MFGM supplementation to infant formula narrows the gap in cognitive development between breastfed and formula-fed infants. Between 2 and 6 mo of age, formula-fed term infants have the capacity to upregulate their ingested volumes when the energy density of formula is reduced from 66 to 60 kcal/100 mL.
This longitudinal study aimed to explore the early presence and developmental pattern of laterality in reaching kinematics and its relationship to side use. In order to do so, 3-D kinematic measurements as well as 2-D video recordings of right-left reaching movements were successively carried out for 17 infants at the ages of 6, 9, 12, and 36 months. Additional investigations of hand preference were made at 36 months. As four infants were prematurely born, their outcomes were compared to those of the fullterm participants. While most of the infants in the early ages showed a rather inconsistent preference in terms of frequency and distributions of right-left side use, the analyses of reaching kinematics revealed a more consistent pattern of fewer movements units (MUs) and straighter right-sided reaching for the majority of infants at all tested ages. However, reaching kinematics from the preterm infants were generally more variable and less side consistent. It is proposed that the development of human handedness originates from an early right arm rather than hand preference in that representations of asymmetry in bilateral projections (involved in arm movements) developmentally precede contralateral projections (involved in refined hand/finger movements).
AimThe neurocognitive basis of Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD; or motor clumsiness) remains an issue of continued debate. This combined systematic review and meta-analysis provides a synthesis of recent experimental studies on the motor control, cognitive, and neural underpinnings of DCD.MethodsThe review included all published work conducted since September 2016 and up to April 2021. One-hundred papers with a DCD-Control comparison were included, with 1,374 effect sizes entered into a multi-level meta-analysis.ResultsThe most profound deficits were shown in: voluntary gaze control during movement; cognitive-motor integration; practice-/context-dependent motor learning; internal modeling; more variable movement kinematics/kinetics; larger safety margins when locomoting, and atypical neural structure and function across sensori-motor and prefrontal regions.InterpretationTaken together, these results on DCD suggest fundamental deficits in visual-motor mapping and cognitive-motor integration, and abnormal maturation of motor networks, but also areas of pragmatic compensation for motor control deficits. Implications for current theory, future research, and evidence-based practice are discussed.Systematic Review RegistrationPROSPERO, identifier: CRD42020185444.
Background: Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) evolves from an interplay between genetic and environmental factors during prenatal development. Since identifying maternal biomarkers associated with ASD risk in offspring during early pregnancy might result in new strategies for intervention, we investigated maternal metabolic biomarkers in relation to occurrence of ASD in offspring using both univariate logistic regression and multivariate network analysis. Methods: Serum samples from 100 women with an offspring diagnosed with ASD and 100 matched control women with typically developing offspring were collected at week 14 of pregnancy. Concentrations of 62 metabolic biomarkers were determined, including amino acids, vitamins (A, B, D, E, and K), and biomarkers related to folate (vitamin B 9 ) metabolism, lifestyle factors, as well as C-reactive protein (CRP), the kynurenine-tryptophan ratio (KTR), and neopterin as markers of inflammation and immune activation. Results: We found weak evidence for a positive association between higher maternal serum concentrations of folate and increased occurrence of ASD (OR per 1 SD increase: 1.70, 95% CI 1.22-2.37, FDR adjusted P = 0.07). Multivariate network analysis confirmed expected internal biochemical relations between the biomarkers. Neither inflammation markers nor vitamin D 3 levels, all hypothesized to be involved in ASD etiology, displayed associations with ASD occurrence in the offspring. Conclusions: Our findings suggest that high maternal serum folate status during early pregnancy may be associated with the occurrence of ASD in offspring. No inference about physiological mechanisms behind this observation can be made at the present time because blood folate levels may have complex relations with nutritional intake, the cellular folate status and status of other B-vitamins. Therefore, further investigations, which may clarify the potential role and mechanisms of maternal blood folate status in ASD risk and the interplay with other potential risk factors, in larger materials are warranted.
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