Posts tagged motor development
Articles and news from the latest research reports.
‘Back to sleep’ does not affect baby’s ability to roll
UAlberta research shows little change in babies’ ability to roll from their tummy to back and vice versa 20 years after “back to sleep” campaign.
Baby, keep on rolling. A campaign to put babies to bed on their backs to reduce the risk of sudden infant death syndrome has not impaired infants’ rolling abilities, according to University of Alberta research.
Johanna Darrah, a professor of physical therapy in the Faculty of Rehabilitation Medicine, says infants develop the ability to roll much the same today as they did 20 years ago when the “back to sleep” campaign was introduced and successfully reduced the occurrence of SIDS. Her research answers fears that the back to sleep campaign, which recommends putting babies to bed on their back instead of their stomach, would hurt an infant’s gross motor development, specifically the ability to roll from tummy to back and vice versa.
“Infant gross motor development hasn’t changed that much in 20 years,” says Darrah. “The thought that babies first roll from their tummy to their back, before they go from their back to their tummy, does not appear to be the case. For most babies, they happen very close together.”
Darrah first studied infant motor development in the early 1990s as a graduate student of former dean Martha Cook Piper when the pair published the Alberta Infant Motor Scale, an observational assessment scale used throughout the world to measure infant motor skill development from birth to walking.
More than 20 years later, Darrah revisited the work, studying the rolling abilities and motor skills development of 725 Canadian infants ranging in age from one week to eight months. One of her goals was to see whether the norms identified and developed 20 years ago still represent the age of emergence of gross motor skills.
Darah notes there is some concern in the physical therapy community that babies develop movement skills like rolling from tummy to back at later ages because of reduced time spent on their stomachs. Those concerns appear to be unfounded, she says, explaining that her results are particularly valuable for health-care practitioners specializing in early childhood development.
“Our results would suggest that gross motor skills emerge in the same order and at the same ages as 20 years ago. The environment is of course important to gross motor development, but the change in a sleeping position hasn’t made much difference as to when babies roll from stomach to back.”
New hope for autistic children who never learn to speak
An Autistica consultation published this month found that 24% of children with autism were non-verbal or minimally verbal, and it is known that these problems can persist into adulthood. Professionals have long attempted to support the development of language in these children but with mixed outcomes. An estimated 600,000 people in the UK and 70 million worldwide have autism, a neuro-developmental condition which is life-long.
Today, scientists at the University of Birmingham publish a paper in Frontiers in Neuroscience showing that while not all of the current interventions used are effective, there is real hope for progress by using interventions based on understanding natural language development and the role of motor and “motor mirroring” behaviour in toddlers.
The researchers, led by Dr Joe McCleery, who is supported by autism research charity Autistica, examined over 200 published papers and more than 60 different intervention studies, and found that:
- Motor behaviours, such as banging toys and copying gestures or facial expressions (“mirroring”), play a key role in the learning of language.
- Children with autism show specific motor impairments, and less “mirroring” brain activity, particularly in relation to strangers in whom they show very little interest. This finding may hold the key to language problems overall.
- Despite extensive use of sign language training to improve speech and communication skills in non-verbal children with autism, there is very little evidence that it makes a positive impact, potentially due to the impairments in motor behaviours and mirroring.
- Picture exchange training can lead to improvements in speech. Here, children gradually learn to “ask” for things by exchanging pictures. This may work well because it does not depend on complex motor skills or mirroring.
- Play-based approaches which employ explicit teaching strategies and are developmentally based are particularly successful.
- New studies involving a focus on motor skills alongside speech and language intervention are showing promising preliminary results. This is exciting because these interventions utilise our new understanding of the role of motor behaviours in the development of speech and social interaction.
With the support of Autistica, the UK’s leading autism research charity, Dr McCleery’s team have now embarked on new work which builds on these findings to design interventions which specifically target the aspects of development where there are deficits in non-verbal autistic children.
Dr McCleery says: “We feel that the field is approaching a turning point, with potentially dramatic breakthroughs to come in both our understanding of communication difficulties in people with autism, and the potential ways we can intervene to make a real difference for those children who are having difficulties learning to speak.”
Christine Swabey, CEO of Autistica, says: “80% of the parents in our recent consultation wanted interventions straight after diagnosis. Dr McCleery’s work shows how critical it is for all intervention to be evidence-based, and that the best approaches are based on a real understanding of the development of difficulties in autism. We are proud to be supporting the next steps in this vital research which will improve the quality of life for people with autism.”
Alison Hardy, whose son Alfie is six, says: “As a parent of an autistic child, who is non-verbal, I feel quite vulnerable. People are always saying “try this, it worked wonders for us”. But you can’t try everything. We need a proper, scientific evidence base for what works and what does not. Then we can focus our time and our effort, with some confidence that we have a chance of helping our children. The publication of this research is an exciting step in giving us that confidence, it is great that Autistica is supporting this vital work.”
(Source: eurekalert.org)