Nutritional Factors in Fetal and Infant Brain Development

Energetic and nutritional constraints on infant brain development: implications for brain expansion during human evolution.

The human brain confronts two major challenges during its development: (i) meeting a very high energy requirement, and (ii) reliably accessing an adequate dietary source of specific brain selective nutrients needed for its structure and function. Implicitly, these energetic and nutritional constraints to normal brain development today would also have been constraints on human brain evolution. T...

proficiency level and factors fostering reticence in efl learners

according to cheng (1999), in recent esl/efl literature, asian (especially east asian) learners of english as a foreign/second language have been arguably reported as reticent and passive learners. the most common allegations are that these students are reluctant to participate in classroom discourse; they are unwilling to give responses; they do not ask questions; and they are passive and over...

Recent Advances in Nutritional Sciences Maternal Nutrition and Fetal Development

Nutrition is the major intrauterine environmental factor that alters expression of the fetal genome and may have lifelong consequences. This phenomenon, termed “fetal programming,” has led to the recent theory of “fetal origins of adult disease.” Namely, alterations in fetal nutrition and endocrine status may result in developmental adaptations that permanently change the structure, physiology,...

Maternal Risk Factors Associated with Fetal and Infant Mortality

Maternal chronic medical conditions, infectious diseases, psychiatric conditions, parental and environmental exposures, and psychosocial stressors have an established impact on fetal and neonatal health. Although countless studies have shown relationships between maternal risk factors and low-birth weight, pre-term birth, and fetal and infant morbidity (e.g. reduced apgar scores), fewer have de...

Transplacental thyroxine and fetal brain development.