lnfant Mother Attachment in Separated and Married Families

Considers two contrasting predictions about the effects of parental marital separation on infants' attachment to their mothers. Behavioral resistance of infants to stressors; Behavior of infants to anxious attachments; Role of marital status versus unfavorable life events in affecting children's development

Preserving the Past: An Early Interview Improves Delayed Event Memory in Children With Intellectual Disabilities.

The influence of an early interview on children's (N = 194) later recall of an experienced event was examined in children with mild and moderate intellectual disabilities (CWID; 7-12 years) and typically developing (TD) children matched for chronological (7-12 years) or mental (4-9 years) age. Children previously interviewed were more informative, more accurate, and less suggestible. CWID (mild) recalled as much information as TD mental age matches, and were as accurate as TD chronological age matches. CWID (moderate) recalled less than TD mental age matches but were as accurate. Interviewers should elicit CWID's recall as early as possible and consider developmental level and severity of impairments when evaluating eyewitness testimony.This research was supported by a grant from the Economic and Social Research Council, UK RES-­‐000-­‐23-­‐0949 to Charlie Lewis, Deirdre Brown and Michael Lamb, and in part by a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology, NZ (LANC0201) to Deirdre Brown.This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from Wiley via http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/cdev.1236

Narrative skill and testimonial accuracy in typically developing children and those with intellectual disabilities

Children must describe maltreatment coherently for their testimony to be influential in court. We know little about how well children with intellectual disabilities (CWID) describe their experiences relative to typically developing (TD) children, despite CWID’s vulnerability to maltreatment. We investigated children’s reports of an experienced event and compared coherence in CWID (mild to moderate impairment: 7-11 years) with TD children matched for mental (4-10 years) or chronological age (7-11 years). All children included important markers of narrative coherence in their reports. Children with lower mental ages, particularly those with an intellectual disability, included fewer markers of narrative coherence in their reports than children with higher mental ages. Individual markers of narrative coherence, particularly recall of content, predicted accuracy of testimony and resistance to suggestion even when disability and mental age were taken into account. These findings highlight the importance of helping children to describe their experiences coherently

The rapid expansion of Madagascar's protected area system

Protected areas (PAs) are our principal conservation strategy and are evolving rapidly, but we know little about the real-world management and governance of new forms. We review the evolution of Madagascar’s PA system from 2003-2016 based on our experience as practitioners involved. During this period PA coverage quadrupled and the network of strict, centrally-governed protected areas expanded to include sites characterized by: i) multiple-use management models in which sustainable extractive natural resource uses are permitted, ii) shared governance arrangements involving non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and local community associations, and iii) a management emphasis on livelihood-based approaches and social safeguards. We discuss the principal challenges for the effectiveness of the expanded system and detail management/policy responses. These include i) enhancing stakeholder participation, ii) ensuring financial sustainability, iii) enforcing rules, iv) ensuring the ecological sustainability of PAs faced with permitted resource extraction, v) reducing the natural resource dependence of local communities through transformative livelihood change, and vi) developing long-term visions to reconcile the differing objectives of conservation NGOs and other stakeholders. In general PAs have had limited effectiveness in reducing deforestation and other threats, which may be related to their rapid establishment processes and the complexity of management towards multiple objectives, coupled with insufficient resources. While Madagascar’s achievements provide a basis for conserving the country’s biodiversity, the challenge faced by its protected areas will continue to grow

Attentional learning helps language acquisition take shape for atypically developing children, not just children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

The shape bias-generalising labels to same shaped objects-has been linked to attentional learning or referential intent. We explore these origins in children with typical development (TD), autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and other developmental disorders (DD). In two conditions, a novel object was presented and either named or described. Children selected another from a shape, colour or texture match. TD children choose the shape match in both conditions, children with DD and 'high-verbal mental age' (VMA) children with ASD (language age > 4.6) did so in the name condition and 'low-VMA' children with ASD never showed the heuristic. Thus, the shape bias arises from attentional learning in atypically developing children and is delayed in ASD

HLA-DQA1*05 carriage associated with development of anti-drug antibodies to infliximab and adalimumab in patients with Crohn's Disease

Anti-tumor necrosis factor (anti-TNF) therapies are the most widely used biologic drugs for treating immune-mediated diseases, but repeated administration can induce the formation of anti-drug antibodies. The ability to identify patients at increased risk for development of anti-drug antibodies would facilitate selection of therapy and use of preventative strategies.This article is freely available via Open Access. Click on Publisher URL to access the full-text

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Plasma lipid profiles discriminate bacterial from viral infection in febrile children

Fever is the most common reason that children present to Emergency Departments. Clinical signs and symptoms suggestive of bacterial infection ar

Retrospective evaluation of whole exome and genome mutation calls in 746 cancer samples

Funder: NCI U24CA211006Abstract: The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) curated consensus somatic mutation calls using whole exome sequencing (WES) and whole genome sequencing (WGS), respectively. Here, as part of the ICGC/TCGA Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) Consortium, which aggregated whole genome sequencing data from 2,658 cancers across 38 tumour types, we compare WES and WGS side-by-side from 746 TCGA samples, finding that ~80% of mutations overlap in covered exonic regions. We estimate that low variant allele fraction (VAF < 15%) and clonal heterogeneity contribute up to 68% of private WGS mutations and 71% of private WES mutations. We observe that ~30% of private WGS mutations trace to mutations identified by a single variant caller in WES consensus efforts. WGS captures both ~50% more variation in exonic regions and un-observed mutations in loci with variable GC-content. Together, our analysis highlights technological divergences between two reproducible somatic variant detection efforts