Monitoring Progress Toward Fulfilling Rights in Early Childhood Under the Convention on the Rights of the Child to Improve Outcomes for Children and Families

Can the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UN-CRC), to which 193 countries are signatory, be used as a tool to support developmental health in the early years? Improving early childhood development (ECD) requires finding ways for social determinants and child rights approaches to work together, which, to date, has not occurred. However, in 2005, the UN-CRC Monitoring Committee issued General Comment 7: Implementing Rights in Early Childhood (GC7) in response to the observation that children under the age of 8 were often overlooked in countries' reporting of progress toward implementing UN-CRC. This chapter shows how a commitment from the UN-CRC Monitoring Committee and key relevant international agencies (WHO, UNICEF) to a long-term program of monitoring compliance with GC7, in conjunction with monitoring of ECD developmental outcomes in all signatory countries, could help move global society toward equity in developmental health from the start of life. © Oxford University Press, 2014

Infantile zinc deficiency: Association with autism spectrum disorders

Elucidation of the pathogenesis and effective treatment of autism spectrum disorders is one of the challenges today. In this study, we examine hair zinc concentrations for 1,967 children with autistic disorders (1,553 males and 414 females), and show considerable association with zinc deficiency. Histogram of hair zinc concentration was non-symmetric with tailing in lower range, and 584 subjects were found to have lower zinc concentrations than −2 standard deviation level of its reference range (86.3–193ppm). The incidence rate of zinc deficiency in infant group aged 0–3 year-old was estimated 43.5 % in male and 52.5 % in female. The lowest zinc concentration of 10.7 ppm was detected in a 2-year-old boy, corresponding to about 1/12 of the control mean level. These findings suggest that infantile zinc deficiency may epigenetically contribute to the pathogenesis of autism and nutritional approach may yield a novel hope for its treatment and prevention

Hair cortisol concentration is unaffected by basic military training, but related to sociodemographic and environmental factors

Abstract The analysis of hair cortisol concentrations (HCC) is a promising new biomarker for retrospective measurement of chronic stress. The effect of basic military training (BMT) on chronic stress has not yet been reported. The aim of the present study was to investigate the effect of 10-week BMT on HCC, while further exploring the role of known and novel covariates. Young healthy male recruits of the Swiss Army participated twice, ten weeks apart, in data collection (1(st) examination: n = 177; 2(nd) examination: n = 105). On two occasions, we assessed HCC, perceived stress, and different candidate variables that may affect HCC (e.g., socioeconomic status, meteorological data). Military training increased perceived stress from the first to the second examination, but did not affect HCC. In line with this, there was no correlation between HCC and perceived stress ratings. This could be interpreted as a missing influence of mainly physical stress (e.g. exercise) on HCC. In contrast, significant correlations were found between HCC and ambient temperature, humidity, and education. Future studies should control for meteorological data and educational status when examining HCC