Judith Baer is worried about how poor people, especially poor mothers, are labeled with diagnoses of mental health problems. Once a teenage mother, today she is a professor who understands the anxiety that comes with poverty— and she wants the diagnostic manual to reflect that kind of understanding, too.
Scientists looking for a correlation between factors like childhood hunger and cognitive aging found a surprising result.
The rate of new cases of children’s cancer is on the rise in California and the reasons for the increase are difficult to determine.
For years, obesity and autism have been on the rise. Now, a new study is providing evidence that maternal metabolic conditions like obesity and diabetes may be linked to developmental delays and autism. Obese mothers are 1.66 times as likely to have a child with autism as normal weight mothers who do not have high blood pressure or diabetes, according to the study conducted by the UC Davis MIND Institute. They are also more than twice as likely to have a child with a second developmental disorder.
It doesn’t take a genius to realize that exercise can reshape our bodies. But working out can also change our DNA, and researchers are slowly discovering how the change occurs. When people who don’t work out regularly get their bodies moving with acute exercise, the DNA in their muscle fibers is chemically modified, researchers are reporting in the March issue of Cell Metabolism.