Social isolation continued: Covid-19 shines a light on what self-advocates know too well.

Covid-19 has been an unprecedented time for social work as a profession and even more so for marginalized communities. This paper shares the reflections of three self-advocates (persons labelled/with intellectual disabilities engaged in advocacy and activism), a social worker, and a social work educator and researcher. It is intended as a rallying cry for social work to rethink how we deliver services to ensure that people who have already been made vulnerable through oppressive ableist practices and assumptions are not put at greater disadvantage at times like Covid-19.

Prenatal Maternal Stress, Child Cortical Thickness, and Adolescent Depressive Symptoms.

Prenatal maternal stress predicts subsequent elevations in youth depressive symptoms, but the neural processes associated with these links are unclear. This study evaluated whether prenatal maternal stress is associated with child brain development, and adolescent depressive symptoms using a prospective design with 74 mother child pairs (40 boys). Maternal stress was assessed during pregnancy, child cortical thickness at age 7, and depressive symptoms at age 12.

Cortical Thinning and Neuropsychiatric Outcomes in Children Exposed to Prenatal Adversity: A Role for Placental CRH?

Objective: The authors sought to assess associations among early-life exposure to adversity, the development and maturation of neurons and brain circuits, and neurodevelopmental outcomes. Specifically, they examined whether fetal exposure to placental corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH), a molecule conveying maternal signals to the fetus, predicts brain growth and neuropsychiatric outcomes in school-age children.

Method: In a large, well-characterized prospective cohort, concentrations of placental CRH (pCRH) in maternal plasma were determined during five intervals during gestation.

Distinct patterns of reduced prefrontal and limbic grey matter volume in childhood general and internalizing psychopathology.

Reduced grey matter volume (GMV) is widely implicated in psychopathology, but studies have found mostly overlapping areas of GMV reduction across disorders rather than unique neural signatures, potentially due to pervasive comorbidity. GMV reductions may be associated with broader psychopathology dimensions rather than specific disorders. We used an empirically supported bifactor model consisting of common psychopathology and internalizing- and externalizing-specific factors to evaluate whether latent psychopathology dimensions yield a clearer, more parsimonious pattern of GMV reduction in prefrontal and limbic/paralimbic areas implicated in individual disorders.

Prenatal maternal cortisol concentrations predict neurodevelopment in middle childhood.

Glucocorticoids (cortisol in humans) are the end product of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical (HPA) axis and are proposed as a key mechanism for programming fetal brain development. The present prospective longitudinal study evaluates the association between prenatal maternal cortisol concentrations and child neurodevelopment. Participants included a low risk sample of 91 mother-child pairs.

Hippocampus and amygdala volumes from magnetic resonance images in children: Assessing accuracy of FreeSurfer and FSL against manual segmentation.

The volumetric quantification of brain structures is of great interest in pediatric populations because it allows the investigation of different factors influencing neurodevelopment. FreeSurfer and FSL both provide frequently used packages for automatic segmentation of brain structures. In this study, we examined the accuracy and consistency of those two automated protocols relative to manual segmentation, commonly considered as the "gold standard" technique, for estimating hippocampus and amygdala volumes in a sample of preadolescent children aged between 6 to 11 years.

Fetal exposure to maternal depressive symptoms is associated with cortical thickness in late childhood.

Background: Maternal depression is one of the most common prenatal complications. The consequences of fetal exposure to maternal depression are poorly understood. The aim of this study is to examine the association between fetal exposure to maternal depressive symptoms and cortical thickness in children 6-9 years old.

Shape of the basal ganglia in preadolescent children is associated with cognitive performance.

Current studies support the belief that high levels of performance and intellectual abilities are associated with increased brain size or volume. With few exceptions, this conclusion is restricted to studies of post-adolescent subjects and to cerebral cortex. There is evidence that "bigger is better" may not pertain to children and further, that there are areas of the brain in which larger structures are associated with cognitive deficits.

The personal development tutor role: an exploration of student and lecturer experiences and perceptions of that relationship.

This exploratory study formed part of the Leadership in Compassionate Care Programme (LCCP) that considered embedding the principles of person-centred compassionate care within an undergraduate nursing curriculum. Currently, there is a lack of literature regarding compassionate care in relation to the student-personal development tutor (PDT) relationship. The aim of the study was to explore the current personal development tutor role, within a pre-registration adult nursing programme, in relation to the support provided to students by PDTs and from this, establish what was important in the role from the student and lecturer perspectives, within the context of the LCCP.

Developmental changes in hippocampal shape among preadolescent children.

It is known that the largest developmental changes in the hippocampus take place during the prenatal period and during the first two years of postnatal life. Few studies have been conducted to address the normal developmental trajectory of the hippocampus during childhood. In this study shape analysis was applied to study the normal developing hippocampus in a group of 103 typically developing 6- to 10-year-old preadolescent children.

Fetal glucocorticoid exposure is associated with preadolescent brain development.

Background: Glucocorticoids play a critical role in normative regulation of fetal brain development. Exposure to excessive levels may have detrimental consequences and disrupt maturational processes. This may especially be true when synthetic glucocorticoids are administered during the fetal period, as they are to women in preterm labor.

Development of white matter pathways in typically developing preadolescent children.

The first phase of major neuronal rearrangements in the brain takes place during the prenatal period. While the brain continues maturation throughout childhood, a critical second phase of synaptic overproduction and elimination takes place during the preadolescent period. Despite the importance of this developmental phase, few studies have evaluated neural changes taking place during this period.

Maternal cortisol over the course of pregnancy and subsequent child amygdala and hippocampus volumes and affective problems.

Stress-related variation in the intrauterine milieu may impact brain development and emergent function, with long-term implications in terms of susceptibility for affective disorders. Studies in animals suggest limbic regions in the developing brain are particularly sensitive to exposure to the stress hormone cortisol. However, the nature, magnitude, and time course of these effects have not yet been adequately characterized in humans.

Analytical techniques for characterization of raw materials in cell culture media.

Raw materials are a critical part of any cell culture medium; therefore, it is of utmost importance to understand and characterize them for high-quality product. The raw material characterization (RMC) program at SAFC focuses on individual screening of raw materials both analytically and biologically. The goal of the program is to develop the best-in-class knowledge base of the raw materials used in SAFC's media formulations and their impact on performance of products.

Evaluation of the personal development portfolio in higher education: an explorative study.

Personal Development Profiles (PDPs) have been an important and necessary feature of United Kingdom (UK) Higher Education for more than a decade. There is significant agreement as to their core purpose and their key features are of relevance to higher education institutions internationally, irrespective of whether an equivalent formal system or process is in place. The aim of this exploratory study was to evaluate the use of PDPs within a Child Health Nursing Programme in a UK University, looking at the experiences of both teaching staff and of students coming to the end of their three year programme of study.

Magnetic resonance imaging demonstrates long-term changes in brain structure in children born preterm and exposed to chorioamnionitis.

Objective: We sought to determine if children born preterm and exposed to chorioamnionitis have differences in brain structure measured at 6-10 years of age using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

Study Design: Structural MRI was performed with 11 preterm children (8.5 ± 1.

Children's Brain Development Benefits from Longer Gestation.

Disruptions to brain development associated with shortened gestation place individuals at risk for the development of behavioral and psychological dysfunction throughout the lifespan. The purpose of the present study was to determine if the benefit for brain development conferred by increased gestational length exists on a continuum across the gestational age spectrum among healthy children with a stable neonatal course. Neurodevelopment was evaluated with structural magnetic resonance imaging in 100 healthy right-handed 6- to 10-year-old children born between 28 and 41 gestational weeks with a stable neonatal course.

Cortical and subcortical changes in typically developing preadolescent children.

There is evidence that abnormal cerebral development during childhood is a risk factor for various cognitive and psychiatric disorders. There is not, however, sufficient normative data available on large samples of typically developing children, especially within the narrow preadolescent age range. We analyzed high resolution MRI images from 126 normally developing children between ages 6 and 10 years.

Gray matter correlates of cognitive ability tests used for vocational guidance.

Background: Individual differences in cognitive abilities provide information that is valuable for vocational guidance, but there is an ongoing debate about the role of ability factors, including general intelligence (g), compared to individual tests. Neuroimaging can help identify brain parameters that may account for individual differences in both factors and tests. Here we investigate how eight tests used in vocational guidance correlate to regional gray matter.

High pregnancy anxiety during mid-gestation is associated with decreased gray matter density in 6-9-year-old children.

Because the brain undergoes dramatic changes during fetal development it is vulnerable to environmental insults. There is evidence that maternal stress and anxiety during pregnancy influences birth outcome but there are no studies that have evaluated the influence of stress during human pregnancy on brain morphology. In the current prospective longitudinal study we included 35 women for whom serial data on pregnancy anxiety was available at 19 (+/-0.

Application of an automated voxel-based morphometry technique to assess regional gray and white matter brain atrophy in a canine model of aging.

In recent years, voxel-based morphometry (VBM) has emerged as a technique to examine regional brain changes associated with normal and pathological aging. Despite its popularity in studies of human aging, application of VBM to animal models of brain aging is rare. In the present study, VBM techniques were developed to validate earlier region of interest (ROI) measures of brain aging in the dog and to provide a more comprehensive analysis of local changes in a canine model of brain aging.

Structural brain variation, age, and response time.

Response time (RT) generally slows with aging, but the contribution of structural brain changes to this slowing is unknown. We used voxel-based morphometry (VBM) to determine gray matter (GM) and white matter (WM) brain volumes in 9 middle-aged adults (38-58 years old) and 9 seniors (66-82 years old). We correlated brain volumes with RT assessed in both a simple visual stimulus-response task and a visual continuous recognition memory task.

The neuroanatomy of general intelligence: sex matters.

We examined the relationship between structural brain variation and general intelligence using voxel-based morphometric analysis of MRI data in men and women with equivalent IQ scores. Compared to men, women show more white matter and fewer gray matter areas related to intelligence. In men IQ/gray matter correlations are strongest in frontal and parietal lobes (BA 8, 9, 39, 40), whereas the strongest correlations in women are in the frontal lobe (BA10) along with Broca's area.

Structural brain variation and general intelligence.

Total brain volume accounts for about 16% of the variance in general intelligence scores (IQ), but how volumes of specific regions-of-interest (ROIs) relate to IQ is not known. We used voxel-based morphometry (VBM) in two independent samples to identify substantial gray matter (GM) correlates of IQ. Based on statistical conjunction of both samples (N = 47; P < 0.