Authoritarian Behavior Leads to Insecure People, Spanish Study Finds

Researchers from the University of Valencia (UV) have identified the effects of the way parents bring up their children on social structure in Spain. Their conclusions show that punishment, deprivation and strict rules impact on a family's self esteem.

"The objective was to analyze which style of parental socialization is ideal in Spain by measuring the psychosocial adjustment of children," says Fernando García, co-author of the study and a researcher at the UV.
The study, which has been published in the latest issue of the journal Infancia y Aprendizaje, was produced on the basis of a nationwide surrey carried out on 948 children and teenagers aged between 10 and 14 (52% of whom were girls), describing the socialization practices of their parents. On the basis of these answers, the families were classified into one of four classic parental socialization types -- authoritative, authoritarian, indulgent and neglectful.

The results show that the ideal family style in Spain is the indulgent one. "The scores for children from indulgent families were the same, or even better, than those from authoritative families," the researcher points out.

According to the expert, imposed discipline systems, such as punishments, deprivation and strict rules, which try to force children do things, have a knock-on effect on family selfesteem and are associated with incomplete emotional development and a certain level of resentment towards the family, even if they are applied by parents who have very cordial relationships with their children, "at least in cultures such as in Spain, where little value is placed on hierarchical relationships."

The researchers highlight the need for parents to work hard "on aspects that are often not sufficiently addressed," such as communication, polite relationships, showing an interest in children's problems and giving reasoned explanations about the consequences of their actions. "These are activities that, at the end of the day, call for involvement, dedication and care," says García, with the objective being for all people to become mature, responsible and able to do things for themselves.

Family classification is obtained by combining behaviors that involve different levels of demands being made and responsibility given. Firstly, the authoritative model describes families that "provide clear rules, giving reasons for them to their children in an affectionate and flexible way, while also expecting these rules to be followed." The authoritarian model is similar to the authoritative one, in that it is demanding or controlling, but it differs in that the parents are less affectionate.

On the other hand there are parents who fall within the neglectful and indulgent models, which are characterized by applying low levels of repression. However, those in the first group are "not very
affectionate" while those in the second group are "very affectionate."

Airbags Reduce Risk of Kidney Injury in Car Crashes

Occupants in motor vehicles with airbags are much less likely to suffer kidney or renal damage in a crash than are occupants in vehicles without airbags, according to a new study in the September Journal of the American College of Surgeons.

Little is known about how to prevent or reduce injury to solid organs from motor vehicle collisions. In fact, this study is the first to evaluate the protective effect of airbags on a specific organ system -- in this case, the kidney and other renal, or upper urinary tract, organs.

The researchers found that compared with the non-airbag group of crash patients, frontimpact airbags were associated with a 45.3 percent reduction in renal injuries and sideimpact airbags were associated with a 52.8 percent reduction in renal injuries. The importance of these finding is underscored by the fact that motor vehicle crashes are the most common source of blunt force trauma to the kidney, accounting for from 48 percent to 66 percent of all such injuries. "The sharp reduction in the rate of kidney injury was surprising because airbags are primarily designed to protect the head and spine," said Thomas G. Smith III, MD, assistant professor of urology in the Department of Surgery at The University of Texas Medical School at Houston. "These findings warrant additional investigation into the role airbags could play in protecting the kidney and other organs during a crash."

In the crashes that involved renal injury, 54.7 percent were front-impact and 45.3 percent were side-impact. In the front-impact crashes, 74.9 percent involved a driver-side airbag and 16.6 percent involved a passengerside airbag. For the side impact crashes, 32.2 percent of occupants had a side-impact airbag.

Researchers analyzed 2,864 records in the Crash Injury Research and Engineering (CIREN) database from 1996 to September 2008 and identified 139 kidney injuries in crashes in motor vehicles with and without airbags. The CIREN database was developed by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to provide detailed crash site analysis and specific occupant injury data to aid in the study of prevention, treatment and rehabilitation of motor vehicle crash injuries. In 2008, there were about 6 million police-reported motor vehicle crashes in the U.S. that resulted in 2.3 million injuries and 37,261 deaths.

Risk Gene for Severe Heart Disease Discovered

Research led by Klaus Stark and Christian Hengstenberg of the University of Regensburg identified a common variant of the cardiovascular heat shock protein gene, HSPB7, which was found to increase risk for dilated cardiomyopathy by almost 50%. Their paper appears on October 28 in the open-access journal PLoS Genetics.

Per year, about 6 in 100,000 individuals develop dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM), with a higher prevalence in men.

This disease is characterized by an enlarged, weakened heart, subsequently affecting the pumping capacity and often leading to chronic heart failure.

Those cases of DCM that occur in certain family groups are associated with a number of mutations affecting muscle cells. However, most cases are of unknown cause. To identify risk alleles for non-familial forms of DCM, an international collaboration of scientists analyzed the contribution of common gene variants to the more frequent, sporadic form of dilated cardiomyopathy, by conducting a large-scale genetic association study with more than 5,500 subjects. Different study groups from Germany and France contributed both well-characterized DCM patients and healthy controls. The HSPB7 gene was strongly associated with susceptibility to DCM.

The researchers concluded that, while genetic testing for this variant is not suitable to date, the findings are a first step towards supporting future preventive measures for this severe form of heart muscle disease.

Estrogen Replacement Therapy Speeds Ovarian Cancer Growth

Estrogen therapy used by menopausal women causes a type of ovarian cancer to grow five times faster, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Colorado Cancer Center.

Menopausal estrogen replacement therapy (ERT) also significantly increases the likelihood of the cancer metastasizing to the lymph nodes, according to the study, which will be published in the Nov.

1 issue of Cancer Research. The effect of ERT was shown in mouse models of estrogen receptor positive(ER+) ovarian cancer, which accounts for about 60 percent of all human ovarian cancer cases. Ovarian cancer is one of the deadliest cancers affecting women. This year alone, nearly 22,000 women will be newly diagnosed with ovarian cancer and an estimated 13,850 women will die from the disease, according to the National Cancer Institute.

"We showed that estrogen replacement substantially increases proliferation and risk of distant lymph node metastasis in ER+ tumors," says Monique Spillman, MD, PhD, the study's lead researcher, a gynecologic oncologist at University of Colorado Hospital and assistant professor at of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.

For the first time, Spillman and her team measured ovarian cancer growth in the abdomen of mice using novel techniques for visualizing the cancer.

In mice with ER+ ovarian cancer cells, which were tagged with a firefly-like fluorescent protein that allowed them to be tracked, the introduction of estrogen therapy made the tumors grow five times faster than in mice that did not receive the ERT. The risk of the cancer moving to the lymph nodes increased to 26 percent in these mice compared with 6 percent in mice that did not receive ERT.

The team also found that the estrogen-regulated genes in ovarian cancer reacted differently than ER+ genes found in breast cancer, helping to explain why current anti-estrogen therapies used with breast cancer, such as Tamoxifen, are largely ineffective against ovarian cancer.

Spillman and her team now will begin to screen current antiestrogen therapies against the newly identified ovarian cancer genes to identify the pathways and compounds that are more likely to effectively treat ER+ ovarian cancer.

This study looked at the effect of estrogen replacement therapy in mice that already possessed ER+ ovarian cancer cells. It did not test whether the estrogen replacement actually could cause the development of these cancer cells. The study also dealt only with estrogen replacement, which is linked to higher risks of ovarian cancer, not combined estrogen/progesterone therapy that is used with women who retain their uteruses.

This research is too early to draw implications for use of estrogen replacement therapy in women, Spillman cautions. "We cannot make clinical recommendations based on what is happening in mice," says Spillman, one of just eight gynecological oncologists in Colorado. "Every woman is different and needs to talk to her doctor about the decision to use hormone replacement therapy."