Caesarean born babies at high risk of asthma by age of 3

Children delivered by caesarean section have an increased risk of developing asthma at the age of three, researchers have suggested.

This was particularly seen among children without a hereditary tendency to asthma and allergies, according to the study from the Norwegian Mother and Child Cohort Study (MoBa).

Data from more than 37 000 participants in the MoBa study were used to study the relationship between delivery method and the development of lower respiratory tract infections, wheezing and asthma in the first three years of life.

Children born by planned or emergency caesarean section were compared with those born vaginally.

The results indicate that children born by caesarean section have a slightly elevated risk for asthma at three years, but have no increased risk of frequent lower respiratory tract infections or wheezing.

The increased risk of asthma among children delivered by caesarean section was higher among children of mothers without allergies.

“It is unlikely that a caesarean delivery itself would cause an increased risk of asthma, rather that children delivered this way may have an underlying vulnerability,” said Maria Magnus, a researcher at the Department of Chronic Diseases at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health.

The increased risk of asthma may be due to an altered bacterial flora in the intestine that affects their immune system development, or because children born this way often have an increased risk of serious respiratory problems during the first weeks of life.

The finding was published in the American Journal of Epidemiology.

Does your baby cry in French or German?

The wail of a newborn may sound the same to the ears of sleep-deprived parents the world over, but according to scientists, that's not the case. Babies cry in the language their parents speak from the first days of life.

An international team of researchers said a study of 60 newborns suggested babies start to learn language in the womb, long before they utter their first coos or babbles and their wails can be distinguished according to the mother tongue.

French newborns tend to cry with a rising melody contour, while their German neighbors prefer a falling melody shape - patterns which the researchers said fit with characteristic differences between the two languages.

Kathleen Wermke of the University of Wuerzburg in Germany, who conducted the study with French and American colleagues, said it showed newborns are capable of producing different cry melodies and that they prefer melodies in the pattern of the language they heard in the womb.

Wermke's team recorded the cries of 60 healthy newborns, 30 born into French-speaking families and 30 born into German-speaking families, when they were three to five days old.

Their analysis, published in journal Current Biology, revealed clear differences in the shape of the newborns' cry melodies, based on their mother tongue.

Previous studies have shown that human fetuses can memorize sounds from the external world by the last three months of pregnancy and are particularly attuned to melodies in both music and language. Vocal imitation studies have also shown babies can match vowel sounds spoken by adults, but only from 12 weeks old.

Wermke's team said their research showed an extremely early impact of native language and confirmed that babies' cries are their first proper attempts to communicate specifically with their mothers.

"Newborns are probably highly motivated to imitate their mother's behaviour in order to attract her and....foster bonding," they wrote. "Because melody contour may be the only aspect of their mother's speech that newborns are able to imitate, this might explain why we found melody contour imitation at that early age."

Baby with two Heads born in Philippines

The baby was born late Tuesday and is now under observation at the neo-natal intensive care unit of the Jose Fabella Memorial Hospital in Manila.

A hospital spokeswoman said the baby was stable at the moment, but said she may die if tests proved both heads shared only one set of vital organs.

"The rate of survival will depend on the shared organ. If they only have one heart, they will not survive," the unidentified spokeswoman told local radio.

Reports said the father Salvador Arganda was a tricycle driver. He and his wife, Chateria, already have five other children and there was no known history of twins in the family.

Officials at the hospital said the extra head appeared to be a twin of the girl who failed to fully separate during the development stage in early pregnancy.

"This is the first case of its kind here in the hospital," one Fabella doctor said, but said other hospitals in Manila have in the past recorded similar cases.

'Pregnant man' gives birth to second Baby

Thomas Beatie, the transgendered man who created history last year by giving birth to a baby girl, has done it again.

ABC News reported that Beatie gave birth to a son early Tuesday in Bend, Oregon, and that the child would be nursed by his wife, Nancy.

Beatie, 35, was born a woman, but legally changed his gender. He decided to get pregnant after it emerged that Nancy could not conceive. Photos of a bearded pregnant Beatie caused a sensation last year.

ABC News quoted sources close to the couple as saying that it was a natural childbirth and not via Caesarean section. Beatie revealed last year that after giving birth to his first child he did not start again taking male hormones to allow him to get pregnant.

Fertility Tips: How to Get Pregnant fast

When you want to get pregnant, you want to get pregnant now. (Being patient is okay in theory until you actually switch into babymaking mode, right?) If you want to increase your odds of getting pregnant sooner rather than later, the following tips from Ann Douglas -- author of The Mother of All Pregnancy Books (U.S. edition and Canadian edition), The Mother of All Pregnancy Organizers and The Unofficial Guide to Having a Baby (first edition and the brand new second edition) -- will help you to maximize your chances of conceiving quickly and ending up with a healthy baby. (Note: If you find this list of tips helpful, you may want to read some of Ann's fertility articles (she's a columnist for Conceive Magazine), as well as The Mother of All Lenses: Pregnancy and Parenting over at Squidoo.)

• Start taking folic acid now. You reduce your chances of giving birth to a baby with a neural tube defect (for example, anencephaly or spina bifida) by 50% to 70% if you start taking at least 0.4 mg of folic acid each day two to three months before you start trying to conceive.
• Try to keep sex fun when you're trying to conceive. Use rooms other than the bedroom or schedule your babymaking rendezvous for an odd time of day. The rationale? You won't be able to keep up the babymaking pace for very long if sex starts feeling like a chore.
• Don't hop up and run to the bathroom right after you make love. Lying down for at least a few minutes (some fertility experts say five minutes) after intercourse increases the odds that the sperm will be able to keep their date with the awaiting egg and that you'll win at baby roulette.
• Make love often during your fertile period (the five days leading up to ovulation). If you've got the stamina to make love at least every 48 hours, you will ensure that there's a fresh shipment of sperm waiting in the fallopian tube at any given time. Of course, you can get too much of a good thing if your partner has a low sperm count, so if you're aware of a pre-existing fertility problem, you'll want to talk this issue over with your fertility specialist.
• Keep in mind that babymaking is a numbers game. Even if you do everything "right," you still have only a 25% to 30% chance of conceiving in any given cycle. (See The Mother of All Pregnancy Books (U.S. edition and Canadian edition), The Mother of All Pregnancy Organizers and The Unofficial Guide to Having a Baby (first edition and the brand new second edition for more on how factors like age and your previous reproductive history affect your odds of conceiving sooner rather than later.
• Here's a bit of sex-related trivia, just in case you and your partner are looking for a little inspiration. There are over 114 million sex acts performed around the world.
• Are you a coffee drinker? Time to give it up or switch to decaf! Caffeine is thought to restrict the growth of a developing baby by constricting blood vessels and reducing blood flow to the uterus. What's more, a few studies have indicated that excessive consumption of caffeine (that is, more than three cups of drip coffee per day) may contribute to fertility problems. The jury is still out on this last point, however.
• Are you or your partner regularly exposed to hazardous substances in the workplace? You may need to consider a job change or job modification before you start your family. Certain substances can affect both the quality of sperm and the development of the embryo.
• Have you had your preconception checkup yet? Set up an appointment with your doctor to review your medical history and to talk about your plans to start trying to conceive. (Note: You can find a detailed discussion of preconception health issues in The Unofficial Guide to Having a Baby (second edition) and The Mother of All Pregnancy Books (U.S. edition and Canadian edition).

• Are you currently taking any prescription or over-the-counter drugs? Be sure to ask your doctor if it's safe for you to continue taking them once you start trying to conceive.
• If you aren't already doing so, start keeping a menstrual calendar. Note the date when your period starts, the number of days it lasts, and anything else your doctor might want to know about. This information could prove helpful if you experience problems in conceiving. It can also prove invaluable in pinpointing the date of conception -- and consequently your due date.
• Try to book the last appointment of the day for your preconception checkup. That's when your doctor or midwife is most likely to be able to take the time to answer your questions and address your concerns without feeling rushed to go on to the next patient.
• Make your vaginal environment as sperm-friendly as possible. Avoid vaginal sprays and scented tampons (which can cause a pH imbalance in your vagina); artificial lubricants, vegetable oils, and glycerin (because they can kill off sperm); saliva (because saliva can also kill sperm); and douching (because it alters the normal acidity of the vagina; can cause vaginal infections and/or pelvic inflammatory disease; and may wash away the cervical mucus that is needed to transport the sperm).
• If you're monitoring your cervical mucus in an attempt to predict your most fertile days, do your checks before you shower, bathe, or swim. These activities can all affect the quantity and quality of your cervical mucus.

Music soothes premature Babies

Playing music to babies can help reduce pain and encourage better oral feeding, a new study suggests. The research, published ahead of print in the Archives of Disease in Childhood, claimed that increasing numbers of neonatal units are using music as a method to help improve behavioural and physiological outcomes or to manage pain during common procedures such as circumcision.

The benefits are said to be calmer infants and parents, a stable condition in the child's functions, higher oxygen saturation, faster weight gain and shorter hospital stays. In the study, researchers from the University of Alberta in Canada reviewed nine existing randomised trials published between 1989 and 2006 to see how effective and worthwhile it was using music in this way.

The trials they studied covered a diverse range of populations studied in different ways, which made it difficult to have definitive conclusions, but they found much preliminary evidence for therapeutic benefits of music for specific indications. Outcomes most often reported in the trials were physiological measures such as heart rate, respiratory rate, oxygen saturation and pain.

One of the high quality studies reviewed that looked at using music during circumcision, showed music did have benefits for infants' heart rate, oxygen saturation, and pain. In three of the studies that looked at heel prick – a common procedure for taking a blood sample from the heel of newborn infants – there was evidence that using music could have benefits for behaviour and pain.

The authors conclude: "There is preliminary evidence to suggest that music may have beneficial effects in terms of physiological parameters, behavioural states and pain reduction during painful medical procedures. "While there is preliminary evidence for some therapeutic benefits of music for specific indications, these benefits need to be confirmed in well-designed, high quality trials."

'Baby fat' could make for leaner Adults

Three new studies show that most adults have unexpectedly large and active deposits of a calorie-burning type of fat that biologists once thought disappeared after infancy.

The persistence of brown fat suggests a potential new strategy to fight obesity, which is epidemic in the United States and increasing rapidly in the developing world. In addition to eating less and exercising more, people may one day be able to stimulate their bodies to get rid of stored energy -- in the form of ordinary fat -- purely as heat.It is, in a sense, the discovery of a new organ," said Dr. Sven Enerback, a researcher at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden and the lead author of one of three studies appearing today in the New England Journal of Medicine.

"This is a tissue whose sole physiological purpose is to expend energy," said Dr. Francesco Celi, a metabolism researcher at the National Institutes of Health, whose commentary accompanies the studies. "That makes it an ideal target" for drugs or other measures designed to make it more active.

At the moment, however, the only safe way of activating brown fat is to stay chilly, right at the verge of shivering, for prolonged periods. That reproduces the conditions that led to the evolution of brown fat -- namely, life-threatening cold in babies and small furry animals that can't put on clothes to keep themselves warm.

Although the new research poses a difficult question -- which would you rather be, thin or warm? -- the goal is to find a more comfortable way exploit this ancient adaptation.

The three studies add to the emerging view that brown fat is involved in the body's complicated energy balance and may play a role in diseases such as Type 2 diabetes that can arise when that balance is thrown off.

For example, leaner people have more detectable brown fat than overweight people. Brown fat also appears to be more active in women than men, even though obesity is more prevalent in women. Studies show that stimulating the production of brown fat in mice -- a species in which it is naturally plentiful -- makes them resistant to gaining weight or to developing diabetes when fed a high-calorie diet.

In humans, it is unclear whether brown fat is more a cause of leanness or a result of it.

Energy lost as heat

Virtually all cells have microscopic power plants called mitochondria, where energy sources such as sugars and fats are burned to produce a compound called ATP, the universal coin of the body's economy. Brown fat cells are loaded with mitochondria, but in them the various enzymes that lead to the production of ATP are uncoupled. The result is that the energy in the glucose and fat is lost as heat, the way the work of a car engine is lost as heat if the car is stuck in a snowbank with its tires spinning.

In one of the new studies, researchers at Maastricht University Medical Center in the Netherlands examined 24 young men, about half of them lean and half overweight. Each was kept in a cool room (61 degrees Fahrenheit) for two hours and then given a PET scan, which lights up any tissue that is using a lot of glucose, showing that it is highly active on a metabolic level.

After the men had been kept cold, activated brown fat deposits were seen in 23 of 24 of them. (The one in which there was no activation was the heaviest.) Lean men had about four times as much brown fat activity as the overweight men. When several were retested without first being cold, there was no brown fat activity.

In a second study, the Swedish team led by Enerback kept five volunteers in a cool room for two hours and then PET-scanned them while intermittently putting one foot of each subject in an ice-water bath. Brown fat deposits lighted up each time.

In the third study, Drs. C. Ronald Kahn and Aaron Cypess of the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston examined PET scans performed on 1,972 patients for various reasons over a three-year period. What appeared to be active brown fat was visible in 7.5% of the women and 3.1% of the men.

That was a much lower prevalence of detectable brown fat than was found in the other two studies. There are a number of possible reasons.

The Boston researchers did not attempt to induce activity in the brown fat by cold exposure (although PET scans done on days it was cold outside were more likely to light up). The patients also included many elderly, overweight and diabetic patients -- all conditions in which brown fat activity is less likely.

Other studies and extrapolation from animal experiments suggest that brown fat could be responsible for as much as one-fifth of the energy we burn at rest. Fully stimulated, the tissue might be able to burn off 10 pounds in a year.

Research published last summer by Kahn and a colleague at the Joslin Center, Dr. Yu-Hua Tseng, showed that when mice are injected with a growth factor called BMP7, they grow more brown fat. Kahn said he thinks ways will be found to increase brown fat in human beings "a lot, at least in activity if not in amount."

A future pill?

Enerback, the Swedish scientist, agreed that the search for a drug that stimulates brown fat "is definitely something we should pursue." He added, however, that "I don't think there will ever be a pill that substitutes for a fundamental change in lifestyle in the treatment of obesity."

The latest findings highlight once again the extent to which obesity is a consequence of evolution. Homo sapiens evolved in a world marked by barely enough food, constant physical activity and dangerous cold, but now lives amid abundance, leisure and warmth.

"We are living in a very comfortable time," said Wouter van Marken Lichtenbelt, a physiologist at Maastricht University who led the Dutch study. "But we did not evolve in such a time."

Pregnancy exercise 'helps Baby'

Exercise during pregnancy can be good for the developing baby as well as for the mother, research suggests.

A team from the Kansas City University of Medicine and Biosciences suggest it is linked to better foetal heart health and nervous system development.

The findings from their pilot study of 26 women are being presented to the American Physiological Society's conference in New York.

A UK expert said pregnant women should discuss exercise levels with their GP.

The researchers wanted to see if maternal exercise had cardiovascular benefits for the foetus.

They also wanted to see if foetuses whose mothers exercised had increased breathing movements compared to non-exercise exposed foetuses.

Foetal breathing is a "practice" movement where a baby developing in the womb gets ready to breathe after it is born.

It is also a sign of how well the respiratory system and central nervous system are developing.

Moderate exercise

The scientists used a non-invasive device to measure the magnetic fields produced by the electrical activity of maternal and foetal heart rates.

It was also able to pick up foetal movements including breathing, body movements, hiccups and sucking.

The women studied were aged between 20 and 35 and were checked between the 36th and 38th weeks of pregnancy.

They were classed as exercisers if they did moderate intensity aerobic exercise such as moderate to vigorous walking, stationary bicycling and running for at least 30 minutes, three times per week. Most were doing more.

The researchers then compared them with pregnant women who did not exercise regularly.

Dr Linda May, who led the study, said: "Foetal breathing movement and the nervous system were more mature in babies exposed to exercise."

She said further research was needed, both to look at more pregnancies and to evaluate the health of babies once they had been born.

But she said understanding more about how to improve the development babies' nervous system could aid understanding of cot death.

"Some researchers think it has to do with something being wrong in the central nervous system, which affects respiration.

"Babies aren't able to wake up and breath for themselves if they need to."

She said this study had shown the babies of women who exercised had a more mature respiratory system, suggesting they would fare better after birth.

'Do not overheat'

Dr May said it was safe for women to exercise while pregnant.

But she said the team did not yet have evidence about what the minimum beneficial level of exercise in pregnancy was.

Patrick O'Brien, a consultant obstetrician and spokesperson for the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists said the study was interesting and worth following up, although it was small.

He added: "This is an interesting finding and one which should encourage women to keep healthy when pregnant.

"Pregnant women should consult their midwives and doctors on the types of exercise they could do when pregnant and how much."

Mr O'Brien said excessive exercise during pregnancy could be dangerous for the unborn baby if a woman becomes too hot or lets their heart rate go over 130 beats per minute.

But he said there was is no increased risk of miscarriage or premature labour linked to exercise.

He advised: "Keep within your comfort zone so that you can still hold a conversation."