Educational outcomes in extremely preterm children : neuropsychological correlates and predictors of attainment

This study assessed the impact of extremely preterm birth on academic attainment at 11 years of age, investigated neuropsychological antecedents of attainment in reading and mathematics, and examined early predictors of educational outcomes. Children born extremely preterm had significantly poorer academic attainment and a higher prevalence of learning difficulties than their term peers. General cognitive ability and specific deficits in visuospatial skills or phoneme deletion at 6 years were predictive of mathematics and reading attainment at 11 years in both extremely preterm and term children. Phonological processing, attention, and executive functions at 6 years were also associated with academic attainment in children born extremely preterm. Furthermore, social factors, neonatal factors (necrotizing enterocolitis, breech delivery, abnormal cerebral ultrasound, early breast milk provision), and developmental factors at 30 months (head circumference, cognitive development), were independent predictors of educational outcomes at 11 years. Neonatal complications combined with assessments of early cognitive function provide moderate prediction for educational outcomes in children born extremely preterm

The glycosyltransferase EOGT regulates adropin expression in decidualizing human endometrium

In pregnancy, resistance of endometrial decidual cells to stress signals is critical for the integrity of the feto-maternal interface and, by extension, survival of the conceptus. O-GlcNAcylation is an essential post-translational modification that links glucose sensing to cellular stress resistance. Unexpectedly, decidualization of primary endometrial stromal cells (EnSCs) was associated with a 60% reduction in O-GlcNAc modified proteins, reflecting downregulation of the enzyme that adds O-GlcNAc to substrates (O-GlcNAc transferase, OGT) but not the enzyme that removes the modification (O-GlcNAcase, OGA). Notably, EOGT, an endoplasmic reticulum-specific O-GlcNAc transferase that modifies a limited number of secreted and membrane proteins, was markedly induced in differentiating EnSCs. Knockdown of EOGT perturbed a network of decidual genes involved in multiple cellular functions. The most downregulated gene upon EOGT knockdown in decidualizing cells was ENHO, which encodes adropin, a metabolic hormone involved in energy homeostasis and glucose and fatty acid metabolism. Analysis of mid-luteal endometrial biopsies revealed an inverse correlation between endometrial EOGT and ENHO expression and body mass index. Taken together, our findings reveal that obesity impairs the EOGT-adropin axis in decidual cells, which in turn points towards a novel mechanistic link between metabolic disorders and adverse pregnancy outcome. [Abstract copyright: Copyright © 2017 Endocrine Society.

The clock protein period 2 synchronizes mitotic expansion and decidual transformation of human endometrial stromal cells

Implantation requires coordinated interactions between the conceptus and surrounding decidual cells, but the involvement of clock genes in this process is incompletely understood. Circadian oscillations are predicated on transcriptional-translational feedback loops, which balance the activities of the transcriptional activators CLOCK (circadian locomotor output cycles kaput) and brain muscle arnt-like 1 and repressors encoded by PER (Period) and Cryptochrome genes. We show that loss of PER2 expression silences circadian oscillations in decidualizing human endometrial stromal cells (HESCs). Down-regulation occurred between 12 and 24 hours following differentiation and coincided with reduced CLOCK binding to a noncanonical E-box enhancer in the PER2 promoter. RNA sequencing revealed that premature inhibition of PER2 by small interfering RNA knockdown leads to a grossly disorganized decidual response. Gene ontology analysis highlighted a preponderance of cell cycle regulators among the 1121 genes perturbed upon PER2 knockdown. Congruently, PER2 inhibition abrogated mitotic expansion of differentiating HESCs by inducing cell cycle block at G2/M. Analysis of 70 midluteal endometrial biopsies revealed an inverse correlation between PER2 transcript levels and the number of miscarriages in women suffering reproductive failure (Spearman rank test, ρ = -0.3260; P = 0.0046). Thus, PER2 synchronizes endometrial proliferation with initiation of aperiodic decidual gene expression; uncoupling of these events may cause recurrent pregnancy loss.-Muter, J., Lucas, E. S., Chan, Y.-W., Brighton, P. J., Moore, J. D., Lacey, L., Quenby, S., Lam, E. W.-F., Brosens, J. J. The clock protein period 2 synchronizes mitotic expansion and decidual transformation of human endometrial stromal cells

Loss of endometrial plasticity in recurrent pregnancy loss

Menstruation drives cyclic activation of endometrial progenitor cells, tissue regeneration, and maturation of stromal cells, which differentiate into specialized decidual cells prior to and during pregnancy. Aberrant responsiveness of human endometrial stromal cells (HESCs) to deciduogenic cues is strongly associated with recurrent pregnancy loss (RPL), suggesting a defect in cellular maturation. MeDIP-seq analysis of HESCs did not reveal gross perturbations in CpG methylation in RPL cultures, although quantitative differences were observed in or near genes that are frequently deregulated in vivo. However, RPL was associated with a marked reduction in methylation of defined CA-rich motifs located throughout the genome but enriched near telomeres. Non-CpG methylation is a hallmark of cellular multipotency. Congruently, we demonstrate that RPL is associated with a deficiency in endometrial clonogenic cell populations. Loss of epigenetic stemness features also correlated with intragenic CpG hypomethylation and reduced expression of HMGB2, coding high mobility group protein 2. We show that knockdown of this sequence-independent chromatin protein in HESCs promotes senescence and impairs decidualization, exemplified by blunted time-dependent secretome changes. Our findings indicate that stem cell deficiency and accelerated stromal senescence limit the differentiation capacity of the endometrium and predispose for pregnancy failure

Developmental changes in the role of different metalinguistic awareness skills in Chinese reading acquisition from preschool to third grade

Copyright @ 2014 Wei et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.The present study investigated the relationship between Chinese reading skills and metalinguistic awareness skills such as phonological, morphological, and orthographic awareness for 101 Preschool, 94 Grade-1, 98 Grade-2, and 98 Grade-3 children from two primary schools in Mainland China. The aim of the study was to examine how each of these metalinguistic awareness skills would exert their influence on the success of reading in Chinese with age. The results showed that all three metalinguistic awareness skills significantly predicted reading success. It further revealed that orthographic awareness played a dominant role in the early stages of reading acquisition, and its influence decreased with age, while the opposite was true for the contribution of morphological awareness. The results were in stark contrast with studies in English, where phonological awareness is typically shown as the single most potent metalinguistic awareness factor in literacy acquisition. In order to account for the current data, a three-stage model of reading acquisition in Chinese is discussed.National Natural Science Foundation of China and Knowledge Innovation Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences

Gender Inequalities in Education

The terrain of gender inequalities in education has seen much change in recent decades. This chapter reviews the empirical research and theoretical perspectives on gender inequalities in educational performance and attainment from early childhood to young adulthood. Much of the literature on children and adolescents attends to performance differences between girls and boys. Of course achievement in elementary and secondary school is linked to the level of education one ultimately attains including high school completion, enrollment in post secondary education, college completion and graduate and professional school experiences. We recommend three directions for future research: (a) interdisciplinary efforts to understand gender differences in cognitive development and non-cognitive abilities in early childhood, (b) research on the structure and practices of schooling, and (c) analyses of the intersectionality of gender with race, ethnicity, class, and immigrant statuses in creating complex patterns of inequalities in educational experiences and outcomes

Cognitive predictors of shallow-orthography spelling speed and accuracy in 6th grade children

Spelling accuracy and time course was investigated in a sample of 100 Norwegian 6th grade students completing a standardized spelling-to-dictation task. Students responded by keyboard with accurate recordings of response-onset latency (RT) and inter-keypress interval (IKI). We determined effects of a number of child-level cognitive ability factors, and of word-level factors—particularly the location within the word of a spelling challenge (e.g., letter doubling), if present. Spelling accuracy was predicted by word reading (word split) performance, non-word spelling accuracy, keyboard key-finding speed and short-term memory span. Word reading performance predicted accuracy just for words with spelling challenges. For correctly spelled words, RT was predicted by non-word spelling response time and by speed on a key-finding task, and mean IKI by non-verbal cognitive ability, word reading, non-word spelling response time, and key-finding speed. Compared to words with no challenge, mean IKI was shorter for words with an initial challenge and longer for words with a mid-word challenge. These findings suggest that spelling is not fully planned when typing commences, a hypothesis that is confirmed by the fact that IKI immediately before within word challenges were reliably longer than elsewhere within the same word. Taken together our findings imply that routine classroom spelling tests better capture student competence if they focus not only on accuracy but also on production time course

Reading comprehension in autism spectrum disorders: The role of oral language and social functioning

Reading comprehension is an area of difficulty for many individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). According to the Simple View of Reading, word recognition and oral language are both important determinants of reading comprehension ability. We provide a novel test of this model in 100 adolescents with ASD of varying intellectual ability. Further, we explore whether reading comprehension is additionally influenced by individual differences in social behaviour and social cognition in ASD. Adolescents with ASD aged 14-16 years completed assessments indexing word recognition, oral language, reading comprehension, social behaviour and social cognition. Regression analyses show that both word recognition and oral language explain unique variance in reading comprehension. Further, measures of social behaviour and social cognition predict reading comprehension after controlling for the variance explained by word recognition and oral language. This indicates that word recognition, oral language and social impairments may constrain reading comprehension in ASD

Analysis of the capacity of google trends to measure interest in conservation topics and the role of online news

With the continuous growth of internet usage, Google Trends has emerged as a source of information to investigate how social trends evolve over time. Knowing how the level of interest in conservation topics--approximated using Google search volume--varies over time can help support targeted conservation science communication. However, the evolution of search volume over time and the mechanisms that drive peaks in searches are poorly understood. We conducted time series analyses on Google search data from 2004 to 2013 to investigate: (i) whether interests in selected conservation topics have declined and (ii) the effect of news reporting and academic publishing on search volume. Although trends were sensitive to the term used as benchmark, we did not find that public interest towards conservation topics such as climate change, ecosystem services, deforestation, orangutan, invasive species and habitat loss was declining. We found, however, a robust downward trend for endangered species and an upward trend for ecosystem services. The quantity of news articles was related to patterns in Google search volume, whereas the number of research articles was not a good predictor but lagged behind Google search volume, indicating the role of news in the transfer of conservation science to the public