Walk your way to happiness
A little walk might be best for a crying baby.
Most parents have experienced frustration when their infants cry excessively and refuse to sleep. Scientists have found that the best strategy to calm them down is by holding and walking with them for five minutes.
‘‘Many parents suffer from babies’ nighttime crying,’’ says Kumi Kuroda of the Riken Centre for Brain Science, in Japan. ‘‘That’s such a big issue, especially for inexperienced parents, that can lead to parental stress and even to infant maltreatment in a small number of cases,’’ she says.
Kuroda and her colleagues have been studying the transport response, an innate reaction seen in many altricial mammals — those whose young are immature and unable to care for themselves — such as mice, dogs, monkeys, and humans. They observed that when these animals pick up their infants and start walking, the bodies of their young tend to become docile and their heart rates slow. Kuroda’s team wanted to compare the effects of the transport response, the relaxed reaction while being carried, with other conditions such as motionless maternal holding or rocking and also examine if the effects persist with longer carrying in human infants.
The researchers compared 21 infants’ responses while under four conditions: being held by their walking mothers, held by their sitting mothers, lying in a still crib, or lying in a rocking cot. The team found that when the mother walked while carrying the baby, the crying infants calmed down and their heart rates slowed within 30 seconds. A similar calming effect occurred when the infants were placed in a rocking cot, but not when the mother held the baby while sitting or placed the baby in a still crib.
This suggests that holding a baby alone might be insufficient in soothing crying infants, contradicting the traditional assumption that maternal holding reduces infant distress. At the same time, movement has calming effects, likely activating a baby’s transport response. The effect was more evident when the holding and walking motions continued for five minutes. All crying babies in the study stopped crying, and nearly half of them fell asleep.
But when the mothers tried to put their sleepy babies to bed, more than onethird of the participants became alert again within 20 seconds. The team found that all babies produced physiological responses, including changes in heart rate, that can wake them up the second their bodies detach from their mothers. However, if the infants were asleep for a longer period before being laid down, they were less likely to awaken during the process, the team found.
Based on their findings, the team proposes a method for soothing and promoting sleep in crying infants. They recommend that parents hold crying infants and walk with them for five minutes, followed by sitting and holding infants for another five to eight minutes before putting them to bed. — Current Biology
Teens who get concussed could be 25% more likely to be in poor academic standing than their peers, new research suggests. The research analysed more than 10,000 US high school students, with 15% reporting they had had at least one sports and activity related concussion in the past year. The researchers calculated that those students had a 25% higher risk of poor academic standing, and the association was stronger with a history of repeated concussions. However, the authors acknowledge an important limitation — that their study did not look at a change in academic standing before and after the concussions. — Injury Prevention
The common idea that packing most of your daily calories in during breakfast will allow your body to burn them more efficiently and quickly may be incorrect, say UK and Dutch researchers, who discovered it doesn't matter when we eat, our body will metabolise calories just the same. The team gave specific diets to a group of overweight or obese people, half with bigger breakfasts and the other with bigger dinners. Then, after four weeks, they got the participants to swap meal plans. At the end of the study, they found there was no difference between the amount of weight the groups lost from the big brekkies or heavy dinners. However, the team did find that the people eating their largest meal in the mornings reported feeling less hungry later in the day. — Cell Metabolism