How to become Amway Business Partner

Starting your own business

To start the Amway Business one needs to buy the Amway Business Kit and be sponsored in the business by an already existing Amway Business Owner. Despite what you may have heard, starting an Amway business doesn’t involve handing over large amounts of cash. With your efforts and our knowledge, the Amway opportunity can become everything from a means of earning a little extra cash to building an international business. Where do you want to go?

If you are not an Amway Business Owner but if you are interested in Amway Business Opportunity please contact us at support@amwayagent.com or you can call us on +91-9820359087.

Buy Amway Products:

If you are interested in buying the Amway products then you can contact us at at support@amwayagent.com or you can call us on +91-9820359087. We have stocks in all categories including Nutrition & Wellness, Cosmetics, Homecare, Personal Care, Commercial and Catalogue Products.

Amway Networking

Amway has helped millions of people worldwide build and maintain their own private businesses through the sale of their products over the 50+ years that they have been functional. Achieving success with sale of Amway products is not difficult if you follow a simple 3 step process.

It is a common tendency of people to judge you not by your fancy job title but from what they perceive you to be as a person and what you think about your job. Confusing? Let me make it simpler.

A neighbor of mine used to love hiking. I would often see her out of her house with her hiking gear as early as 5am ‘so that I can get to the best point before any of the noisy family crowds do’ she used to tell me. I used to wonder what the fuss was all about but also marvel the fact that she had much more determination than me to pull herself out of bed that early on a weekend all for a trek. But every time I met her, she had a brilliant new story about how she took paths that led her to fascinatingly green spaces that she never knew existed. She also showed me this superb photograph of a sunrise that she caught on a chilly wintery morning. Her whole spirited attitude was not to entice me into becoming an ardent hiker like she was, but her enthusiasm for it caught nonetheless.

Using the same attitude and enthusiasm will selling your Amway products would help you a great deal. You shouldn’t hound your co-workers or neighbors with the sale of your Amway products, but the mere expression of enthusiasm will make people listening want to know more.

Once you’ve got your activities into the notice of the right people (your target audience) the remaining process is a breeze. People like following things that are currently going strong in terms of demand. Thanks to the internet you can keep your all of your target audience updated with the new stock of products that you might have. Online marketing never fails if used correctly. Apply your networking skills and knowledge of internet technology in helping your Amway business expand. You don’t need to be a computer or technology whizz. Just a simple (yet well constructed) email stating availability of Amway products to your target audience would help give your advertising a boost and also help in extended promotion (since your target audience might send your email to other people they know).

Using these simple yet effective strategies would help an IBO (whether a housewife, businessman or college student) reap benefits like none other!

Skin and Healthcare Products

Amway also caters a wide range of home care, skin care, healthcare and maintenance products with well known brands like Artistry, Nutrilite etc.

Amway has for the longest time been a company which made the network marketing scheme work. It encouraged IBOs to promote Amway products to establish businesses of their own, but also believe in the products that Amway created. Distributors are forever encouraged by Amway to try the products for themselves. The Amway group thrives on the generation of satisfied – repeat customers who don’t need to be reminded about the quality of Amway products.

Amway’s vast and well working product line also speaks of its success. From home care to health products, Amway has developed itself to be a brand that is effective, affordable and environmentally friendly.

Apart from the IBO system of sales and promotion of their products, Amway also has a liberal return policy of 180 days that applies guarantee on all items, in either online or catalogue shopping with delivery options.

Like any other business, signing up as an Amway IBO also requires commitment and focus. Proper positioning and advertisement of your Amway products will allow a higher number of people to take notice of what you have to offer. Rope in your colleagues, neighbors and family to help spread the word of your Amway product sales.

Amway’s IBO scheme allows people from all economic backgrounds and social standings to build a business of their own. Housewives, college students and entrepreneurs alike can now earn a steady income by selling Amway products.

Could additives in hot dogs affect incidence of co...

ScienceDaily (Oct. 24, 2011) — The addition of ascorbate (vitamin C) or its close relative, erythorbate, and the reduced amount of nitrite added in hot dogs, mandated in 1978, have been accompanied by a steep drop in the death rate from colon cancer, according to data presented at the 10th AACR International Conference on Frontiers in Cancer Prevention Research, held Oct. 22-25, 2011.

However, the incidence rate for colon cancer has apparently not changed much since 1978, according to 2011 data from the SEER Cancer Statistics Review from the National Cancer Institute.

“It was proposed that N-nitroso compounds in hot dogs and other processed meats can cause colon cancer,” said Sidney S. Mirvish, Ph.D., professor emeritus at the Eppley Institute for Research in Cancer and Allied Diseases at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha. “We found that the level of total apparent N-nitroso compounds in hot dog links prepared in our laboratory fell as increasing levels of sodium erythorbate were included in the hot dog links.”

Mirvish and colleagues discussed the view that colon cancer was induced by components of the apparent nonvolatile N-nitroso compounds that occur in processed (nitrite-preserved) meat. Hence, Mirvish and colleagues investigated the effect of varying the erythorbate level on the N-nitroso compound content of hot dogs.

They found that the current level of erythorbate (500 milligrams per kilogram) added to hot dogs reduces the N-nitroso compounds to 2 nanomoles per gram compared with 180 nanomoles per gram when erythorbate was not used.

“When erythorbate was not added, 80 percent of the apparent N-nitroso compounds were found to be due to nitrosothiols, which are probably harmless, still leaving 40 nanomoles per gram that were attributed to possibly carcinogenic N-nitroso compounds,” Mirvish said.

If the level of N-nitroso compounds was an important cause of colon cancer, “the drop in N-nitroso compound content caused by the mandated changes in processed meat should have been accompanied by a drop in the incidence of colon cancer,” Mirvish said.

In fact, since the mandated changes were introduced 33 years ago, the death rate for colon cancer has dropped sharply. “This may have been due mostly to earlier detection and better treatment of this disease,” Mirvish said.

Mirvish concluded that the role of hot dog-derived N-nitroso compounds in the causation of colon cancer remains unclear.

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Blood vessel mapping reveals four new ‘ZIP c...

ScienceDaily (Oct. 24, 2011) — A research team led by scientists from The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center has discovered four new “ZIP codes” in their quest to map the vast blood vessel network of the human body.

The study, published online the week of Oct. 24 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, brings science one step closer to the goal of using the vascular system to personalize cancer therapy, as well as fight obesity, heart disease and other disorders. Researchers also found that some addresses are shared in vasculature across the board instead of always being organ-specific.

The study is part of ongoing research to identify specific and unique addresses, or ZIP codes, within the body’s vascular system and use them to develop diagnostic, imaging and therapeutic strategies. Husband-and-wife research team Wadih Arap, M.D., Ph.D., and Renata Pasqualini, Ph.D., professors at the David H. Koch Center for Applied Research of Genitourinary Cancers at MD Anderson, pioneered the concept and were senior authors of the paper.

“By identifying vascular ZIP codes, we bring medicine closer to the ultimate goal of targeted therapies,” Pasqualini said.

Innovative methods help investigation

This study supports the Arap-Pasqualini lab’s ongoing research to show blood vessels are more than a uniform and ubiquitous “pipeline” that serves the circulatory system.

More than a decade ago, the group pioneered a screening technique that employs billions of viral particles, called phage, to discover, validate and use blood vessel diversity. The particles are packaged with small fragments of proteins called peptides that act as ligands. When injected into the body, they bind to specific receptors in the blood vessels and organs.

“This process is like a ‘molecular mass mailing’ to all addresses in the body,” Arap said. “The peptides travel until they find a target and bind to it, then with our novel technology we recover and identify them. Knowing the characteristics of the peptides and where they attach can help us understand the vascular system’s molecular makeup and develop therapies focusing on disease sites.”

This new study was the first in which researchers evaluated the molecular repertoire of protein diversity in several patients, targeting multiple organs at once.

In three cancer patients, serial rounds of peptide collection were followed by biopsies from various tissues to determine where and how the peptides homed, which enabled the enrichment of targeting peptides for identifying ligand-receptors. After systemic delivery of a peptide library to the first patient, phage were recovered from organs, pooled and serially screened in two subsequent patients. Large-scale sequencing was then performed.

“This uncovered a new twist for the vascular map,” Pasqualini said. “To this point, we had seen mainly addresses that were organ and tissue specific. Because of this synchronized method, we discovered some markers are vascular-associated at multiple sites.”

Shared addresses surprise researchers

Analysis revealed four native ligand-receptors, three of which were previously unrecognized.

Two are shared among multiple tissues (integrin a4/annexin A4 and cathepsin B/apolipoprotein E3) and the other two have a restricted and specific distribution in normal tissue (prohibitin/ annexin A2 in white fat tissue) or cancer (RAGE/leukocyte proteinase-3 in bone metastases).

The discovery of shared addresses especially intrigued researchers.

“No one knew about the novel aspect surrounding these particular proteins, and the fact that they can interact and come together to serve a common purpose,” Pasqualini said. “There are likely to be many more.”

A tissue-specific vascular-targeting system, comprising ANXA2 and prohibitin, was found as a ligand-receptor in human white adipose (fat) tissue vasculature. In earlier research, targeting of prohibitin with an apoptotic agent caused dramatic weight loss in obese rodents. The lab is applying to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to conduct a clinical trial for a new drug that will test this principle for weight loss in humans. Moving the impact forward This project establishes that large-scale study of the human vasculature can uncover many unidentified or unique molecular networks that can contribute to the treatment of many diseases.

“This endeavor and the applications of our findings are exciting,” Arap said. “There are going to be many more receptors and many levels of diversity. We’ve just scratched the surface.”

Translational applications, such as first-in-man clinical trials, have started within MD Anderson. The FDA has granted a safe-to-proceed status for the first vascular-targeted Investigational New Drug (IND). Three other drugs are in pre-IND stage, and several others are in pre-clinical laboratory phase.

“I believe these strategies to identify therapeutic targets on the vasculature are truly innovative both from a scientific and clinical perspective,” said David Cheresh, Ph.D., associate director for Translational Research at the University of California, San Diego Cancer Center and noted authority on angiogenesis and cancer metastasis. “Identifying such targets will ultimately pave the way for the next generation of smart/targeted cancer therapies.”

MD Anderson and some of its researchers, including Arap and Pasqualini, have equity positions in drug-development companies Alvos Therapeutics and Ablaris Therapeutics, which are subjected to certain restrictions under institutional policy. MD Anderson manages and monitors the terms of these arrangements in accordance with its conflict-of-interest policy.

Co-authors from MD Anderson’s David H. Koch Center are first authors Fernanda Staquicini, Ph.D., Marina Cardó-Vila, Ph.D., and Mikhail Kolonin, Ph.D. Additional authors include Julianna Edwards; Diana Nunes, Ph.D., and Emmanuel Dias-Neto, Ph.D., Eleni Efstathiou, M.D., Ph.D.; Jessica Sun, and Christopher Logothetis, M.D.

Other MD Anderson contributors include Anna Sergeeva, Ph.D., Department of Stem Cell Transplantation; Shi-Ming Tu, M.D., Department of Genitourinary Medical Oncology; Jeffrey Gershenwald, M.D., Department of Surgical Oncology; Jeffrey Molldrem, M.D., Department of Stem Cell Transplantation; Anne Flamm, J.D., Department of Clinical Ethics ; Erkki Koivunen, Ph.D., Department of Leukemia; Rebecca Pentz, Ph.D., Department of Clinical Ethics; Patricia Troncoso, M.D., Department of Pathology; Kim-Ahn Do, Ph.D., Department of Biostatistics; Gregory Botz, M.D., Department of Critical Care; and Michael Wallace, M.D., Department of Diagnostic Radiology.

Additional contributors included Martin Trepel, M.D., University Medical Center of Hamburg; Nalvo Almeida, Ph.D., and João Setubal, Ph.D., Virginia Bioinformatics Institute and Department of Computer Science, Virginia Polytechnic University; Stan Krajewski, M.D., Ph.D., at The Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute; Richard Sidman, M.D., (corresponding author), Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School; Dolores Cahill, Ph.D., and David O’Connell, Ph.D., Conway Institute of Biomedical and Biomolecular Science, University College Dublin.

This work was funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health, National Cancer Institute, the U.S. Department of Defense, AngelWorks, the Gillson-Longenbaugh Foundation and the Marcus Foundation.

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High fizzy soft drink consumption linked to violen...

ScienceDaily (Oct. 24, 2011) — Teens who drink more than five cans of non-diet, fizzy soft drinks every week are significantly more likely to behave aggressively, suggests research published online in Injury Prevention. This includes carrying a weapon and perpetrating violence against peers and siblings.

US lawyers have successfully argued in the past that a defendant accused of murder had diminished capacity as a result of switching to a junk food diet, a legal precedent that subsequently became known as the “Twinkie Defense” — a twinkie being a packaged snack cake with a creamy filling.

The researchers base their findings on 1,878 teens from 22 public schools in Boston, Massachusetts. The teens were part of the Boston Youth Survey, a biennial survey of 9th to 12th graders (14 to 18 year olds).

The teens were asked how many carbonated non-diet soft drinks they had drunk over the past seven days. Intake was measured in cans (355 ml or 12 ounces), and responses categorised according to quantity.

The responses were divided into two groups: those drinking up to four cans over the preceding week (low consumption); and those drinking five or more (high consumption). Just under one in three (30%) respondents fell into the high consumption category.

The researchers then looked at potential links to violent behaviour in this group, by asking if they had been violent towards their peers, a sibling, or a partner, and if they had carried a gun or knife over the past year.

Responses were assessed in the light of factors likely to influence the results, including age and gender, alcohol consumption, and average amount of sleep on a school night.

Those who drank 5 or more cans of soft drinks every week were significantly more likely to have drunk alcohol and smoked at least once in the previous month.

But even after controlling for these and other factors, heavy use of carbonated non-diet soft drinks was significantly associated with carrying a gun or knife, and violence towards peers, family members and partners.

When the findings were divided into four categories of consumption, the results showed a clear dose-response relationship across all four measures.

Just over 23% of those drinking one or no cans of soft drink a week carried a gun/knife, rising to just under 43% among those drinking 14 or more cans. The proportions of those perpetrating violence towards a partner rose from 15% in those drinking one or no cans a week to just short of 27% among those drinking 14 or more.

Similarly, violence towards peers rose from 35% to more than 58%, while violence towards siblings rose from 25.4% to over 43%.

In all, for those teens who were heavy consumers of non-diet carbonated soft drinks, the probability of aggressive behaviour was 9 to 15 percentage points higher — the same magnitude as the impact of alcohol or tobacco — the findings showed. “There may be a direct cause-and-effect-relationship, perhaps due to the sugar or caffeine content of soft drinks, or there may be other factors, unaccounted for in our analyses, that cause both high soft drink consumption and aggression,” conclude the authors.

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Journal Reference:

1. Sara J Solnick, David Hemenway. The ‘Twinkie Defense’: the relationship between carbonated non-diet soft drinks and violence perpetration among Boston high school students. Injury Prevention, 2011; DOI: 10.1136/injuryprev-20011-040117

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Perinatal antidepressant stunts brain development ...

ScienceDaily (Oct. 24, 2011) — Rats exposed to an antidepressant just before and after birth showed substantial brain abnormalities and behaviors, in a study funded by the National Institutes of Health.

After receiving citalopram, a serotonin-selective reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), during this critical period, long-distance connections between the two hemispheres of the brain showed stunted growth and degeneration. The animals also became excessively fearful when faced with new situations and failed to play normally with peers — behaviors reminiscent of novelty avoidance and social impairments seen in autism. The abnormalities were more pronounced in male than female rats, just as autism affects 3-4 times more boys than girls.

“Our findings underscore the importance of balanced serotonin levels — not too high or low — for proper brain maturation,” explained Rick Lin, Ph.D., of the University of Mississippi Medical Center, Jackson, a Eureka Award grantee of the NIH’s National Institute of Mental Health.

Lin and colleagues report on their discovery online during the week of Oct. 24, 2011, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Last July, a study reported an association between mothers taking antidepressants and increased autism risk in their children. It found that children of mothers who took SSRI’s during the year prior to giving birth ran twice the normal risk of developing autism — with treatment during the first trimester of pregnancy showing the strongest effect. A study published last month linked the duration of a pregnant mother’s exposure to SSRIs to modest lags in coordination of movement — but within the normal range — in their newborns.

“While one must always be cautious extrapolating from medication effects in rats to medication effects in people, these new results suggest an opportunity to study the mechanisms by which antidepressants influence brain and behavioral development,” said NIMH Director Thomas R. Insel, M.D. “These studies will help to balance the mental health needs of pregnant mothers with possible increased risk to their offspring.”

Earlier studies had hinted that serotonin plays an important role in shaping the still-forming brain in the days just after a rat is born, which corresponds to the end of the third trimester of fetal development in humans. Experimental manipulations of the chemical messenger during this period interfered with formation of sensory-processing regions of the cortex, or outer mantle, and triggered aggressive and anxiety-related behaviors in rodents.

There is also recent evidence in humans that serotonin from the placenta helps shape development of the fetal brain early in pregnancy. Disrupted serotonin has been linked to mood and anxiety disorders. SSRIs, the mainstay medication treatment for these disorders, boost serotonin activity.

Lin and colleagues gave citalopram to male and female rat pups prenatally and postnatally and examined their brains and behavior as they grew up. Male, but not female, SSRI exposed rat pups abnormally froze when they heard an unfamiliar tone and balked at exploring their environment in the presence of unfamiliar objects or scents. These behaviors persisted into adulthood. The male pups especially also shunned normal juvenile play behavior — mimicking traits often seen in children with autism.

A key brain serotonin circuit, the raphe system, known to shape the developing brain during the critical period when the animals were exposed to the drug, showed dramatic reductions in density of neuronal fibers. Evidence of stunted development in the circuit coursed through much of the cortex and other regions important for thinking and emotion, such as the hippocampus.

The researchers also discovered miswiring in the structure responsible for communications between the brain’s left and right hemispheres, called the corpus collosum. Extensions of neurons, called axons, through which such long-distance communications are conducted, were deformed. A protective sheath, called myelin, that normally wraps and boosts axons’ efficiency– like insulation on an electrical wire — was reduced by one-third in the treated animals. This damage was three times worse in male than in female pups and would likely result in abnormal communication between the two hemispheres, say the researchers.

Moreover, the perinatally exposed animals showed evidence of neurons firing out of sync and other electrophysiological abnormalities, suggesting faulty organization of neuronal networks in the cortex.

The research also was supported by the NIH’s National Center for Research Resources, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke and National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by NIH/National Institute of Mental Health.

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Journal Reference:

1. Kimberly L. Simpson, Kristin J. Weaver, Etienne De Villers-Sidani, Jordan Y.-F. Lu, Zhengwei Cai, Yi Pang, Federico Rodriguez-Porcel, Ian A. Paul, Michael Merzenich, Rick C. S. Lin. Perinatal antidepressant exposure alters cortical network function in rodents. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2011; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1109353108

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Water disinfection byproducts linked to adverse he...

ScienceDaily (Oct. 24, 2011) — University of Illinois scientists report the first identification of a cellular mechanism linked to the toxicity of a major class of drinking water disinfection byproducts. This study, published in Environmental Science Technology, suggests a possible connection to adverse health effects, including neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s.

“I’m not implying that drinking disinfected water will give you Alzheimer’s,” said Michael Plewa, lead scientist and professor of genetics in the U of I Department of Crop Sciences. “Certainly, the disinfection of drinking water was one of the most significant public health achievements of the 20th century. But the adverse effects of disinfection byproducts (DBPs) that are unintentionally formed during this process are causing concerns as researchers unveil their toxicity.”

More than 600 DBPs have been discovered. Although researchers know some DBPs are toxic, little biological information is available on the majority of these water contaminants. The Environmental Protection Agency regulates only 11 of these DBPs, he said.

Plewa’s laboratory investigated the biological mechanism, or the cellular target that leads to toxicity, in the second-most prevalent DBP class generated in disinfected water — haloacetic acids (HAAs).

“The EPA has regulated HAAs for nearly 15 years. However, we did not know how they caused toxicity before this study,” he said. “Now that we’ve uncovered the mechanism for HAAs, we can make sense of past data that can lead to new studies relating to adverse pregnancy outcomes, different types of cancer, and neurological dysfunction.”

Plewa believes this will assist the EPA in establishing regulations based on science. Their research will also help the water treatment community develop new methods to prevent the generation of the most toxic DBPs.

“It’s fairly simple,” Plewa said. “To increase the health benefits of disinfected water, we must reduce the most toxic DBPs. If we understand their biological mechanisms, we can come up with more rational ways to disinfect drinking water without generating toxic DBPs.”

In this study, researchers focused on three HAAs — iodoacetic acid, bromoacetic acid and chloroacetic acid. After they rejected their first hypothesis that the HAAs directly damaged DNA, they looked at research in a different area — neuroscience. Plewa’s graduate student, Justin Pals, discovered an amazing connection, Plewa said.

In neurotoxicology, iodoacetic acid reduces the availability of nutrients or oxygen in neurons by inhibiting glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase (GAPDH).

“Researchers are interested in understanding how to prevent damage after a stroke or other neurological damage,” Plewa said. “Iodoacetic acid kills these cells. One of the targets they found was that iodoacetic acid inhibited GAPDH.”

Plewa’s lab conducted quantitative GAPDH enzyme kinetics and discovered that the data were highly correlated with a diversity of adverse health markers.

“All the pieces of the puzzle fell into place in an instant,” Plewa said. “We had discovered our cellular target — GAPDH. Never before had this type of research been done with this level of precision and associated with a large body of adverse biological impacts.”

They discovered that the HAA disinfection byproducts were toxic because the cells cannot make ATP, and this causes oxidative stress.

“Cells treated with HAAs experience DNA damage,” Plewa said. “So they start expressing DNA repair systems. HAAs are not directly damaging DNA, rather they are inhibiting GAPDH, which is involved in increasing the oxidative stress that we are observing.”

A growing body of information has shown that GAPDH is associated with the onset of neurological diseases.

“If you carry a natural mutation for GAPDH and are exposed to high levels of these disinfection byproducts, you could be more susceptible to adverse health effects such as Alzheimer’s,” he said.

More research is needed to study iodinated disinfection byproducts because they are the most reactive in inhibiting GAPDH function and are currently not regulated by the EPA, Plewa said.

“We replaced the standard working model of direct DNA damage with a new working model based on a cellular target molecule,” he said. “This discovery is a fundamental contribution to the field of drinking water science.”

This research was published in Environmental Science Technology. Scientists include Michael Plewa, Justin Pals, Justin Ang and Elizabeth Wagner, all of the University of Illinois. Research was supported by the WaterCAMPWS Center NSF Award CTS-0120978.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Illinois College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences. The original article was written by Jennifer Shike.

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Journal Reference:

1. Justin A. Pals, Justin K. Ang, Elizabeth D. Wagner, Michael J. Plewa. Biological Mechanism for the Toxicity of Haloacetic Acid Drinking Water Disinfection Byproducts. Environmental Science Technology, 2011; 45 (13): 5791 DOI: 10.1021/es2008159

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Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Math disability linked to problem relating quantit...

ScienceDaily (Oct. 24, 2011) — Children who start elementary school with difficulty associating small exact quantities of items with the printed numerals that represent those quantities are more likely to develop a math-related learning disability than are their peers, according to a study supported by the National Institutes of Health.

The children in the study who appeared to have difficulty grasping the fundamental concept of exact numerical quantities — that the printed numeral 3, for example, represents three dots on a page — went on to be diagnosed with math learning disability by fifth grade.

Other early factors correlated with a math learning disability were difficulty recalling answers to single-digit addition problems, distractibility in class, and difficulty understanding that more complex math problems can be broken down into smaller problems that can be solved individually.

Although the math learning disabled children did make limited progress in subsequent grades, by fifth grade they had not caught up to their typically achieving peers in the ability to recall number facts or in their ease of adding sets of dots and numerals together. The authors note that the math disabled students did catch up in other areas, such as the use of counting to solve problems.

The study was not designed to prove cause and effect, so the researchers do not know whether the factors they identified caused the children’s math learning disability or were linked to other, unidentified factors.

“The search for factors underlying difficulty learning mathematics is extremely important,” said Kathy Mann Koepke, Ph.D., of NIH’s Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), which funded the study. “Once we identify such factors, the hope is that we can modify them through appropriate teaching methods to help people who have difficulty learning and using math.”

Dr. Mann Koepke directs the NICHD’s Mathematics and Science Cognition and Learning Development and Disorders program.

“Math skills are important for higher education and for entry into many higher paying technical fields,” she said. “Math skills have many health implications. For example, many American adults lack even the basic math skills necessary to estimate the appropriate number of calories in their diets or to calculate the time intervals at which to take their medications.”

The study was conducted by Mary K. Hoard, Ph.D., Lara Nugent, Drew H. Bailey and David C. Geary, Ph.D., all of the University of Missouri, Columbia.

Their findings appear in the Journal of Educational Psychology.

The researchers’ analysis was based on a battery of tests they gave one to three times each year to 177 students at 12 Columbia, Mo., public schools. The testing process took place from kindergarten through fifth grade. The researchers measured several factors:

• math achievement
• reading ability
• intelligence and general cognitive ability
• paying attention in class
• working memory, the ability to hold one idea or concept in mind while switching between tasks
• an understanding of numbers and their relation to each other
• understanding of the number line
• aptitude for solving simple and complex addition problems

The researchers classified the students into three groups based on their early achievement and the subsequent progress they made in math from kindergarten to fifth grade. One group — referred to as typically achieving students — had average scores in kindergarten and developed their skills at an average rate during their early school years (132 students). Low-achieving students had an average score in kindergarten and made inconsistent and slow progress (29 students). Students with a low initial score and consistently slow progress were described as learning disabled with regard to math (16 students).

After their analysis, the researchers found that differences between groups in kindergarten scores were correlated with the result of one test in particular. For this test, students were asked to look at a series of rectangles, resembling dominoes, on a computer screen. Each domino was each divided into two or three areas; some areas contained one to nine dots, and others a written numeral. Students were asked to quickly circle any dominos in which the number of dots, together with the numeral, matched the target number and to not circle those that did not match.

The researchers found that the difference in scores from this test was linked to the overall gap in math scores between typically achieving and math learning disabled groups.

“Our findings suggest that children who generally struggle with math — the low achievers — may have a poor sense of numbers, but they can narrow the achievement gap in part because most of them can memorize new math facts and, thus, learn some aspects of math as quickly as their typically achieving peers,” said Dr. Geary.

Dr. Geary added that, in contrast to the low achievers, students with a math learning disability not only have a poor concept of numbers, but also have difficulty memorizing math facts.

Clarifying the factors that contribute to a math learning disability may lead to the development of teaching methods that help students overcome difficulties with number concepts and skills, Dr. Mann-Koepke said. It is important to identify potential difficulties early, when chances for successfully overcoming them are greatest.

Other NICHD-funded investigators have also identified basic risk factors for math learning disability. These researchers have shown that math skills are linked to the approximate number system, a person’s intuitive ability to estimate quantities or identify the approximate number in a set. One study of grade school children showed that this ability is impaired in children with a math learning disability. A related study showed that difficulty with estimating such quantities is apparent in children as young as 3 and is correlated with later poor math performance in school. Researchers do not yet know if the ability to distinguish between small, exact quantities is related to the approximate number system.

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Journal Reference:

1. David C. Geary, Mary K. Hoard, Lara Nugent, Drew H. Bailey. Mathematical cognition deficits in children with learning disabilities and persistent low achievement: A five-year prospective study.. Journal of Educational Psychology, 2011; DOI: 10.1037/a0025398

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Exposure to chemical BPA before birth linked to be...

ScienceDaily (Oct. 24, 2011) — Exposure in the womb to bisphenol A (BPA) — a chemical used to make plastic containers and other consumer goods — is associated with behavior and emotional problems in young girls, according to a study led by researchers at Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), Cincinnati Children’s Hospital and Medical Center, and Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia.

BPA is found in many consumer products, including canned food linings, polycarbonate plastics, dental sealants, and some receipts made from thermal paper. Most people living in industrialized nations are exposed to BPA. BPA has been shown to interfere with normal development in animals and has been linked with cardiovascular disease and diabetes in people. In a 2009 study, HSPH researchers showed that drinking from polycarbonate bottles increased the level of urinary BPA.

In this study, published Oct. 24, 2011, in an advance online edition of Pediatrics, lead author Joe Braun, research fellow in environmental health at HSPH, and his colleagues found that gestational BPA exposure was associated with more behavioral problems at age 3, especially in girls.

The researchers collected data from 244 mothers and their 3-year-old children in the Health Outcomes and Measures of the Environment Study, conducted in the Cincinnati area. Mothers provided three urine samples during pregnancy and at birth that were tested for BPA; their children were tested each year from ages 1 to 3. When the children were 3 years old, the mothers completed surveys about their children’s behavior.”None of the children had clinically abnormal behavior, but some children had more behavior problems than others. Thus, we examined the relationship between the mom’s and children’s BPA concentrations and the different behaviors,” Braun said.

BPA was detected in over 85% of the urine samples from the mothers and over 96% of the children’s urine samples. The researchers found that maternal BPA concentrations were similar between the first sample and birth. The children’s BPA levels decreased from ages 1 to 3, but were higher and more variable than that of their mothers.

After adjusting for possible contributing factors, increasing gestational BPA concentrations were associated with more hyperactive, aggressive, anxious, and depressed behavior and poorer emotional control and inhibition in the girls. This relationship was not seen in the boys.

The study confirms two prior studies showing that exposure to BPA in the womb impacts child behavior, but is the first to show that in utero exposures are more important than exposures during childhood, Braun said. “Gestational, but not childhood BPA exposures, may impact neurobehavioral function, and girls appear to be more sensitive to BPA than boys,” he said.

Although more research is needed to fully understand the health effects of BPA exposure, clinicians can advise those concerned to reduce their BPA exposure by avoiding canned and packaged foods, thermal paper sales receipts, and polycarbonate bottles with the number 7 recycling symbol, the authors wrote. Bruce Lanphear of Simon Fraser University was senior author of the study.

The study was funded in part by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Harvard School of Public Health.

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Journal Reference:

1. Joe M. Braun, Amy E. Kalkbrenner, Antonia M. Calafat, Kimberly Yolton, Xiaoyun Ye, Kim N. Dietrich, Bruce P. Lanphear. Impact of Early Life Bisphenol A Exposure on Behavior and Executive Function in Children. Pediatrics, Published online Oct. 24, 2011 DOI: 10.1542/peds.2011-1335

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Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

More time outdoors may reduce kids’ risk for...

ScienceDaily (Oct. 24, 2011) — A new analysis of recent eye health studies shows that more time spent outdoors is related to reduced rates of nearsightedness, also known as myopia, in children and adolescents. Myopia is much more common today in the United States and many other countries than it was in the 1970s. In parts of Asia, more than 80 percent of the population is nearsighted. The analysis suggests that more exposure to natural light and/or time spent looking at distant objects may be key factors.

On Oct. 24, 2011, at the 115^th Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Ophthalmology Dr. Anthony Khawaja of the University of Cambridge, will present a summary analysis of the evidence. The analysis was led by Dr. Justin Sherwin of the University of Cambridge.

The data included in the analysis was drawn from eight carefully selected studies on outdoor time and myopia in children and adolescents, representing 10,400 participants in total. Dr. Sherwin’s team concluded that for each additional hour spent outdoors per week, the chance of myopia dropped by approximately two percent. Nearsighted children spent on average 3.7 fewer hours per week outdoors than those who either had normal vision or were farsighted.

Though the reasons aren’t yet clear, the protective effect appears to result from simply being outdoors rather than performing a specific activity. Two of the eight studies examined whether children who spent more time outdoors were also those who spent less time performing near work, such as playing computer games or studying, but no such relationship was found in either study. The amount of time spent on near work is of interest to researchers as another potential cause for the recent uptick in nearsightedness.

“Increasing children’s outdoor time could be a simple and cost-effective measure with important benefits for their vision and general health” said Dr. Khawaja. “If we want to make clear recommendations, however, we’ll need more precise data. Future, prospective studies will help us understand which factors, such as increased use of distance vision, reduced use of near vision, natural ultra violet light exposure or physical activity, are most important.”

Another question, Dr. Khawaja considered is whether boosting outdoor time might stop nearsightedness from getting worse. He cited a recent Chinese study, not included in Dr. Sherwin’s analysis, of 80 nearsighted children between the ages of 7 and 11. Forty of them were assigned to spend less than 30 hours on near work and more than 14 hours on outdoor time per week. At the end of the two-year study, children in the intervention group were less nearsighted on average than the 40 control group children who did not follow the special schedule.

The 115^th Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Ophthalmology is in session October 23 through 25 at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Fla. It is the world’s largest, most comprehensive ophthalmic education conference. Approximately 25,000 attendees and more than 500 companies gather each year to showcase the latest in ophthalmic technology, products and services. To learn more about the place Where All of Ophthalmology Meets, visit www.aao.org/annual_meeting.

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