Almost half of parents said they’d allow their children to take part if their child had the disease being studied, according to U-M’s National Poll on Children’s Health
“This poll shows that the research community needs to step up and find ways to better reach parents about opportunities for children to participate, answer parents’ questions about benefits and risks of participation, and potentially broaden the types of studies available,” Davis says.
Research points to the need to better understand the impact of prematurity on the timing of critical maturational processes and to develop therapies aimed at regulating brain development
Preterm infants—generally those born 23 to 36 weeks after conception, as opposed to the normal 37- to 42-week gestation—face an increased risk of behavioral problems, ranging from impulsiveness and distractibility to more serious conditions like autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
Alternative treatment focuses on controlling the ‘fight or flight’ response
Teaching kids with autism spectrum disorder skills in turning down their fight or flight response and turning up the opposite may fundamentally allow them to be more socially engaging, decrease some of the need for cognitive rigidity and repetitive behaviors and, more importantly, allow them to feel better.
It turns out that your messenger RNA may catch more than one ride to get where it’s going.
“The ability to reverse their tracks is important to their ability to eventually get where they need to go,” Gonsalvez said. And location is really everything, because the proteins need to be expressed in a specific location to function correctly.
A new kind of genetic switch can target the activities of just one type of brain cell
But in the past few years, the glia cells – particularly the tiny microglia that make up about one-tenth of the brain cells – have been shown to play critical roles both in the healthy and in the diseased brain.