Month: July 2023

Almost half of females had an anxiety disorder along with just over a quarter of males.

There are specific signs that a child will go on to develop an anxiety disorder, a study finds.

These include a tendency to do things alone, crying easily and often and frequently appearing sad and miserable.

All these behaviours are related to being socially and emotionally withdrawn.

In contrast, being shy, submissive or fearful of authority figures  or people in general does not predict adult anxiety disorders.

Mr Nathan Monk, the study’s first author, said:

“Basically, what we have found is that childhood anxious behaviors related to social isolation and sadness appear to carry risk for developing an anxiety disorder in later life.

In contrast, behaviors related to situational fears and anxiety around adults do not appear to carry the same risk.”

The study tracked over 1,000 children born in Christchurch, New Zealand for over four decades.

It found surprisingly high levels of anxiety, with almost half of females having an anxiety disorder along with just over a quarter of males.

Dr Kat Donovan, study co-author, said:

“This research reinforces the importance of actively developing social skills and skills in managing emotions, especially in the first 1,000 days of a child’s life where parents and whānau (a Māori word for extended family) play a key role.”

She continued:

“All tamariki (Māori children) experience anxiety at a certain stage but it only causes concern when it disrupts their development and reduces educational and emotional learning opportunities.”

Dr Donovan has some advice for parents of anxious children:

“It’s tough for parents and whānau to see their child in distress but it’s important they help them tolerate their feelings and not avoid them, by encouraging them to be in situations which are challenging and providing them with opportunities to be exposed to those situations.

However, if they don’t feel they have the skills to cope with certain behaviors they should seek out parenting courses or professional support.”

The study was published in the journal Psychological Medicine (Monk et al., 2021).

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Supplementation reversed the effects of age-related memory loss.

A diet low in flavanols is linked to age-related memory loss, a large study finds.

However, taking a daily flavanol supplement over three years reversed these losses.

Many people already get enough flavanols from a healthy diet, however those with a poorer diet will probably benefit.

Flavanols, which are a type of flavonoid, are found in nearly all fruits and vegetables, as well as in tea.

Participants in the study with a mild flavanol deficiency experienced boosts to their cognitive functioning of 16 percent over the three years of the study.

Professor Adam Brickman, the study’s first author, said:

“The improvement among study participants with low-flavanol diets was substantial and raises the possibility of using flavanol-rich diets or supplements to improve cognitive function in older adults.”

Neurons in the hippocampus

Professor Scott Small, study co-author, has been studying age-related memory loss for many years.

His lab has shown that changes in the dentate gyrus, a part of the hippocampus, are central to memory decline.

Flavanols, though, enhance neuron and blood vessel growth in this region.

Professor Small said:

“The identification of nutrients critical for the proper development of an infant’s nervous system was a crowning achievement of 20th century nutrition science.

In this century, as we are living longer research is starting to reveal that different nutrients are needed to fortify our aging minds.”

The current study included over 3,500 healthy adults given either a flavanol supplement or a placebo over three years.

The supplement contained 500 mg of flavanols, including 80 mg of epicatechins, a type of flavanol thought to be particularly effective.

The memories of those with mild flavanol deficiencies improved by 10.5 percent compared to placebo and by 16 percent compared to their scores at the start of the study.

Dramatic improvements

While the study provides strong evidence for the benefits of a healthy dietary flavanol intake, Professor Small is cautious:

“We cannot yet definitively conclude that low dietary intake of flavanols alone causes poor memory performance, because we did not conduct the opposite experiment: depleting flavanol in people who are not deficient.”

Next, Professor Small wants to look at the effects of rectifying a severe flavanol deficiency:

“Age-related memory decline is thought to occur sooner or later in nearly everyone, though there is a great amount of variability.

If some of this variance is partly due to differences in dietary consumption of flavanols, then we would see an even more dramatic improvement in memory in people who replenish dietary flavanols when they’re in their 40s and 50s.”

High-flavanol foods

Foods that containing high levels of flavanols include:

• pears,
• olive oil,
• wine,
• tomato sauce,
• kale,
• beans,
• tea,
• spinach,
• broccoli,
• apples,
• and oranges.

Related

The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Brickman et al., 2023).

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The common drink is linked to a higher level of education.

Smarter people are more likely to drink alcohol daily, research finds.

Better educated people are also more likely to have a drinking problem.

Higher grades in school at the age of just 5-years-old predict greater intake of alcohol many decades later.

Among women, there is an especially strong link between alcohol consumption and being highly educated.

The reason may be that middle-class lifestyles — accessible through education — are linked to more alcohol consumption.

It could also be because intelligent people often value novel things and are at a greater risk of getting bored.

The study’s authors write:

“The more educated women are, the more likely they are to drink alcohol on most days and to report having problems due to their drinking patterns

The better-educated appear to be the ones who engage the most in problematic patterns of alcohol consumption.”

The results come from a study that followed everyone born in the UK in one week in 1970.

Women with degrees were 86% more likely to drink on most days than those with less education, the study found.

Highly-educated women were 1.7 times more likely to have a drinking problem than the less well-educated.

The authors write:

“Both males and females who achieved high-level performance in test scores administered at ages five and 10 are significantly more likely to abuse alcohol than individuals who performed poorly on those tests.”

The link between alcohol consumption and education could come down to a range of factors, the authors write:

“Reasons for the positive association of education and drinking behaviours may include: a more intensive social life that encourages alcohol intake; a greater engagement into traditionally male spheres of life, a greater social acceptability of alcohol use and abuse; more exposure to alcohol use during formative years; and greater postponement of childbearing and its responsibilities among the better educated.”

The study was published in the journal Social Science and Medicine (Huerta & Borgonovi, 2010).

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High IQ brains have greater functional connectivity and higher synchronisation, but this has an unexpected real-world effect.

Intelligent people take longer to solve difficult problems than those with lower IQs, a study finds.

The reason seems to be that people with higher IQs avoid jumping to conclusions, which means they are more likely to end up with the correct answer.

On simpler problems, though, people with high IQs do indeed answer more quickly.

Greater functional connectivity

The conclusions come from a study of 650 people who were given a series of logical problems to solve, which became steadily harder.

From a combination of brain scans and simulations of brain activity, the researchers found that the brains of smarter people took longer to solve difficult problems.

High IQ brains have greater functional connectivity and higher synchronisation.

It is these properties that allow the more intelligent brain to ‘hold out’ while complex information is being processed.

Dr Michael Schirner, the study’s first author, said:

“Synchronization, i.e., the formation of functional networks in the brain, alters the properties of working memory and thus the ability to ‘endure’ prolonged periods without a decision.

In more challenging tasks, you have to store previous progress in working memory while you explore other solution paths and then integrate these into each other.

This gathering of evidence for a particular solution may sometimes takes longer, but it also leads to better results.

We were able to use the model to show how excitation-inhibition balance at the global level of the whole brain network affects decision-making and working memory at the more granular level of individual neural groups.”

Brain simulations

To reach their conclusions, the researchers used simulations of brain activity, personalised for each of the 650 people in the study.

Professor Petra Ritter, study co-author, explained:

“We can reproduce the activity of individual brains very efficiently.

We found out in the process that these in silico brains behave differently from one another—and in the same way as their biological counterparts. Our virtual avatars match the intellectual performance and reaction times of their biological analogues.”

The simulations revealed that the brains of people with lower IQs cannot wait until all the various areas of the brain have finished their processing steps before ‘jumping to conclusions’.

In contrast, greater synchrony in high IQ brains allowed time for all the brain regions to complete their processing and deliver up an answer that was more likely to be correct.

Related

The study was published in the journal Nature Communications (Shirner et al., 2023).

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