Reading stories to children in hospital helps relieve their pain and stress
All the children in a Brazilian study had increased levels of oxytocin after listening to stories
Many children’s hospitals already have storytelling programmes that aim to cheer up patients. But new research, published in the journal Proceedings Of The National Academy Of Sciences,
suggests that storytelling also has physiological benefits
“Until now, the positive evidence for storytelling was based on ‘common sense’ and taken at face value, in which interacting with the child may distract, entertain and alleviate psychological suffering,” said study co-author Dr Jorge Moll, of D’Or Institute for Research and Education (IDOR), Brazil.
“$ut there Yas a lack of a solid scientific basis especially Yith
regard to underlying physiological mechanisms.”
The team, based at IDOR and the Federal University of ABC, Brazil, studied 81 children between the ages of two and seven, all of whom were in the intensive care unit at Rede D’Or São Luiz Jabaquara Hospital in São Paulo. A group of 41 children each had a session with a storyteller, lasting 25 to 30 minutes. A control group of 40 children each had the same amount of time with the same professionals, but they told riddles instead.
Before and after the sessions, the team took saliva samples from each child and assessed their pain level. The saliva samples allowed the researchers to measure levels of the hormone cortisol, which is related to stress, and the hormone oxytocin, which plays a role in empathy.
$oth groups of children benefitted from the sessions they all
had less cortisol and more oxytocin in their saliva, suggesting they were less stressed, and they reported less pain and discomfort. However, the results were twice as strong for the storytelling group than the control group.
At the end of the sessions, the children also took part in a word-association exercise, which included words like ‘hospital’, ‘nurse’ and ‘doctor’. The team said that while children from the control group responded to the image of a hospital with “this is the place that people go when they are sick”, the storytelling group responded with “this is the place that people go to get better”.
Similarly, children from the control group said “this is the bad woman who comes to give me an injection” in response to a doctor or nurse, whereas the storytelling group said “this is the woman who comes to heal me”.
“I consider this study to be one of the most important I have participated in, due to its simplicity, rigour, and potential direct impact on practices in the hospital environment, aiming at the relief of human suffering,” said Moll.
“As it is a low-cost and highly safe intervention, it can potentially be implemented in the entire public system, once larger scale studies verify its reproducibility and effectiveness. We intend to extend and replicate it in other settings and patient groups and to support volunteering dedicated to the noble activity of storytelling noY Yith more solid scientific evidence,” he added.
Bad news for anyone who thought the Galaxy was one of the cool, hip neighbourhoods of the Universe: new research by Australian scientists suggests the Milky Way is far more normal than astronomers had previously thought.
For the first time, a galaxy similar to our own was studied in detailed cross-section. The galaxy’s structure, according to the team from the University of Sydney, is a lot like the Milky Way, which forces us to reconsider what we know about our own cosmic neighbourhood.
The spiral structure of the Milky Way consists of two layers of stars, one thick and one thin. The thick layer features mainly ancient stars with a lower ratio of iron to hydrogen and helium. The thin layer, which includes the Sun, is home to younger stars that are more metallic. Until now, researchers had assumed these layers were the result of a freak and violent accident millions of years ago: a collision between two very different galaxies. However, the newly studied galaxy – dubbed UGC 10738 – reveals that it too has a similar structure.
“Our observations indicate that the Milky Way’s thin and thick discs didn’t come about because of a gigantic mash-up, but a sort of ‘default’ path of galaxy formation and evolution,” said Dr Nicholas Scott, one of the lead scientists of the study. “From these results we think galaxies with the Milky Way’s particular structures and properties could be described as the ‘normal’ ones.”
Far from being galactic hipsters with mysterious backstories, Milky Way-style galaxies are probably extremely common. But if that sounds like an anticlimax, think again: it’s a potential leap forward in astronomy.
“It means we can use existing, very detailed observations of the Milky Way as tools to better analyse much more distant galaxies which, for obvious reasons, we can’t see as well,” said Scott.
Although astronomers have viewed similar discs in other galaxies, they have never been able to analyse the type of stars that exist within them.
Scott and his colleagues solved this issue by pointing the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile at UGC 10738, located 320 million light-years away. Relative to Earth, the galaxy is viewed ‘edge on’, revealing a cross-section of its structure.
“Using an instrument called the multi-unit spectroscopic explorer, or MUSE, we were able to assess the metal ratios of the stars in its thick and thin discs,” said study co-lead Dr Jesse van de Sande, from the Sydney Institute of Astronomy in Australia. “They were pretty much the same as those in the Milky Way – ancient stars in the thick disc, younger stars in the thin one. We’re looking at some other galaxies to make sure, but that’s pretty strong evidence that the two galaxies evolved in the same way.”
It’s an important step forward in our understanding of how galaxies evolved, said co-author Prof Ken Freeman from the Australian National University. “We know a lot about how the Milky Way formed, but there was always the worry that the Milky Way is not a typical spiral galaxy. Now we can see that the Milky Way’s formation is fairly typical of how other disc galaxies were assembled.”