[News article] Playtime at the pool may boost youngsters’ bodies and brains

Ok, the emphasis is on “may”. “…[L]earning to swim early in life may give kids a head start in developing balance, body awareness and maybe even language and math skills.”
Am blessed to be able to swim at work during lunch. The campus has a gym, with swim privileges at the hotel pool on campus. Maybe the swim is keeping some math skills intact!

From the 20 May 2015 Science News article

…

Loosely based on something our mother told us, it’s that learning to swim early in life may give kids a head start in developing balance, body awareness and maybe even language and math skills.

Mom may have been right. A multi-year study released in 2012 suggests that kids who take swim lessons early in life appear to hit certain developmental milestones well before their nonswimming peers. In the study, Australian researchers surveyed about 7,000 parents about their children’s development and gave 177 kids aged 3 to 5 years standard motor, language, memory and attention tests. Compared with kids who didn’t spend much time in the water, kids who had taken swim lessons seemed to be more advanced at tasks like running and climbing stairs and standing on their tiptoes or on one leg, along with drawing, handling scissors and building towers out of blocks.

Hitting milestones related to motor skills isn’t so surprising, the authors note, since swimming is a very physical activity. A bit more unexpected, they say, are the swimming kids’ advanced skills in language and math — tasks like counting, naming objects and recognizing words and letters. Kids who swam also seemed to be better at following directions. And, in some areas, kids had proportionally better scores on the development tests relative to how long they had been taking lessons.

The authors admit that they can’t conclusively claim that swimming alone is responsible for the developmental advances because the analysis was based on survey data and limited testing with young children. “Simply, we can say that children who participate in swimming achieve a wide range of milestones … and skill, knowledge and dispositions … earlier than the normal population,” the researchers write.

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[Reblog] Common Pesticide May Increase Risk of ADHD

Usually I don’t reblog posts with commercial advertising.  Please don’t associate me with any of the products! However, the post cited reputable resources.
On another note, I stopped using pesticides about five years ago.  Don’t get me started on RoundUp, even the least potent versions. Sure, I have more weeds. Corn gluten has eradicated the broadleaf grass. Other weeds I just pull out by hand.

 

Percent of Youth 4-17 Ever Diagnosed with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder by State: National Survey of Children’s Health

 

From the undated post at Science Blog

 

A commonly used pesticide may alter the development of the brain’s dopamine system — responsible for emotional expression and cognitive function – and increase the risk of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in children, according to a new Rutgers study.

The research published Wednesday in the Journal of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB), by Rutgers scientists and colleagues from Emory University, the University of Rochester Medical Center, and Wake Forest University discovered that mice exposed to the pyrethroid pesticide deltamethrin in utero and through lactation exhibited several features of ADHD, including dysfunctional dopamine signaling in the brain, hyperactivity, working memory, attention deficits and impulsive-like behavior.
Read more at http://scienceblog.com/76707/common-pesticide-may-increase-risk-adhd/#ZGUbPJch3TbkfGGH.99

 

 

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The conundrum between maturity and ADHD

Symptoms of ADHD described by the literature (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’ve often wondered if populations and sub-populations can be over-diagnosed or misdiagnosed.
At times this can happen with good intentions, sometimes I fear for the sake of profit….

From the 10 April posting by MATTHEW TOOHEY, MD at KevinMD.com

A recent Canadian study showed that the youngest children in each grade (born in the earliest month of the Canadian grade cutoff: December) were 30% more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than the oldest children (born in January). For girls, who overall have a lower incidence of ADHD, the difference was even more pronounced: 70%.

Interestingly, the overall rate of ADHD diagnosis in the sampling of children from this Canadian study (900,000 children) was 6.9% for boys and 2.2% for girls. Rates of diagnosis here in the United States are much higher, creeping up on 10% of all children.

What does all of this mean? Well, you can look at this data many different ways, depending on your point of view and feelings about ADHD, but it stresses to me what seems to be common sense: many factors play into our expectations of what normal behavior should be.  It is often the school which prompts parents to have their child evaluated for attention problems and this comes from a comparison to other children in the class. A six year old may be significantly less mature or able to stay on task than a seven year old. Likewise, boys tend to have more trouble with the expectations of the school environment than girls in the younger grades….

Related articles

• Are kids being diagnosed with ADHD just for being young? [Medicine] (io9.com)
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• Legal Drug-Pushing: How Disease Mongers Keep Us All Doped Up – John-Manuel Andriote – Health – The Atlantic (jflahiff.wordpress.com)
• Current psychiatric drugs are only marginally effective(jflahiff.wordpress.com)
• Seven Ways Medical Conflicts of Interest Are Disguised
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How environmental exposures can contribute to autism and ADHD

Image via Wikipedia

From an August 2011 posting by PHILIP J. LANDRIGAN, MD at KevinMD.com

Each year, biologically based disorders of brain development – autism, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), mental retardation, dyslexia, and subclinical neurodevelopmental disabilities – affect between 400,000 and 600,000 of the four million babies born in the United States. This means that between 10% and 15% of American children have some kind of learning disability.

Reported rates of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are sharply increasing.  The CDC reports that the rates of ASD increased by 57% between 2002 and 2006, now affecting 1 of every 110 babies born in the U.S.

With this rise in reported diagnosis, researchers are asking new questions about the causes of autism.  Until recently, most of this research into the causes of ASD has focused on genetic factors.  These investigations have made rapid progress and have identified a series of genetic abnormalities that are linked to autism. Taken together, these identified genetic causes account for about 30 to 40% of cases of autism.

Read the article

 

 

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