Subject(s)
Language Development Disorders/therapy , Child Language , Child, Preschool , Female , Follow-Up Studies , Humans , MaleABSTRACT
Forty-nine children who had a virus infection of the central nervous system (CNS) when under 1 year of age were studied. One child had died during the initial illness and three of the survivors were severely disabled. The other survivors, more than 5 years after the initial illness, were all attending normal schools. These 45 children, together with 45 matched controls, were examined. We confirm the findings of other studies that virus infections of the CNS in infancy may cause severe disabilities in some cases, and may depress intellectual abilities in others, even though they appear to have recovered fully. Many of the children who had a virus infection of the CNS in infancy had adverse birth and social histories and so were exceptionally vulnerable, but these factors did not account fully for the findings, and when their influence was included in the analysis, the index children still had a mean performance IQ (WISC) 6 points lower than the control children (P less than 0.05), whereas there was less than 1 point difference between the verbal IQs. Attention is drawn to the problem of virus infections in neonatal units.
Subject(s)
Learning Disabilities/psychology , Meningitis, Viral/psychology , Adenovirus Infections, Human/psychology , Brain Damage, Chronic/psychology , Child , Child, Preschool , Coxsackievirus Infections/psychology , Disabled Persons/psychology , Echovirus 9 , Echovirus Infections/psychology , Education, Special , Enterovirus , Enterovirus B, Human , Female , Follow-Up Studies , Herpes Simplex/psychology , Humans , Infant , Infant, Newborn , Intelligence , Male , Neurocognitive Disorders/psychologySubject(s)
Pedigree , Twins, Monozygotic , Twins , Female , Genes, Dominant , Humans , Male , PregnancyABSTRACT
Triceps and subscapular skinfold thicknesses were measured in 222 pairs of like-sex twins (78 monozygotic and 144 dizygotic) aged 3-15 years. Log transformations of the measurements were standardized for age and sex and the results used to estimate heritability--that is, the proportion of total variation determined by genetic factors. The overall contribution of non-genetic familial effects was small. There were appreciable differences in heritability between limb and trunk fat and between the sexes and at different ages. Over the age of 10 heritability was high for both sites in boys and girls. In younger children environmental factors contributed more to the variation.
