Research Snapshot

Middle-Class Children's Health Worse than Wealthy Counterparts It is widely recognized that children born to poor and uneducated parents are more likely to be in bad health and die as infants than children of the wealthy and educated. But a new study says parents’ income and education are so linked to their children’s health that there’s even a significant difference between the health of middle-class children versus that of their wealthier counterparts. The report was produced by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Commission to Build a Healthier America. It concludes in part that the sources of these disparities are so entrenched that even a major expansion of healthcare programs would not alone close these gaps; the problems need to be addressed by tackling the underlying social conditions.

Prenatal Stress Exposure Affects Children’s Intellectual Development Children born to women who experienced even moderate amounts of stress during pregnancy may face at least some language and verbal development limitations, researchers report in the Journal of American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Why such stress might affect the development of children isn’t clear; however, the researchers note that “exposure to high levels of objective (prenatal stress) may have altered fetal neurodevelopment, thereby influencing the expression of the children’s neurobehavioral abilities in early childhood.”

Depression Can Be Factor In Deaths of People Who’ve Had Heart Attacks Depression and a high heart rate at night appear to be predictors of death among adults who’ve had heart attacks, researchers report in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine. Depression, the researchers note, often interferes with individuals’ sleep, which in turn may cause ischemia, a restriction of blood and oxygen to heart tissues.

Children of Deployed Service Personnel At Risk For Behavior Problems The young children of American military service personnel deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan are more likely than other kids in military families to exhibit behavioral problems, such as aggressiveness, researchers report in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine. “The whole family dynamic changes when one parent is away for a long period,” said Deborah Frank, one of the researchers. “And in this case, on top of the usual stresses of separation, even very young children can sense the anxiety that not only is the parent not there, but something terrible might happen to them.”

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