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A link between childhood stress and early molars:
"I've long been concerned that if kids grow up too fast, their brains will mature too fast and will lose plasticity at an earlier age. Then they'll go into school and have trouble learning at the same rate as their peers," says Mackey, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at Penn. "Of course, not every kid who experiences stress or [is] low income will show this pattern of accelerated development."
What would help, she thought, was a scalable, objective way -- a physical manifestation, of sorts -- to indicate how children embodied and responded to stresses in their world. Eruption timing of the first permanent molars proved to be just that.
In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Mackey, with doctoral student Cassidy McDermott and colleagues from Penn's School of Dental Medicine and the University of Missouri-Kansas City, shows that children from lower-income backgrounds and those who go through greater adverse childhood experiences get their first permanent molars earlier. The findings, generated initially from a small study and replicated using a nationally representative dataset, align with a broader pattern of accelerated development often seen under conditions of early-life stress.
Journal Reference:
Cassidy L. McDermott, Katherine Hilton, Anne T. Park, et al. Early life stress is associated with earlier emergence of permanent molars [open], Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2105304118)
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by choose another one on Thursday June 10 2021, @01:43PM (3 children)
Wow, "ironing is delicious" - learn something new every day! Looks like my brain is still plastic - probably what all the white bits are on the scans...
Might have to try some ironing later - if I can actually even stand on the gout-ridden ankle by then. As for the OPs "it's hard to run" - yeah, no shit sherlock, just being able to walk would be nice right now, but I can damn well still think because here I am...
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday June 10 2021, @04:19PM (1 child)
A nice plastic mind might think to shorten the ironing board, and set it up in front of a chair, so that the gouty ankle doesn't have to bear any weight while ironing. Or, get one of those tall stools that you see at work stations all over the world. That way, you can grab all your clothes that you intend to iron, lay them within reach, lay the clothes hangars within reach, then iron all day with no pain. Be sure you've set your ironing board up within reach of something to hang your freshly ironed clothes on.
We all have our problems, you know. One of those problems is adapting to life as we age. So, who is smarter, you or the ironing board?
FWIW, I haven't ironed anything in decades. Dear Wife maybe irons a half dozen items a month. What's the point when we have all these wrinkle-free wash and dry fabrics? Take your clothes out of the dryer a little sooner, hang them up while they are still every-so-slightly damp. It saves a lot of work!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 10 2021, @05:32PM
Keep active and your muscles from wasting. That's a priority. It also helps your brain. The largest cause of disability in old age is muscle wasting.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4156923/ [nih.gov]
https://eurapa.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1007/s11556-012-0102-8 [biomedcentral.com]
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Thursday June 10 2021, @07:13PM
Losing "plasticity", by definition, is a reduction in the rate of change that the brain can sustain.
Losing plasticity = learning slower is a TAUTOLOGY.