PSICONLINE NEWS n.202 - 25.7.2004

• Stress nemico delle donne, altera gli ormoni
• Anziani: un decalogo contro caldo e solitudine
• FOR MANY ADOLESCENT GIRLS,PREGNANCY MAY BE NO ACCIDENT
• What do babies think before they start talking?

Stress nemico delle donne, altera gli ormoni
Lo stress fa male alla salute delle donne influenzando la quantita' di ormoni chiave per l'organismo che possono anche interferire con il ciclo mestruale e con la fertilita'.
A dimostrarlo e' una ricerca, pubblicata sul European Journal of Endocrinology, che porta la firma italiana: troppo stress quotidiano e' legato all'iperprolattinemia, cioe' l'eccesso di ormone prolattina nel sangue.
Questo e' il primo studio, spiega Nicoletta Sonino dell'Universita' di Padova, in cui si fa il confronto tra soggetti con iperprolattinemia e soggetti sani, prima si era solo osservata una tendenza a sbalzi di prolattina in persone sane sotto stress.

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Anziani: un decalogo contro caldo e solitudine
Si chiama «Sole sì, soli no» la nuova campagna di solidarietà per gli anziani messa a punto dalla Comunità di Sant’Egidio mentre l’estate entra nel vivo e nel ricordo dello scorso anno, con alcune migliaia di decessi in più tra gli anziani.
Sono - ha spiegato alla Radio vaticana Silvia Marangoni, della Comunità di Sant’Egidio - «quattordici consigli per vivere più freschi, e soprattutto per vivere. Si tratta di non uscire nelle ore più calde; di bere tanto, fornendo al corpo quell’apporto idrico necessario. Poi alcuni consigli alimentari: la necessità di mangiare frutta e verdura, evitando quegli alimenti che risultano più impegnativi e che, quindi, indeboliscono l’organismo. Ancora, non assumere un certo tipo di farmaci o, comunque, rivedere le posologie dei medicinali».

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FOR MANY ADOLESCENT GIRLS,PREGNANCY MAY BE NO ACCIDENT
As social scientists and health educators grapple with causes of adolescent pregnancy in the United States, some researchers suggest that one component of the problem has been largely ignored. Though most adolescent pregnancies are accidental, a substantial number of girls want to get pregnant.
Susan L. Davies, Ph.D., of the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s School of Public Health and colleagues, questioned 455 low-income, African-American adolescent girls in Birmingham, Ala., aged 14-18 between 1996 and 1999, and found that nearly a quarter (23.6 percent) expressed some desire to become pregnant in the near future.
“Adolescent pregnancy research has predominantly focused on factors associated with pregnancy occurrence and overlooked the possibility that pregnancy is a desired outcome for some adolescents,” Davies says. Instead, she adds, successful pregnancy prevention programs need to discern between factors that contribute to intentional versus accidental pregnancies among teen girls.
In their research, published in the August 2004 issue of Health Education & Behavior, Davies and her team tried to identify some of those factors. Self-administered questionnaires asked participants about their desire to be pregnant, their relationships with males and their birth control use.

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What do babies think before they start talking?
Babies as young as five months old make distinctions about categories that their parents do not, revealing new information about how language develops in humans. The research by Sue Hespos, assistant professor of psychology and human development at Vanderbilt University, and Elizabeth Spelke, professor of psychology at Harvard University, was published in the July 22 issue of Nature in the article “Conceptual precursors to language.”
“It's been shown in previous studies that adults actually categorize things differently based on what language they speak,” Hespos said. “So, if language is influencing adults' thought, one of our questions was, what's going on with preverbal infants? Do children think before they speak?
“Language capitalizes on a pre-existing system of ‘I live in a 3-D world, I know how objects behave and interact,'” she continued. “This pre-existing ability suggests that children do think before they speak. ”

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