Health
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Childhood mental health difficulties mediate the long-term association between early-life adversity at age 3 and poorer cognitive functioning at ages 11 and 14
Open Access paper from the JCPP – ‘Here, we test the hypothesis that early-life adversity may lead to mental health challenges which in turn have adverse consequences for the development of cognitive abilities.’ Tochukwu Nweze (pic) et al.
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ACEs – Adverse Childhood Experiences
Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) are defined as situations that lead to an elevated risk of children and young people experiencing damaging impacts on their health and other social outcomes across the life course.
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Are ACE scores useful for identifying individuals at risk of health problems?
Clinics are increasingly screening for ACEs, but ACE scores may not tell us who will go on to develop poor health, explain Jessie R Baldwin (pic) and Andrea Danese.
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Chronic illness may present barriers to engaging in CBT for depression
Between 10 and 20% of teenagers have a chronic illness:1 an ongoing health condition that lasts at least 3 months, and for which a cure is unlikely. Research suggests that teenagers with chronic illnesses are more likely to also have low mood and develop depression than their healthy peers.2
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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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