Tag Archives: Infants

Evidence that babies react to taste, smell in the womb; Carrot for “laughter-face” response, kale for “cry-face” response: Study

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A study led by Durham University’s Fetal and Neonatal Research Lab, UK, took 4D ultrasound scans of 100 pregnant women to see how their unborn babies responded after being exposed to flavours from foods eaten by their mothers.

Researchers looked at how the fetuses reacted to either carrot or kale flavours just a short time after the flavours had been ingested by the mothers.

Fetuses exposed to carrot showed more “laughter-face” responses while those exposed to kale showed more “cry-face” responses.

Their findings could further our understanding of the development of human taste and smell receptors.

The researchers also believe that what pregnant women eat might influence babies’ taste preferences after birth and potentially have implications for establishing healthy eating habits.

The study is published in the journal Psychological Science.

pregnant lady

pregnant lady/Commons.wikimedia.org

Humans experience flavour through a combination of taste and smell. In fetuses it is thought that this might happen through inhaling and swallowing the amniotic fluid in the womb.

Lead researcher Beyza Ustun, a postgraduate researcher in the Fetal and Neonatal Research Lab, Department of Psychology, Durham University, said: “A number of studies have suggested that babies can taste and smell in the womb, but they are based on post-birth outcomes while our study is the first to see these reactions prior to birth.

“As a result, we think that this repeated exposure to flavours before birth could help to establish food preferences post-birth, which could be important when thinking about messaging around healthy eating and the potential for avoiding ‘food-fussiness’ when weaning.

“It was really amazing to see unborn babies’ reaction to kale or carrot flavours during the scans and share those moments with their parents.”

The research team, which also included scientists from Aston University, Birmingham, UK, and the National Centre for Scientific Research-University of Burgundy, France, scanned the mothers, aged 18 to 40, at both 32 weeks and 36 weeks of pregnancy to see fetal facial reactions to the kale and carrot flavours.

Mothers were given a single capsule containing approximately 400mg of carrot or 400mg kale powder around 20 minutes before each scan. They were asked not to consume any food or flavoured drinks one hour before their scans.

A 4D scan image of a fetus showing a neutral face/CREDIT: FETAP (Fetal Taste Preferences) Study, Fetal and Neonatal Research Lab, Durham University.

The mothers also did not eat or drink anything containing carrot or kale on the day of their scans to control for factors that could affect fetal reactions.

Facial reactions seen in both flavour groups, compared with fetuses in a control group who were not exposed to either flavour, showed that exposure to just a small amount of carrot or kale flavour was enough to stimulate a reaction.

Co-author Professor Nadja Reissland, head of the Fetal and Neonatal Research Lab, Department of Psychology, Durham University, supervised Beyza Ustun’s research. She said: “Previous research conducted in my lab has suggested that 4D ultrasound scans are a way of monitoring fetal reactions to understand how they respond to maternal health behaviours such as smoking, and their mental health including stress, depression, and anxiety.

“This latest study could have important implications for understanding the earliest evidence for fetal abilities to sense and discriminate different flavours and smells from the foods ingested by their mothers.”

Co-author Professor Benoist Schaal, of the National Centre for Scientific Research-University of Burgundy, France, said: “Looking at fetuses’ facial reactions we can assume that a range of chemical stimuli pass through maternal diet into the fetal environment.

“This could have important implications for our understanding of the development of our taste and smell receptors, and related perception and memory.”

The researchers say their findings might also help with information given to mothers about the importance of taste and healthy diets during pregnancy.

They have now begun a follow-up study with the same babies post-birth to see if the influence of flavours they experienced in the womb affects their acceptance of different foods.

Research co-author Professor Jackie Blissett, of Aston University, said: “It could be argued that repeated prenatal flavour exposures may lead to preferences for those flavours experienced postnatally. In other words, exposing the fetus to less ‘liked’ flavours, such as kale, might mean they get used to those flavours in utero.

“The next step is to examine whether fetuses show less ‘negative’ responses to these flavours over time, resulting in greater acceptance of those flavours when babies first taste them outside of the womb.”

Related: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/09567976221105460

 

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

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· More than half of children treated had at least a 75% reduction in signs of eczema and itch
· Kids sleep through night for first time instead of scratching
· Parents see children’s personalities change as they are able to lead a normal life.

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.

CHICAGO — 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.

“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.

The trial was sponsored by Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc. and Sanofi, who jointly developed dupilumab.

Scientists develop improved, potentially safer Zika vaccine

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The worldwide Zika threat first emerged in 2015, infecting millions as it swept across the Americas. It struck great fear in pregnant women, as babies born with severe brain birth defects quickly overburdened hospitals and public health care systems.

In response, there has been a flurry of heroic scientific efforts to stop Zika. Whole governments, academic labs and pharmaceutical companies have raced to develop Zika vaccines ever since global health experts first realized the dangers wrought by the mosquito-borne virus.

Now, ASU has taken a major step forward in boosting Zika prevention efforts.

ASU Biodesign Institute scientist Qiang “Shawn” Chen has led his research team to develop the world’s first plant-based Zika vaccine that could be more potent, safer and cheaper to produce than any other efforts to date.

“Our vaccine offers improved safety and potentially lowers the production costs more than any other current alternative, and with equivalent effectiveness,” said Chen, a researcher in the Biodesign Center for IVV and professor in the School of Life Sciences. “We are very excited about these results.”

Rapid response network

Several potential Zika vaccines have had promising results in early animal and human tests. Last year, the Food and Drug Administration approved the first human testing of a Zika vaccine candidate, and this summer, a $100 million U.S. government-led clinical trial is underway.

But currently, there are no licensed vaccines or therapeutics available to combat Zika.

Several dedicated ASU scientists also heeded the call to action, wanting to use their special know-how to find a way to overcome the pandemic crisis.

First, ASU chemist Alexander Green, along with collaborators at Harvard, developed a more rapid and reliable Zika test, an achievement highlighted by Popular Science in its “Best of What’s New” of 2016.

Now, Chen may have come up with a better vaccine candidate based on a key Zika protein. Chen is a viral expert who has worked for the past decade on plant-based therapeutics and vaccines against West Nile virus and Dengue fever, which come from the same Zika family, called flaviviruses.

He honed in on developing a vaccine against a part of a Zika viral protein, called DIII, that plays a key role for the virus to infect people.

“All flaviviruses have the envelope protein on the outside part of the virus. It has three domains. “The domain III has a unique stretch of DNA for the Zika virus, and we exploited this to generate a robust and protective immune response that is unique for Zika,” said Chen.

They first grew the envelope protein in bacteria, then switched to prepare the DIII protein domain in tobacco plants.

After developing enough material for the new vaccine candidate, Chen’s team performed immunization experiments in mice, which induced antibody and cellular immune responses that have been shown to confer 100 percent protection against multiple Zika virus strains in a mouse challenge.

Producing plant-based vaccines, especially in tobacco plants, is old hat for ASU researchers like Chen. For more than a decade, they’ve been producing low-cost vaccines in plants to fight devastating infectious diseases in the developing world.

It’s the same approach ASU plant research pioneer Charles Arntzen used when he played a key role in developing ZMapp, the experimental treatment used during the Ebola outbreak.

Artntzen’s Biodesign colleagues, including Chen, Hugh Mason and Tsafrir Mor, have continued to pursue plant-based vaccines and therapeutics to combat West Nile virus, dengue fever, nerve agents and even cancer.

Effective but not foolproof

While Chen has been cheering on Zika vaccine progress from other researchers, in each case, there can be side effects.

To date, other scientists have tested several kinds of vaccines on mice –including one made from DNA and another from an inactivated form of the virus. With just one dose, both vaccines prompted the creation of antibodies that shielded the animals from becoming infected when they were exposed to the virus.

Any heat-killed vaccine runs the risk of accidentally injecting a live version of the virus if there is an error made in the vaccine production protocol. This tragic scenario happened occasionally with the polio vaccine.

For the second research group, they used the complete Zika envelope protein for their vaccine. Since envelope protein domains I and II are similar to West Nile and dengue viruses, this can cause a dangerous cross-reactive immune response.

“When you make the full native envelope protein as the basis for a vaccine, it will induce antibodies against DI, DII and the DIII domains of the protein,” explained Chen. “Those who have been prior exposed to DI and DII of other members of the Zika virus family may be prone to developing very bad symptoms, or in some cases, fatalities for dengue.”

In fact, animal experiments have shown that prior exposure to dengue or West Nile virus makes the Zika infection and symptoms much worse, suggesting a similar risk for people who had prior exposure to dengue (especially in South America, where it is more common).

“If you have prior exposure to dengue, and then have Zika exposure, the Zika infection may be much worse, and for men, may increase the likelihood of sexual transmission,” said Chen.

Chen’s protein-based vaccine uses the smallest and most unique part of the Zika virus that can still elicit a potent and robust immune response.

“In our approach, we make what we call a pseudovirus. It’s a fake virus. The pseudovirus displays only the DIII part of the envelope protein on the surface. This is at least as potent as previous vaccine versions.”

And he is very confident that his DIII-based protein vaccine will be safer.

“We did a test to make sure that the vaccine produces a potent protective immune response, but also, that it does not produce antibodies that may be cross reactive for dengue, West Nile, yellow fever or others,” said Chen.

Fast track to the clinic

During the height of the Zika pandemic, whole countries of women were told not to become pregnant, due to babies born with a severe brain defect called microcephaly, in which the head and brain don’t develop properly.

There have also been vision and hearing defects and learning disabilities associated with less severe infections.

To make matters worse, in adults, a debilitating nervous system condition called Gullian-Barre syndrome has also been shown to be caused by Zika.

While the most severe wave of the Zika pandemic has ebbed, it won’t go away anytime soon, and a vaccine still offers the best hope.

Tens of millions more could still be infected in the Americas in the coming years (see WHO fact sheet).

The ASU scientists were able to mobilize quickly from idea to proof-of-concept because they could leverage funds from an NIAID grant and seed funds from the Biodesign Institute.

These are all made possible by generous federal, state and public support, including sales tax generated from the long-time Arizona innovation booster, voter-approved Proposition 301.

“This is a great example of the brightest minds quickly coming together, with public support, to take on one of the most significant public health challenges of our time,” said Josh LaBaer, executive director of the Biodesign Institute.

“That’s the essence of Biodesign at its best, and we hope this important proof-of-principal of a Zika vaccine can be translated quickly into the clinic.”

With the successful proof-of-principle, Chen hopes to partner with the medical community to begin the first phase of a human clinical trial in the next two years.

“Above all, we have to ensure the utmost safety with any Zika vaccine, especially because the people who will need it most, pregnant women, have the most worries about their own health, and the health of the fetus,” said Chen. “This has to be 100 percent safe and effective.”

Along with Chen, the research team included Ming Yang, Huafang “Lily” Lai and Haiyan Sun.

The research was published in the online version of Scientific Reports.

 

Bilingual babies listen to language

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Are two languages at a time too much for the mind? Caregivers and teachers should know that infants growing up bilingual have the learning capacities to make sense of the complexities of two languages just by listening. In a new study, an international team of researchers, including those from Princeton University, report that bilingual infants as young as 20 months of age efficiently and accurately process two languages.

The study, published Aug. 7 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that infants can differentiate between words in different languages. “By 20 months, bilingual babies already know something about the differences between words in their two languages,” said Casey Lew-Williams, an assistant professor of psychology and co-director of the Princeton Baby Lab, where researchers study how babies and young children learn to see, talk and understand the world. He is also the co-author of the paper.

“They do not think that ‘dog’ and ‘chien’ [French] are just two versions of the same thing,” Lew-Williams said. “They implicitly know that these words belong to different languages.”

To determine infants’ ability to monitor and control language, the researchers showed 24 French-English bilingual infants and 24 adults in Montreal pairs of photographs of familiar objects. Participants heard simple sentences in either a single language (“Look! Find the dog!”) or a mix of two languages (“Look! Find the chien!”). In another experiment, they heard a language switch that crossed sentences (“That one looks fun! Le chien!”). These types of language switches, called code switches, are regularly heard by children in bilingual communities.

The researchers then used eye-tracking measures, such as how long an infant’s or an adult’s eyes remained fixed to a photograph after hearing a sentence, and pupil dilation. Pupil diameter is an involuntary response to how hard the brain is “working,” and is used as an indirect measure of cognitive effort.

The researchers tested bilingual adults as a control group and used the same photographs and eye-tracking procedure as tested on bilingual infants to examine whether these language-control mechanisms were the same across a bilingual speaker’s life.

They found that bilingual infants and adults incurred a processing “cost” when hearing switched-language sentences and, at the moment of the language switch, their pupils dilated. However, this switch cost was reduced or eliminated when the switch was from the non-dominant to the dominant language, and when the language switch crossed sentences.

“We identified convergent behavioral and physiological markers of there being a ‘cost’ associated with language switching,” Lew-Williams said. Rather than indicating barriers to comprehension, the study “shows an efficient processing strategy where there is an activation and prioritization of the currently heard language,” Lew-Williams said.

The similar results in both the infant and adult subjects also imply that “bilinguals across the lifespan have important similarities in how they process their languages,” Lew-Williams said.

“We have known for a long time that the language currently being spoken between two bilingual interlocutors — the base language — is more active than the language not being spoken, even when mixed speech is possible,” said François Grosjean, professor emeritus of psycholinguistics at Neuchâtel University in Switzerland, who is familiar with the research but was not involved with the study.

“This creates a preference for the base language when listening, and hence processing a code-switch can take a bit more time, but momentarily,” added Grosjean. “When language switches occur frequently, or are situated at [sentence] boundaries, or listeners expect them, then no extra processing time is needed. The current study shows that many of these aspects are true in young bilingual infants, and this is quite remarkable.”

“These findings advance our understanding of bilingual language use in exciting ways — both in toddlers in the initial stages of acquisition and in the proficient bilingual adult,” said Janet Werker, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, who was not involved with the research. She noted that the findings may have implications for optimal teaching in bilingual settings. “One of the most obvious implications of these results is that we needn’t be concerned that children growing up bilingual will confuse their two languages. Indeed, rather than being confused as to which language to expect, the results indicate that even toddlers naturally activate the vocabulary of the language that is being used in any particular setting.”

A bilingual advantage?

Lew-Williams suggests that this study not only confirms that bilingual infants monitor and control their languages while listening to the simplest of sentences, but also provides a likely explanation of why bilinguals show cognitive advantages across the lifespan. Children and adults who have dual-language proficiency have been observed to perform better in “tasks that require switching or the inhibiting of a previously learned response,” Lew-Williams said.

“Researchers used to think this ‘bilingual advantage’ was from bilinguals’ practice dealing with their two languages while speaking,” Lew-Williams said. “We believe that everyday listening experience in infancy — this back-and-forth processing of two languages — is likely to give rise to the cognitive advantages that have been documented in both bilingual children and adults.”

Infants know what we like best, WashU study finds

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Behind the chubby cheeks and bright eyes of babies as young as 8 months lies the smoothly whirring mind of a social statistician, logging our every move and making odds on what a person is most likely to do next, suggests new research in the journal Infancy.

“Even before they can talk, babies are keeping close track of what’s going on in front of them and looking for patterns of activity that may suggest preferences,” said study co-author Lori Markson, associate professor of psychological & brain sciences and director of the Cognition & Development Lab at Washington University in St. Louis. “Make the same choice three or four times in a row, and babies as young as 8 months come to view that consistent behavior as a preference.”

The findings demonstrated that infants look for consistent patterns of behavior and make judgements about people’s preferences based on simple probabilities calculated from observed events and actions.

Co-led by Yuyan Luo, an associate professor of psychological sciences at the University of Missouri-Columbia, the study may shed light on how infants and young children learn about people’s preferences for a certain kind of food, toy or activity. It might also explain why kids always seem to want the toy that someone else is playing with.

“Consistency seems to be an important factor for infants in helping them sort out what’s happening in the world around them,” Markson said. “Our findings suggest that, if a person does something different even a single time, it undoes the notion of someone having a clear preference and changes an infant’s expectations for that individual’s behavior. In other words, if you break the routine, all bets are off in terms of what they expect from you.”

The findings confirmed that infants as young as 8 months are already developing the ability to see the world through someone else’s eyes, to sense what another person may or may not know, think or believe about a situation.

Because babies can’t tell us what they’re thinking, researchers had previously speculated that the ability to see life from someone else’s perspective did not develop until about 4 years of age. But more recent research over the past decade gets around this spoken-language barrier by relying on a proven premise — that babies spend much more time looking at events they consider to be new and unusual.

In this study, Markson and Luo conducted a series of experiments to track how infant “looking times” changed when an actor made an unexpected choice between one of two stuffed-animal toys displayed before the infant on a small puppet stage.

They corroborated these findings using a similar experiment that tracked whether infants, when asked to give a toy to the actor, would reach more often for the toy consistently chosen by the actor in previous trials, thus implying that the infant understood the actor’s preference.

The experiments were conducted on a sample of 60 healthy, full-term infants with an even split of males and females ranging in age from 7 to 9 months and an average age of 8 1/2 months.

Seated on a parent’s lap, the infants watched as a young woman reached out and grabbed one of two stuffed animals on the stage, either a white-and-brown dog or a yellow duck with orange beak and a purple bonnet.

During the “familiarization” phase of these experiments, the toy selection process was repeated four times under three separate conditions.

In the “consistent” condition, a woman in a blue or black shirt picked up the yellow duck four times in a row. In the “inconsistent” condition, the same woman picked up the duck three times and the dog once. And, in the “two actor” condition, the woman in the blue shirt selected the duck three times, while another woman in a white shirt selected the dog once.

After each four-trial familiarization phase, the researcher observed the babies’ reactions as the women reappeared on the stage and made a fifth selection, either going back to the previously targeted duck or making a new selection of the dog.

Two trained observers watched the babies’ reactions through concealed peepholes and independently coded the babies’ “looking time” responses based on seconds spent watching each toy-selection event. Video cameras captured both the babies’ reactions and the toy-selection process so that response time coding could be further analyzed and confirmed.

Findings confirmed that the babies spent about 50 percent more time looking at selections that represented a break from consistent patterns made in the familiarization trials.

“Infants who saw someone make the same choice three or four times in a row showed clear signs of being surprised when that person did not follow the same pattern in the future,” Markson said. “They obviously paid more attention to actions that did not fit their assumptions about what toys the women appeared to prefer most.”

In a second phase of the study, researchers reaffirmed their findings using a variation on the experiment in which the women who had chosen the stuffed animals during the trial phase asked the infant to choose between two toys by saying: “Can you give it to me? Can you give me the toy?”

In this variation, the infants also seemed to have made assumptions about the women’s toy preferences, reaching for the stuffed animal that had been consistently chosen by the woman during the trial phase.

“Our study is the first one to show how inconsistent choices affect infants’ understanding about others’ preferences,” Markson said. “Based on these findings, we hope to further explore how ratios of consistent/inconsistent choices matter to infants and eventually compare infants’ understanding to adults’ knowledge about others’ choices.”