Health
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Mothers’ prenatal BMI is linked with foetal brain connectivity
New data suggest that a high maternal prenatal body mass index (BMI) is associated with differences in functional connectivity in the foetal brain that might confer a risk of mental health and cognitive problems in childhood.
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Insufficient sleep might affect children’s emotional health
Data from a new study published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry suggest that insufficient sleep can affect emotional health in children. The study, conducted by Candice Alfano and colleagues, assessed the impact of sleep duration on different aspects of emotion in a cohort of 53 children aged 7-11 years old.
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How common and costly is persistent health anxiety in young people?
Health anxiety – characterized by excessive and impairing worry about health issues1 – has been minimally described in childhood and adolescence, and longitudinal studies are lacking.
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Depressed mothers and their offspring differ in terms of health risk profiles and allostatic load
Allostatic load is essentially the “wear and tear” that accumulates in the body in individuals exposed to chronic stress. Because some patients with psychiatric disorders have a shorter lifespan than their healthy counterparts,1 some researchers have suggested that there might be a link between disorders such as depression and increased allostatic load.
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Interventions for reducing loneliness seem effective in young people
Meta-analyses of interventions aimed at reducing loneliness among young people are distinctly lacking in the field. Now, Alice Eccles and Pamela Qualter have addressed this gap by compiling a review for Child and Adolescent Mental Health on interventions to reduce loneliness in young people.
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Young people’s ‘neural fingerprints’ might permit a precision-medicine approach to depression
Precision medicine has been discussed in medical research since the late 1990’s. Only recently, however, has this concept aroused interest and inspired relevant research in psychiatry, particularly in adolescents.
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How accurate are teachers’ assessments of children’s mental health?
Frances Mathews, Tamsin Ford and colleagues have performed a secondary analysis of the 2004 British Child and Adolescent Mental Health Survey, to understand how accurately teacher concern predicts the presence of a mental disorder in school children.
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Is race linked to the structure of psychopathology in young people?
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have found no significant difference in the hierarchical structure of psychopathology between African American and European American youths.
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Depressed young people have lower vitamin B12 and vitamin D levels than their peers
Researchers in Turkey have studied serum folate, vitamin B12, homocysteine and 25-OH vitamin D levels in young people with and without depression.
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Mental disorders are under researched yet prevalent in children under 7 years
Mira Vasileva and colleagues in Germany and Australia recently compiled a Research Review for the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry on the prevalence of mental disorders in children <7 years old.
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