitter release from nerve cells. Surprisingly, LPI and 2-AG can be transformed into one other by enzyme activity.

“Theoretically, the brain could control activity by toggling between pro-excitatory LPI and the restorative actions of 2-AG,” said first study author Evan Rosenberg, PhD, a post-doctoral scholar in the Tsein’s lab. “Drug designers could inhibit the enzymes that underpin LPI production or promote its conversion to 2-AG, as an additional approach to control seizures. LPI could also serve as a biomarker of seizures or predictor of clinical responsiveness to CBD, providing an area of future research.”

An Emory University study found that extracts from two common wild plants reduce the virus’s ability to infect living cells.
The findings were reported in Scientific Reports as the first major screening of botanical extracts for SARS-CoV-2 viral efficacy. Extracts from the blooms of tall goldenrod (Solidago altissima) and the rhizomes of eagle fern (Pteridium aquilinum) each prevented SARS-CoV-2 from entering human cells in laboratory dish experiments. Plants contain just trace amounts of the active chemicals. People attempting to treat themselves with them would be futile and perhaps hazardous, according to the study. They caution that the eagle fern is known to be harmful.

“It’s very early in the process, but we’re working to identify, isolate and scale up the molecules from the extracts that showed activity against the virus,” said Cassandra Quave, senior author of the study and associate professor in Emory School of Medicine’s Department of Dermatology and the Center for the Study of Human Health, adding, “Once we have isolated the active ingredients, we plan to further test for their safety and for their long-range potential as medicines against Covid-19.”

Quave is an ethnobotanist who studies how indigenous peoples used plants for healing in order to find viable new medication prospects. Her lab is in charge of the Quave Natural Product Library, which houses thousands of botanical and fungal natural products isolated from plants collected across the world.

The latest paper’s primary author is Caitlin Risener, a PhD candidate in Emory’s Molecular and Systems Pharmacology graduate programme and the Center for the Study of Human Health.

Previously, the Quave lab focused on plants that traditional people had used to treat skin irritation in order to find promising compounds for the treatment of drug-resistant bacterial infections. Because Covid-19 is a novel illness, the researchers used a comprehensive approach.

They developed a technique for speedily testing over 1,800 extracts and 18 compounds from the Quave Natural Product Library for SARS-CoV-2 activity. “We’ve shown that our natural products library is a powerful tool to help search for potential therapeutics for an emerging disease,” Risener said, adding, “Other researchers can adapt our screening method to search for other novel compounds within plants and fungi that may lead to new drugs to treat a range of pathogens.”

SARS-CoV-2 is an RNA virus with a spike protein that may connect to a protein on host cells called ACE2. “The viral spike protein uses the ACE2 protein almost like a key going into a lock, enabling the virus to break into a cell and infect it,” Quave explains.

The researchers designed studies using SARS-CoV-2 virus-like particles, or VLPs, and cells modified to overexpress ACE2 on their surface. The VLPs were stripped of the genetic material required to infect Covid-19. Instead, if a VLP was able to connect to an ACE2 protein and enter a cell, it was programmed to hijack the cell’s machinery, causing a fluorescent green protein to be activated.

Before injecting the virus particles, a plant extract was applied to the cells in a petri dish. They could rapidly tell whether the viral particles had entered the cells and activated the green protein by placing a fluorescent light on the dish.

The researchers found a few hits for extracts that protect against viral entrance and then focused on the ones with the highest activity: tall goldenrod and eagle fern. Both plant species are native to North America and have long been used for medical purposes by Native Americans.

Additional tests revealed that the plant extracts’ protective capacity was effective against all four SARS-CoV-2 variants: alpha, theta, delta, and gamma. The Quave lab collaborated with co-author Raymond Schinazi, Emory professor of paediatrics, director of Emory’s Division of Laboratory of Biochemical Pharmacology, and co-director of the HIV Cure Scientific Working Group within the NIH-sponsored Emory University Center for AIDS Research, to further test these findings.

Schinazi is a world expert in antiviral research, well recognised for his groundbreaking work on breakthrough HIV medications. Because of the Schinazi lab’s superior biosecurity rating, the researchers were allowed to test the two plant extracts in trials utilising infectious SARS-CoV-2 virus instead of VLPs. The findings validated the potential of tall goldenrod and eagle fern extracts to block SARS-ability CoV-2’s to attach to and infect live cells.

“Our results set the stage for the future use of natural product libraries to find new tools or therapies against infectious diseases,” Quave said. The researchers are now attempting to pinpoint the precise method through which the two plant extracts inhibit ACE2 protein binding.

One of the most enjoyable aspects of the endeavour for Risener was collecting samples of tall goldenrod and eagle fern herself. The Quave lab, in addition to collecting medicinal plants from throughout the world, does field visits to the woods of the Joseph W. Jones Research Center in South Georgia. The Woodruff Foundation built the institute to help maintain one of the few remains of the once-dominant southern longleaf pine ecosystem.

“It’s awesome to go into nature to identify and dig up plants,” Risener said, adding, “That’s something that few graduate students in pharmacology get to do. I’ll be covered in dirt from head to toe, kneeling on the ground and beaming with excitement and happiness.”

She also helps to prepare plant extracts and mount specimens for the Emory Herbarium. “When you collect a specimen yourself, and dry and preserve the samples, you get a personal connection,” she said, adding, “It’s different from someone just handing you a vial of plant material in a lab and saying, ‘Analyze this.'”

Risener plans to pursue a career in outreach and education for science policy related to natural chemical research after graduation. Some of the more well-known botanical medications include aspirin (derived from the willow tree), penicillin (derived from fungus), and the cancer treatment Taxol (from the yew tree).

“Plants contain such chemical complexity that humans probably couldn’t imagine of all the botanical chemicals that are yet to be found,” Risener said, adding, “The huge therapeutic potential of plants underscores the need of ecosystem preservation.”