High birth weight makes kids smarter
at school
Lower weight at birth has an adverse effect on
children's performance in school which is likely due to the early health
struggles small babies often face, a research has found.
The researchers used a unique set of data that matched birth and school records from 1.6 million children.
The higher the weight at birth, the better the children performed in reading and math tests at school.
"We tend to think that good schools are places where struggling kids get special attention and motivated teachers can correct any problems with learning," said Jeffrey Roth, professor of paediatrics at the College of Medicine, University of Florida and co-author.
"This research indicates that it's not always the case. Good schools are good for everyone, but even the best schools don't seem to differentially help kids with early health disadvantage," Roth explained.
These findings held true when socioeconomic and demographic factors were equal among children's families, Roth said.
When researchers compare children with similar family backgrounds, birth weight plays a key role in predicting future school success.
"Children with higher birth weight enter school with a cognitive advantage that appears to remain stable through the elementary and middle school years," researchers said.
"The estimated effects of low birth weight are present for children of highly educated and poorly educated parents alike, for children of both young and old mothers, and for children of all races and ethnicities, parental immigration status, parental marital status and other background characteristics," the team concluded.
The study's results were published in the journal The American Economic Review.
Source: www.timesofindia.com
08.12.2014
High-sugar diet in fathers could make
kids obese
A new study demonstrates that increasing sugar in
the diet of male fruit flies for just a day before mating could cause obesity
in their offspring.
There is also evidence that a similar system regulates susceptibility to obesity in mice and humans.
The research provides insights into how certain metabolic traits are inherited and may help investigators determine whether they can be altered.
If our genes are the hardware, our epigenetics is the software that decides how the hardware is used.
"It turns out that the father's diet reprogrammes the epigenetic 'software' so that genes needed for fat production are turned on in their sons," said J. Andrew Pospisilik of the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics in Germany.
Through mating experiments in fruit flies, the scientists found that dietary interventions in males could change the body composition of their offspring, with increased sugar leading to obesity in the next generation.
Because epigenetic programmes are somewhat plastic, the investigators suspect that it might be possible to reprogramme obese epigenetic programmes to lean epigenetic programmes.
"At the moment, we and other researchers are manipulating the epigenetics in early life but we do not know if it is possible to rewrite an adult programme," the authors said.
The research appeared in the Cell Press journal Cell.
Source: www.timesofindia.com
08.12.2014
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