News
Bush, Thoemmes to receive Chancellor Awards for Diversity
UCSF Article link
Mood of children during earliest stages of life linked to maternal mental health
UCSF Article link
Offspring of Pregnant Women Exposed to High Level of Pollutants May Have Lower IQs
UCSF Article link
KQED Article link
Classroom Friendships May Offset Effects of Punitive Parents
A study published in Development and Psychopathology discovered a link between friendships in kindergarten and an improvement in the behavior of a child who has experienced punitive parenting.
UCSF Article link
MSN Article link
Living in better neighborhood may protect health of kids in poverty
https://psych.ucsf.edu/news/living-better-neighborhood-may-protect-healt...
also see:
Stress in Pregnancy Linked to Changes in Infant’s Nervous System and Temperament
https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2017/11/409146/stress-pregnancy-linked-changes...
Undoing the Harm of Childhood Trauma and Adversity
Maternal stress hormones appear to program fetal development, she said, and beyond that, a mother’s own early childhood adversity can affect her biology throughout her life, which she carries into her pregnancy.
Bush and Lieberman have joined forces in the CTRP-Health study at the UCSF Child Trauma Research Program (CTRP) to examine the biological systems implicated in traumatic stress and their response to Lieberman’s child-parent interventions. In mothers and their children, Bush and colleagues are searching for biological markers of adversity in the telomeres at the ends of chromosomes, the immune system and other physiological stress response systems."
http://www.ucsf.edu/news/2016/10/404446/undoing-harm-childhood-trauma-and-adversity
NIH awards nearly $5 million to research environmental influences on child development
"The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded more than $4.7 million to a project being conducted in part by UC San Francisco researchers investigating how the environment influences neurodevelopment and asthma risk in children.
The grant was part of $157 million in national awards announced by the NIH for a multitude of projects under a seven-year initiative called Environmental Influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO). The ECHO program will investigate how exposure to a range of environmental factors in early development — from conception through early childhood — influences the health of children and adolescents. The studies will target four key pediatric outcomes that have a high public health impact: airway health, obesity, neurodevelopment, and birth outcomes.
UCSF Department of Psychiatry faculty members Nicole Bush, PhD, and Kaja LeWinn, ScD, are co-principal investigators on the grant project, titled "Prenatal and Childhood PATHWAYS to Health: An Integrated Model of Chemical and Social Exposures, Biological Mechanisms, and Sex-Specific Effects on Neurodevelopment and Respiratory Outcomes." In collaboration with their fellow co-principal investigators from the University of Washington (Catherine Karr, PhD, MD, MS), Seattle Children’s Research Institute (Sheela Sathyanarayana, MD, MPH), and the University of Tennessee Health Science Center in Memphis (Frances Tylavsky, DrPH), they will harmonize data from three extant cohorts comprising nearly 3,000 mother-child pairs to examine important questions about the effects of chemical (pollution and phthalates) and non-chemical (self-reported stress and stress biomarkers) exposures during pregnancy and their interaction on developing fetuses."