United States: A new study found that asthma may cause memory problems in children. Kids who get asthma at a young age might have even more trouble with their memory. This is the first study to make this connection. Researchers say it’s important to think about asthma as something that could affect how children think and remember things.
“There are signs of evidence that other long-term diseases including asthma but also including diabetes, heart diseases and others may put children at a disadvantage regarding their cognition,” Ghetti noted in a news release. “It is imperative that we find out what might ‘worsen’ or ‘buffer’ risk in the context of community health practice.”
As reported by the HealthDay, to conduct the study, investigators looked at records from 2,027 children with asthma who were enrolled in the third and fourth grades. Thus, it was found that in the United States alone about 4.6 million children are asthmatic.
Child development progresses most significantly in the first years of a child’s life in terms of memory and cognition in particular. ‘In children with asthma that improvement may take longer,’ said lead researcher Nicholas Christopher-Hayes, a doctoral candidate in psychology at UC Davis.
His team discovered that children stricken with asthma got a lower value on tests of episodic memory, the part of memory which deals with experiences and feelings or moods.
Independent Measures Results: In a subset of 492 children followed for two years the investigators demonstrated that early-onset asthma was associated with less gains in memory every year.
The research team said these memory deficits in childhood might have a cumulative effect, meaning that they would continue to experience them in later years.
The authors pointed out that older adult asthmatics have been found to be at a higher risk of developing dementia as well as Alzheimer’s disease.
Asthma, for instance, might set children on a path that would make them vulnerable to become seriously ill with something like dementia in later years,” Christopher Hayes said.
Such memory issues could stem from chronic inflammation linked to asthma or from times that the brain is deprived of oxygen due to asthma, said the researchers.
In lab mice studies, the team also discovered that drugs used for asthma have an impact on the hippocampus at the base of the brain which is the centre of memory.