Touch is a critical channel of communication used by mothers to communicate and interact with their infants and to contribute to their infants' socio-emotional development. The present study examined maternal touching in 41 mothers with and without depressive symptomatology. Mothers and their 4-month-old infants participated in the Still-Face (maternal emotional unavailability) and Separation (...

BACKGROUND Events during pregnancy and labour may influence the future health and well-being of offspring. Many studies rely on maternal reports of pre and peri-natal factors. Both maternal and child characteristics may potentially influence the reliability and accuracy of maternal recall. However, this has not been previously examined. AIMS To examine agreement between information from mater...

An increasing number of studies in a variety of taxa demonstrate the role of maternal sex steroids on offspring development. In avian species, mothers deposit substantial amounts of androgens in their eggs, and experimental evidence indicates that these maternal androgens influence the chick's early development. Despite the well-known organizing role of sex steroids on brain and behaviour, stud...

BACKGROUND The objectives of this study were to assess the association between children and parents' knowledge of caries preventive practices, the parents' caries preventive oral health behaviours and children's caries preventive oral health behaviour and caries experience. METHOD Three hundred and twenty four participants aged 8-12 years, 308 fathers and 318 mothers were recruited through a ...

Research on cognitive and behavioural development of children born after assisted conception is inconsistent. This prospective study aimed to explore underlying causal relationships between ovarian stimulation, in-vitro procedures, subfertility components and child cognition and behaviour. Participants were singletons born to subfertile couples after ovarian stimulation IVF (n = 63), modified n...

Maternal obesity is associated with the development of a variety neuropsychiatric disorders; however, mechanisms behind this association are not fully understood. Comparison between maternal immune activation and reveals similarities in impairments cytokine profile. Here, we present summary recent evidence describing how inflammatory processes contribute towards disorders offspring obese mother...

In female rats, food intake is reduced during the period in the estrous cycle when the rat is sexually receptive and ovulation is imminent (Wade and Gray, 1979). By contrast, food intake is increased during lactation in the postpartum period (Linden et al, 1990) and sexual behaviour and ovulation are inhibited (Sodersten et al, 1983). There are several examples demonstrating that the neuroendoc...

objective: to analyze the trend in maternal mortality ratio in a tertiary care centre and the effect of various maternity schemes on it. materials and methods:  retrospective analysis of all maternal deaths occurring in the guru gobind singh medical college & hospital, faridkot, punjab, india was done from jan 2010 to dec 2012. every maternal death was scrutinized from various aspects like dire...

Maternal grandmothers residing in 3-generation households often provide care and support to their grandchildren. However, the implications of grandmother coresidence and involvement for adolescent adjustment have been neglected in the South African literature. This study examined whether the involvement of maternal grandmothers who coreside with grandchildren and their parents differed from tha...

Adverse early life events are associated with altered stress responsiveness and metabolic disturbances in the adult life. Dietary methyl donor supplementation could be able to reverse the negative effects of maternal separation by affecting DNA methylation in the brain. In this study, maternal separation during lactation reduced body weight gain in the female adult offspring without affecting f...