Air pollution causes more than one third of strokes, lifestyle diseases in India

Washington D.C, Feb 10: Children's vulnerability towards depression, anxiety, impulsive behaviour, and poor cognitive performance could be determined by considering the hours of sleep they manage to get.

Sleep states are active processes that support the reorganisation of brain circuitry. This makes sleep especially important for children, whose brains are developing and reorganising rapidly.

In a study by researchers from the University of Warwick -- recently published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry -- cases of 11,000 children aged between 9 and 11 years from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development dataset were analyzed to find out the relationship between sleep duration and brain structure.

The study was carried out by researchers Professor Jianfeng Feng, Professor Edmund Rolls, Dr. Wei Cheng and colleagues from the University of Warwick's Department of Computer Science and Fudan University.

Measures of depression, anxiety, impulsive behaviour and poor cognitive performance in the children were associated with shorter sleep duration. Moreover, the depressive problems were associated with short sleep duration one year later.

The reduced brain volume of areas such as orbitofrontal cortex, prefrontal, and temporal cortex, precuneus, and supramarginal gyrus was found to be associated with the shorter sleep duration.

Professor Jianfeng Feng, from the University of Warwick's Department of Computer Science, comments: "The recommended amount of sleep for children 6 to 12 years of age is 9-12 hours. However, sleep disturbances are common among children and adolescents around the world due to the increasing demand on their time from school, increased screen time use, and sports and social activities."

A previous study showed that about 60 per cent of adolescents in the United States receive less than eight hours of sleep on school nights.

Professor Jianfeng Feng further added: "Our findings showed that the total score for behavior problems in children with less than 7 hours sleep was 53 per cent higher on average and the cognitive total score was 7.8 per cent lower on average than for children with 9-11 hours of sleep. It highlights the importance of enough sleep in both cognition and mental health in children."

Professor Edmund Rolls from the University of Warwick's Department of Computer Science also commented: "These are important associations that have been identified between sleep duration in children, brain structure, and cognitive and mental health measures, but further research is needed to discover the underlying reasons for these relationships."

Washington D.C., May 9: Do the middle age feel much stressful now, and seems to have changed over time, if compared to the life in the 90s? Well, this recent study indicates that it might be true.

The study has signalled to the fact that life may become more stressful majorly for middle-aged people than it was in the 1990s. The researchers reached this analysis even before the novel coronavirus started sweeping the globe.

A team of researchers led by Penn State found that across all ages, there was a slight increase in daily stress in the 2010s compared to the 1990s. But when researchers restricted the sample to people between the ages of 45 and 64, there was a sharp increase in daily stress.

"On average, people reported about 2 percent more stressors in the 2010s compared to people in the past," said David M. Almeida, professor of human development and family studies at Penn State.

"That's around an additional week of stress a year. But what really surprised us is that people at mid-life reported a lot more stressors, about 19 percent more stress in 2010 than in 1990. And that translates to 64 more days of stress a year."

Almeida said the findings were part of a larger project aiming to discover whether health during the middle of Americans' lives has been changing over time.

"Certainly, when you talk to people, they seem to think that daily life is more hectic and less certain these days," Almeida said.

For the study, the researchers collected data from 1,499 adults in 1995 and 782 different adults in 2012.

Almeida said the goal was to study two cohorts of people who were the same age at the time the data was collected but born in different decades. All study participants were interviewed daily for eight consecutive days.

During each daily interview, the researchers asked the participants about their stressful experiences throughout the previous 24 hours.

They asked questions related to arguments with family or friends or feeling overwhelmed at home or work, so and so. The participants were also asked how severe their stress was and whether those stressors were likely to impact other areas of their lives.

"We were able to estimate not only how frequently people experienced stress, but also what those stressors mean to them," Almeida said.

"For example, did this stress affect their finances or their plans for the future. And by having these two cohorts of people, we were able to compare daily stress processes in 1990 with daily stress processes in 2010," Almeida added.

After analyzing the data, the researchers found that participants reported significantly more daily stress and lower well-being in the 2010s compared to the 1990s.

Additionally, participants reported a 27 percent increase in the belief that stress would affect their finances and a 17 percent increase in the belief that stress would affect their future plans.

Almeida said he was surprised not that people were more stressed now than in the 90s, but at the age group that was mainly affected.

"We thought that with economic uncertainty, life might be more stressful for younger adults. But we didn't see that. We saw more stress for people at mid-life," Almeida said.

"And maybe that's because they have children who are facing an uncertain job market while also responsible for their own parents. So it's this generational squeeze that's making stress more prevalent for people at mid-life," he concluded.

Early treatment with the antiviral drug remdesivir has been found to reduce viral load and prevent lung disease in macaques infected with SARS-CoV-2 that causes COVID-19, according to a study.

The findings, published in the journal Nature on Tuesday, support the early use of remdesivir treatment in patients with COVID-19 to prevent progression to pneumonia.

Researchers from the National Institutes of Health in the US noted that remdesivir has broad antiviral activity and has been shown to be effective against infections with SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV in animal models.

The drug is being tested in human clinical trials for the treatment of COVID-19, they said.

Researcher Emmie de Wit and colleagues investigated the effects of remdesivir treatment in rhesus macaques, a recently established model of SARS-CoV-2 infection.

Two sets of six macaques were inoculated with SARS-CoV-2.

One group was treated with remdesivir 12 hours later -- close to the peak of virus reproduction in the lungs -- and these macaques received treatment every 24 hours until six days after inoculation.

In contrast to the control group, the researchers found that macaques that received remdesivir did not show signs of respiratory disease, and had reduced damage to the lungs.

Viral loads in the lower respiratory tract were also reduced in the treated animals; viral levels were around 100 times lower in the lower-respiratory tract of remdesivir-treated macaques 12 hours after the first dose, they said.

The researchers said that infectious virus could no longer be detected in the treatment group three days after initial infection, but was still detectable in four out of six control animals.

Despite this virus reduction in the lower respiratory tract, no reduction in virus shedding was observed, which indicates that clinical improvement may not equate to a lack of infectiousness, they said.

Dosing of remdesivir in the rhesus macaques is equivalent to that used in humans, the researchers noted.

They cautioned that it is difficult to directly translate the timing of treatment used in corresponding disease stages in humans, because rhesus macaques normally develop only mild disease.

However, researchers said the results indicate that remdesivir treatment of COVID-19 should be initiated as early as possible to achieve the maximum treatment effect.