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How much a baby is touched leaves measurable effects on DNA methylation (2017)

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Re: How much a baby is touched leaves measurable effects on DNA methylation (2017)

#81

Post by thaumasiotes »

jbuzbee wrote: post #47
samstave wrote: post #2

Hmm... I have three children - and all are intelligent, beautiful well adjusted kids. 5, 7, and 15. One thing I made a point of as each was born - I maintained as much physica contact with each immediately after birth. I didnt allow them to leave or be examined without me there, touching them. I did it not for the posted reasons, but just beacuse it felt right to me. ALso - I would hum and sing to them a tune while t…

Here's another magical experience. No one will believe it, but it's true, so here goes. We too would read, sing and hum to my son in-womb. While doing so, we'd occasionally hear a loud click, the source of which we couldn't determine. But after he was born, we found out. He would press his tongue hard against the roof of his mouth then release it with a suction "pop". Was he trying to communicate back to us from the…

> He would press his tongue hard against the roof of his mouth then release it with a suction "pop".

This is an alveolar click, known as a normal part of certain African languages.

If you've seen the name "!Kung San" around, it is the sound indicated by the "!K".

Re: How much a baby is touched leaves measurable effects on DNA methylation (2017)

#82

Post by soyguzzler »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #81
jbuzbee wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's another magical experience. No one will believe it, but it's true, so here goes. We too would read, sing and hum to my son in-womb. While doing so, we'd occasionally hear a loud click, the source of which we couldn't determine. But after he was born, we found out. He would press his tongue hard against the roof of his mouth then release it with a suction "pop". Was he trying to communicate back to us from the…

> He would press his tongue hard against the roof of his mouth then release it with a suction "pop". This is an alveolar click, known as a normal part of certain African languages. If you've seen the name "!Kung San" around, it is the sound indicated by the "!K".

Reminds me of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4okFm62gxk

Re: How much a baby is touched leaves measurable effects on DNA methylation (2017)

#83

Post by animal531 »

s1k3b8 wrote: post #49
samstave wrote: post #2

Hmm... I have three children - and all are intelligent, beautiful well adjusted kids. 5, 7, and 15. One thing I made a point of as each was born - I maintained as much physica contact with each immediately after birth. I didnt allow them to leave or be examined without me there, touching them. I did it not for the posted reasons, but just beacuse it felt right to me. ALso - I would hum and sing to them a tune while t…

> I did it not for the posted reasons, but just beacuse it felt right to me. It probably felt right because it's natural. Newborns pretty much stayed with their mothers 24/7 for all of human history. This is true for chimps ( our closest ancestors ) and even our common ancestor. It's only recently with the push to get women into the workforce where women were encouraged to separate from their newborns so that they co…

Human babies also learn the pre-constructs for the languages being spoken around them while still in the womb, so no reason they can't learn other repeated noises.

Re: How much a baby is touched leaves measurable effects on DNA methylation (2017)

#84

Post by nashashmi »

yibg wrote: post #46
nashashmi wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure how much it is related, but I learned how touch has a powerfully lasting impact when I read about babies from an underfunded Hungarian orphanage having lots of health problems later in life because of how little they were touched.

Seems very probable that an underfunded orphanage will have other areas like healthcare, sanitation and nutrition lacking as well. Was there something specific about what you read that related to touch?

https://www.livescience.com/21778-early-neglect-alters-kids-...

https://www.nytimes.com/1988/02/02/science/the-experience-of...

This was something I quickly found. I can't seem to find the very article I read however.

Re: How much a baby is touched leaves measurable effects on DNA methylation (2017)

#85

Post by Wildgoose »

nashashmi wrote: post #42
samstave wrote: post #2

Hmm... I have three children - and all are intelligent, beautiful well adjusted kids. 5, 7, and 15. One thing I made a point of as each was born - I maintained as much physica contact with each immediately after birth. I didnt allow them to leave or be examined without me there, touching them. I did it not for the posted reasons, but just beacuse it felt right to me. ALso - I would hum and sing to them a tune while t…

Not sure how much it is related, but I learned how touch has a powerfully lasting impact when I read about babies from an underfunded Hungarian orphanage having lots of health problems later in life because of how little they were touched.

I believe you may be referring to the Romanian orphanages after the Ceasescu communist regime.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_orphans

Re: How much a baby is touched leaves measurable effects on DNA methylation (2017)

#86

Post by m_rcin »

username90 wrote: post #80
jMyles wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an example of the sort of cases in which I worry that experts become clouded by zealotry; I think it's more likely that a generalist-at-a-distance will poke the right holes in the methodology of these kinds of studies.

I wonder why they don't have independent statisticians review each paper doing statistics? Seems weird and abusable that only people from the same subfield reviews the papers.

It's hard enough to find reviewers in the same field. I imagine finding statisticians to review papers from fields they don't care about would be problematic. You probably know that reviewers work for free.

Re: How much a baby is touched leaves measurable effects on DNA methylation (2017)

#87

Post by aidenn0 »

dcolkitt wrote: post #20
aidenn0 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are issues with twin studies, not the least of which the number of twins raised separately, but not adopted, is tiny. However adoptive parents are a small self-selected subset of the population.

Most twin studies simply compare identical and fraternal twins in non-adopted households. Since identical twins share twice the genetic covariance of fraternal twins, the impact of family environment can be backed out from the respective intra-pair correlation coefficients. In the limit case if genetics played no factor, then fraternal and identical twins should have identical pairwise correlations. For example suppo…

Right, those studies can tell us about heritability, but cannot distinguish between common environment and genetics.

Re: How much a baby is touched leaves measurable effects on DNA methylation (2017)

#88

Post by VeninVidiaVicii »

badestrand wrote: post #63
VeninVidiaVicii wrote: post #60

The epigenome isn't some mystical thing, it's just a manifestation of the environment on cellular function. These kinds of sensationalist articles are exquisitely frustrating as a genomicist.

You need to give that knowledge time to spread. The vast majority of living adults learned in school that the DNA is fixed and the surrounding stuff is just junk. Eventually everyone will know about epigenetics but how else would you spread the information if not with articles like these.

A few months ago, I spoke to my uncle, who's an endocrinologist at a medical school, and when I told him "Your organs are different because of epigenetics" a lightbulb went off in his head. I think outreach is just doing am awful job of explaining epigenetics. Even his colleagues in genetics hadn't really been able to explain it very succinctly.

Instead, articles are full of explanations like this one, leading you to make outlandish conclusions. Hell, even in one of my community outreach events, a farmer came up to me afterwards and said he doesn't want to grow any crops with methylated DNA.

Re: How much a baby is touched leaves measurable effects on DNA methylation (2017)

#89

Post by glofish »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #58
glofish wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will tell you what they did. They collected data, with no hypothesis or any idea what they are looking for, then desperately fit various models until something showed up as statistically significant. Of course, you could say: how dare you, how would you even know, ... I work in this field, the p-hacking, harking (hypothesizing after the results are known) is both pervasive and endemic. they massaged the factors, th…

Your comments on this? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2682215/

A perfect example of what I am talking about. What is the final conclusion of that paper written in 2009!:

> Are the neuroendocrine effects of these experiences across the lifespan also mediated by DNA methylation? The answer to this question is not yet known.

So what happened in the following ten (!) years, have we finally figured out whether the effect is mediated by DNA methylation? Nah. Instead, they published another bullshit paper, this time about babies being held...

Ten years is (or rather should be) an eternity in science! The 1st smartphone was barely released back then - how far have gone in technology in this time? Yet we are nowhere closer to have proven or disproven the mechanism. Instead, they would much rather maintain the status quo and publish another bullshit paper.

Re: How much a baby is touched leaves measurable effects on DNA methylation (2017)

#90

Post by yibg »

nashashmi wrote: post #84
yibg wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems very probable that an underfunded orphanage will have other areas like healthcare, sanitation and nutrition lacking as well. Was there something specific about what you read that related to touch?

https://www.livescience.com/21778-early-neglect-alters-kids-... https://www.nytimes.com/1988/02/02/science/the-experience-of... This was something I quickly found. I can't seem to find the very article I read however.

Years of neglect is quite a bit broader than just touch. I would expect years of neglect in early childhood to have a long lasting effect on the mental development of kids.
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