Maternal depression is the predominant persistent risk for child cognitive and social-emotional problems from early childhood to pre-adolescence:A longitudinal cohort study

Rationale Brain development occurs rapidly during early childhood and continues throughout middle childhood. Early and later windows of opportunity exist to alter developmental trajectories. Few studies in low- and middle-income countries have examined the importance of the timing of exposure to risks for poor pre-adolescent cognitive and social-emotional outcomes. Methods We assessed 359 children who participated in two follow-up studies of the Supplementation with Multiple Micronutrients Intervention Trial conducted in Indonesia in 2001–2004: at 3.5 years in 2006 and 9–12 years in 2012–2014. Using structural equation models, we examined indicators of early childhood (3.5 y) and pre-adolescent (9–12 y) exposure to risks (child height-for-age z-score [HAZ], hemoglobin [Hb], maternal depressive symptoms [MDS], home environment [HOME]), with two developmental outcomes: cognitive ability and social-emotional problems. We characterized patterns of change by calculating residuals of indicators measured earlier (3.5 y) predicting the same indicators measured later (9–12 y), for example, the residual of 3.5 y MDS predicting 9–12 y MDS (rMDS). Results Three early risk indicators (HOME, Hb, and MDS) were indirectly associated with pre-adolescent cognitive scores through early cognitive scores (HOME: 0.15, [95% CI 0.09, 0.21]; Hb: 0.08 [0.04, 0.12], MDS: −0.07 [-0.12, −0.02]). Pre-adolescent cognitive scores were also associated with change in MDS (rMDS: −0.13 [-0.23, −0.02]) and Hb (rHb: 0.10 [0.00, 0.20]) during middle childhood. For pre-adolescent social-emotional problems, both early childhood MDS (0.31 [0.19, 0.44]) and change in MDS during middle childhood (rMDS: 0.48 [0.37, 0.60]) showed strong direct associations with this outcome. Conclusions Our findings confirm those of previous studies that prevention of risk exposures during early childhood is likely to support long-term child development. It also adds evidence to a previously scarce literature for the middle childhood period. Prevention of maternal depressive symptoms and child anemia during middle childhood should be assessed for effectiveness to support child development

A graph theory interpretation of nodal regions

The techniques defined in this paper will divide a set of cities into subgroups which specify a central place and its subordinate hierarchy. The association between cities is not the only system which may be defined as a network of points and lines. Nations or states may be thought of as points with migrations or commodity flows as lines. The important step in the employment of abstract linear graph analysis is the assignment of plausible meaning to the points and lines, preferably in terms of some real world phenomena. The usefulness of the attributes and the interpretation of the resulting hierarchy depends on the correspondence between an empirical example using graph theory analysis and other knowledge of the phenomena. The procedure described in this paper may be employed in a variety of ways, but the application is valid only when significant theoretical conclusions are produced and verified empirically.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/45977/1/10110_2005_Article_BF01969070.pd

Coalgebraic semantics for parallel derivation strategies in logic programming

Logic programming, a class of programming languages based on first-order logic, provides simple and efficient tools for goal-oriented proof-search. Logic programming supports recursive computations, and some logic programs resemble the inductive or coinductive definitions written in functional programming languages. In this paper, we give a coalgebraic semantics to logic programming. We show that ground logic programs can be modelled by either P f P f -coalgebras or P f List-coalgebras on Set. We analyse different kinds of derivation strategies and derivation trees (proof-trees, SLD-trees, and-or parallel trees) used in logic programming, and show how they can be modelled coalgebraically.</p