Teenage Brain Research Articles

Anxiety Impact on the Children Brain: Consequences for Children Emotional Capacities

Significant fluctuations in sensitive and intellectual functioning, an increase in strain - interrelated psychiatric sicknesses like nervousness and unhappiness, are all related to adolescent growth. Additionally, the brain is undergoing tremendous maturation at this period, as evidenced by operational changes numerous areas. Although the teenage - correlated alterations in these areas have been well-described by numerous exquisite human neuroimaging studies, surprisingly less is recognized almost these fluctuations in non - anthropological creatures. Furthermore, there is a dearth of information on how prolonged stress exposure may impair this structural maturation in both human and non-human species. Given the essential link between the structure and function of the anxious organization, him is crucial toward comprehend in what way these normal and higher stress -related organizational changes throughout puberty affect psychosomatic role, which in turn might affect subsequent neural enlargement. Succinct overview aims designate effects of chronic strain exposure on intellect sections which endure to develop structurally throughout youth besides are extremely penetrating to its belongings. This review will pay special attention to the morphology of the amygdala, hippocampal construction, and cortex. Future research directions also explored because there are still many unresolved issues in this field of study. To better comprehend the mechanisms underlying the rise correlated to psychiatric frequently seen during this period of growth, we must have a clearer understanding of how stress impacts teenage brain development.

Sound thoughts: How understanding the teenage brain may help us look after their ears.

OPINION article Front. Integr. Neurosci., 29 November 2022 Volume 16 - 2022 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fnint.2022.1016842

Impact of Drug Abuse on Performance of Gymnasium Students in Germany

The education stakeholders in Germany acknowledge that alcohol and drug abuse among students are significant barriers to achieving academic goals. Alcohol and drug abuse are also related to an increase in other risky actions such as early sexual conduct, drunk driving, physical violence and truancy. Drug abuse in schools, particularly illicit drugs in high school, has long been a topic of concern. Thus, the study sought to examine the impact of drug abuse on the performance of college students in Germany. The study was literature-based and the inferences were based on the verdicts from the prior studies. The study results showed that drug abuse has a negative impact on performance. Drugs and alcohol are some of the most detrimental yet most common disruptions in teenage brain development. They manipulate the brain's wiring and affect how it processes and retains information, including how a teen thinks, focuses, learns, remembers, and concentrates inside and outside school. Drugs can impair teens' cognitive development and affect students' performance in school: reduce their ability to memorize things, poor concentration in the classroom and deficiency of prioritization of assignments. The study recommended that secondary school administrators develop a well-integrated learner surveillance system throughout school environments. Moreover, the government introduce life skills training in the syllabus to teach learners how to resist indulgence in drug abuse. Schools need to develop policies that promote participation in learning by creating environments that make it satisfying and interesting. In addition, the school administration should introduce and strengthen counselling and support services to students who demand social assistance. Keywords: Drug Abuse, Performance, Students, Germany

Adolescent prairie voles practice parenting

For many organisms, it takes a village to raise the young – individuals other than the youngsters’ parents will provide care and help them to survive. In prairie voles, both adults and adolescents will care for babies, or pups, that are not their own. Recent work published by Caitlyn Finton and colleagues at Cornell University and Emory University, USA, suggests that adolescent prairie voles take care of pups to practice their parenting skills. But the hormones that drive adolescent caregiving behaviors are not the same as those that drive normal, adult parenting behaviors.Finton and colleagues first tested why adolescent prairie voles would care for pups. The team thought that adolescents would either care for their siblings to pass on some of their related genes, or care for any pups that were around to learn how to become more competent parents in the future. The researchers raised families of prairie voles in the lab and chose adolescent males for their fostering experiments, as females tend to be more aggressive towards pups.To test the adolescents’ caregiving motivations, the researchers put the prairie voles in cages with a sibling of the same age, a sibling pup or an unrelated pup. They then recorded how the animals behaved toward each other using a video camera and counted the amount of time that the adolescents spent grooming, sniffing or huddling near the other voles.As expected, the ​​adolescent prairie voles spent a lot of time around the younger voles. The adolescents also spent more time grooming and cuddling the pups than they spent caring for siblings of the same age, which aligns with the idea that prairie vole teens help care for young.However, the team found no difference in the amount of time adolescents spent grooming, cuddling or smelling related and unrelated pups. This suggests that adolescent male prairie voles are practicing their parenting skills on unrelated pups rather than caring only for siblings to pass on some of their genes.Next, Finton and colleagues tested whether the brain activity that drives teenage caregiving is similar to the activity that drives adult parenting. They looked at the expression of genes in brain cells of adolescents to understand how changes in brain activity relate to differences in behavior, predicting that cells that produce the parenting hormones oxytocin and vasopressin would change their activity after caring for pups, but not after interacting with siblings or an inanimate object.Surprisingly, the researchers found that cells that produce oxytocin and vasopressin had the same activity regardless of whether the adolescents interacted with the pups or their same-age siblings. This might be because the area of the brain they looked at, the hypothalamus, is not involved in adolescent caregiving, or it could be that other hormones, such as estrogen, drive the adolescents’ behaviors towards pups.Taken together, these results suggest that adolescent prairie voles raise pups to become better parents in the future, even if their teenage brains are not working like a parent’s brain.

Long-term unmet supportive care needs of teenage and young adult (TYA) childhood brain tumour survivors and their caregivers: a cross-sectional survey

IntroductionThe supportive care needs of long-term childhood brain tumour survivors, now teenagers and young adults (TYAs), and their caregivers are largely unknown. We aimed to describe their supportive care needs and explore associations between needs and quality of life (QoL).MethodsParticipants were recruited from long-term follow-up clinics (in three NHS Trusts in England) and online. Participants included childhood brain tumour survivors, ≥ 5 years from diagnosis, currently aged 13–30, and their primary caregivers. Survivors completed the Supportive Care Needs Survey (SCNS) Short Form and caregivers the SCNS-Partners & Caregivers, alongside validated QoL questionnaires (Peds-FACT-Br and CQOLC).ResultsIn total, 112 individuals (69 survivors/43 caregivers) participated. Survivors reported on average 9.4 (± 8.5) unmet needs. Needs were greatest in the psychological domain, with anxiety (60.3%), uncertainty about the future (50.7%) and feeling down and depressed (48.5%) most commonly reported. Caregivers reported on average 12.4 (± 12.3) unmet needs. Again, the greatest number of unmet needs was observed in the psychological domain. Many caregivers also reported information needs around financial support/government benefits (42.9%) and possible survivor fertility problems (42.9%). Multivariable linear regression analysis showed that female survivors, unemployed survivors, survivors further away from diagnosis and single caregivers were more likely to report unmet needs. More unmet needs were significantly associated with poorer QoL in survivors and caregivers.ConclusionThis research provides leads to improving supportive care and long-term follow-up services. Psychological support represents the biggest gap in care. Understanding unmet needs and recognising what services are required are critical to improving quality of long-term survival.

The Incredible Teenage Brain, Everything You Need to Know to Unlock Your Teen’s Potential

The Incredible Teenage Brain, Everything You Need to Know to Unlock Your Teen’s Potential

Mind Games: Technology and the Developing Teenage Brain

Mind Games: Technology and the Developing Teenage Brain

Reviews

Inside the teenage brain: David Sang reviews Inventing Ourselves by Sarah-Jayne Blakemore. Heisenberg, harmonics and headbanging: Iain Dale-Trotter reviews When the Uncertainty Principle Goes to 11 by Philip Moriarty. From early concepts to relativity and quanta: Rick Marshall reviews the Evolution of Physics by Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld. A battle of watts: Frank Thompson reviews The Current War directed by Alfonso Gomez-Rejon. A three phase electrical supply in the laboratory: Frank Thomspon reviews the Invertek Optidrive E3.

The association between prenatal endocrine-disrupting chemical exposure and altered resting-state brain fMRI in teenagers.

Many studies have reported that prenatal exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) can cause adverse behavioral effects or cognitive dysfunction in children. This study aimed to investigate a relationship of the concentration of prenatal EDCs and brain function in teenagers. We recruited 59 mother-child pairs during the third trimester of pregnancy, and collected and examined the concentration of EDCs, such as heavy metals, phthalates and perfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs), in maternal urine and serum. Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) data were collected in teenagers 13-16years of age, and fractional amplitude of low-frequency fluctuation (fALFF) and regional homogeneity (ReHo) were performed to find the association between maternal EDC concentrations and the functional development of the teenage brain. We found a correlation between MBP concentration and activity in the superior frontal gyrus, middle frontal gyrus, middle temporal gyrus and inferior temporal gyrus in the combined group of boys and girls. We also observed a correlation between MBzP concentration and activity in the anterior cingulum gyrus and insula in girls. We found a correlation between lead concentration and activity in the cuneus in the combined group. We also observed a correlation between MeHg concentration and activity in the superior temporal gyrus, caudate nucleus and putamen in the combined group. The PFOS results revealed a negative relationship between activity in the right putamen in boys, girls and the combined group after phthalate or heavy metals were applied as covariates. The PFNA results showed a negative correlation between activity in the left/right putamen and left caudate nucleus in boys, girls and the combined group after phthalate, heavy metals or PFOS were applied as covariates. We examined the correlations between maternal EDC concentrations and brain development and found that the associations with resting-state teenage brains in some circumstances are sex-related.

Binging, Boozing, and the Teenage Brain

Binging, Boozing, and the Teenage Brain

“Christopher Cat”: An Excerpt

“Christopher Cat”An Excerpt Mecca Jamilah Sullivan (bio) Among the teenagers of New York City, Galton Preparatory High School for the Gifted was known for many things. Each spring, it made the New York Times rankings of the best high schools in the city, and the number of graduates it sent to Ivy League universities each fall was a point of great pride for parents and administrators. But for the students themselves, Galton’s reputation was more complicated, and more exciting. Galton students were the rebellious stepchildren of New York’s young intelligentsia—the ones who popped speed and saw therapists and agonized over their grades during the day, then snuck out of their homes and dropped acid and did lines of cocaine with businessmen in fancy clubs downtown while their parents slept at night. This reputation, of course, was earned almost entirely by the white students, and those few black students born wealthy enough to live beyond the burden of racial proof. This was not the case for La Famille. They were a group of hood imports— scholarship students, children of immigrants, and first-generation black middle class. Early in the solidification of their group and regularly thereafter, they bonded over the various sit-down talks they’d each gotten from their parents, lectures so similar they could have been copied from an Official Third World Parenting Handbook and distributed across languages, cultures, and generations until they were imprinted on all the world’s upwardly mobile brown teenage brains. There were classics like “You Will Have to Be Twice as Smart and Work Twice as Hard to Get Half of What You Deserve” and “Not Fair? Life’s Not Fair. Don’t You Know Our History?” The boys often got some version of “All They Expect of You Is to End Up Dead, Gay, or In Jail. It’s Your Job to Prove Them Wrong,” while the girls received the corollary: “They Think You’ll End Up Illiterate, Pregnant and On Welfare at Sixteen. It’s Your Job to Prove [End Page 38] Them Wrong.” Talking with Eric Martinez, Shanté Price, and the Hillings twins, it was clear to Malaya that these dictums ran through the diaspora like blood and bassbeats. They brought La Famille together. Whatever nonsense Galton’s white students got into, the members of La Famille understood that their place was only to listen to the gossip with a delicate mix of disgust and envy, and to go on about their forward-striving lives. Malaya Clondon never mentioned the other sit-downs she got from her parents—If You Don’t Lose Weight, You’re Going to Die—or how much she longed to be the kind of girl who someone would worry might turn up pregnant one day. As La Famille’s charming fat girl—beyond fat, she knew, but still—her role was to be dazzling, the warm and winsome glue that kept the group whole. Compared to the white kids’, La Famille’s infractions were minor, but for them, even small transgressions carried the scent and thrill of danger. Cutting class to give hand jobs in the record store, buying blurry overdubbed VHS pornos from the news stands on 72nd street and watching them in Eric Martinez’s dusty kitchen, sneaking out to meet in Central Park to drink $1.25 bottles of flavored malt liquor and wine coolers from the bodega and smoke Newports late into the night—there were no hard drugs involved in their hijinks, no felonies or glamorous trysts, but it was enough to make them feel alive and almost grown. One morning in December of eleventh grade, a blizzard hit Manhattan unexpectedly, and classes were dismissed after first period. On a nicer day, this would have meant taking it to the park or the two-dollar movie theater in midtown to laugh too loudly and eat popcorn while Shanté and Eric made out in the back row. But the blizzard seemed to be serious, because the train schedules had slowed down, which meant that the kids from Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx had to start their treks home now. RayShawn Carter, Shanté, and the...

The Q&A

Neuroscientist Dean Burnett's latest book unpicks the mysteries of the teenage brain. He says the behaviour that parents find so difficult may actually have saved the human race

Against the Stream: The teenage brain is not unique

Increasingly, claims are being made by developmental neuroscientists that adolescence is characterised by unique changes to the brain. These changes are said to underlie what are claimed to be unique behavioural features of the teenage years. In this paper, it is argued that the brain changes described begin before the teen years and continue long after them. This is not surprising, as there are no behavioural features that are specific to adolescence.

The Teenage Brain: Public Perceptions of Neurocognitive Development during Adolescence.

Over the past decade, important insights have been obtained into the neurocognitive development during adolescence. To better understand how these neuroscientific insights impact the real world, we investigated how neuroscience has shaped public perceptions of the "teenage brain" and if these perceptions influence adolescent behavior. When asking to generate free associations with the word "teenage brain," adolescents ( n = 363, Mage = 14.47 years) and parents ( n = 164, Mage = 47.16 years) more often mention undesirable behaviors (e.g., "irresponsible") than desirable behaviors (e.g., "creative"). Despite these dominantly negative associations, priming adolescents with positively versus negatively framed statements about adolescent brain development did not influence their subsequent risk-taking, impulsivity, and performance on response-to-failure tasks. However, we did find a more nuanced effect, related to how much adolescents agreed with the negative versus positive priming statements: Adolescents' negative beliefs about adolescent brain development reinforced negative behaviors by increased risk-taking behaviors, and adolescents' positive beliefs reinforced positive behaviors by using positive strategies to cope with academic setbacks. The current findings underline the impact of views that build up over time and that these are not easily influenced by a one-time instance of information but rather reinforce the impact of new information. To prevent negative perceptions of the teenage brain from becoming self-fulfilling prophecies, it is important that communication about adolescent neurocognitive development is framed in a more balanced way. Neuroscientists need to be more aware of how their research impacts the real world, before we are fully ready for "real-world neuroscience."

Inventing Ourselves: The Secret Life of the Teenage Brain Inventing Ourselves: The Secret Life of the Teenage Brain Sarah-Jayne Blakemore PublicAffairs, 2018, 256 pp.

This week on the Science podcast, Sarah-Jayne Blakemore delves into the teenage brain, revealing the extraordinary features that define this transitional state in human development.

Assessing Neuroplasticity Using Magnetoencephalography (MEG) in Patient with Left-Temporo-Parietal Pilocytic Astrocytomas Treated with Endoscopic Surgery

Neuroplasticity has been subjected to a great deal of research in the last century. Recently, significant emphasis has been placed on the global effect of localized plastic changes throughout the central nervous system, and on how these changes integrate in a pathological context. The present study aimed to demonstrate the functional cortical reorganization before and after surgery using magnetoencephalography (MEG) in a participant with brain tumor. Results of Visual Evoked Magnetic Field (VEF) based on functional MEG study revealed significantly different of MEG N100 waveforms before and after surgery. Larger and additional new locations for visual activation areas after the surgery were found suggesting neuroplasticity. The present study highlight a physiological plasticity in a teenage brain and the alterations regarding neural plasticity and network remodeling described in pathological contexts in higher-order visual association areas.

Exercise, cognition, and the adolescent brain.

Few adolescents engage in the recommended levels of physical activity, and daily exercise levels tend to drastically decrease throughout adolescence. Beyond physical health benefits, regular exercise may also have important implications for the teenage brain and cognitive and academic capabilities. This narrative review examines how physical activity and aerobic exercise relate to school performance, cognition, and brain structure and function. A number of studies have found that habitual exercise and physical activity are associated with academic performance, cognitive function, brain structure, and brain activity in adolescents. We also discuss how additional intervention studies that examine a wide range of neurological and cognitive outcomes are necessary, as well as characterizing the type, frequency, and dose of exercise and identifying individual differences that contribute to how exercise may benefit the teen brain. Routine exercise relates to adolescent brain structure and function as well as cognitive performance. Together, these studies suggest that physical activity and aerobic exercise may be important factors for optimal adolescent brain development.

Can Teenagers Feel the Pain of Others? Peeking into the Teenage Brain to Find Empathy

Can Teenagers Feel the Pain of Others? Peeking into the Teenage Brain to Find Empathy

Does Watching a Play about the Teenage Brain Affect Attitudes toward Young Offenders?

Neuroscience is increasingly used to infer the cognitive capacities of offenders from the activity and volume of different brain regions, with the resultant findings receiving great interest in the public eye. This field experiment tested the effects of public engagement in neuroscience on attitudes toward offenders. Brainstorm is a play about teenage brain development. Either before or after watching this play, 728 participants responded to four questions about the age of criminal responsibility, and the moral responsibility and dangerousness of a hypothetical young or adult offender. After watching the play, participants perceived the young offender as less likely to reoffend than the adult offender and the young, but not adult, offender as less morally responsible for his actions, especially on the first offense. Therefore, public engagement in the newest arrival to the criminological scene – neuroscience – may shift support for different youth justice responses.

Markers of immune-mediated inflammation in the brains of young adults and adolescents with type 1 diabetes and fatal diabetic ketoacidosis. Is there a difference?

Due to the limited data on diabetic ketoacidosis and brain edema (DKA/BE) in children/adolescents and the lack of recent data on adults with type 1 diabetes (T1D), we addressed the question of whether neuroinflammation was present in the fatal DKA of adults. We performed immunohistochemistry (IHC) studies on the brains of two young adults with T1D and fatal DKA and compared them with two teenagers with poorly controlled diabetes and fatal DKA. C5b-9, the membrane attack complex (MAC) had significantly greater deposits in the grey and white matter of the teenagers than the young adults (p=0.03). CD59, a MAC assembly inhibitory protein was absent, possibly suppressed by the hyperglycemia in the teenagers but was expressed in the young adults despite comparable average levels of hyperglycemia. The receptor for advanced glycation end products (RAGE) had an average expression in the young adults significantly greater than in the teenagers (p=0.02). The autophagy marker Light Chain 3 (LC3) A/B was the predominant form of programmed cell death (PCD) in the teenage brains. The young adults had high expressions of both LC3A/B and TUNEL, an apoptotic cell marker for DNA fragmentation. BE was present in the newly diagnosed young adult with hyperglycemic hyperosmolar DKA and also in the two teenagers. Our data indicate that significant differences in neuroinflammatory components, initiated by the dysregulation of DKA and interrelated metabolic and immunologic milieu, are likely present in the brains of fatal DKA of teenagers when compared with young adults.