It's been a long time

Wow, I didn't realize it's been 3 months since I've posted anything here. Really sorry about it.

Here's an interesting article from NewScientist.com:

Stressed parents equals sick kids

STRESSED parents aren't just damaging their own health - they may also be making their children more vulnerable to illness.

Stress is well known to affect a person's own physical health, but the effect on their children's health was unclear. To investigate, Mary Caserta and her colleagues at the University of Rochester in New York asked the parents of 169 children aged between 5 and 10 to monitor their child's health over three years, recording symptoms of illnesses and taking their temperatures.

Every six months, the parents took a test designed to assess their own psychiatric health, noting markers of stress such as anxiety or depression.

Caserta's team found that the total number of illnesses, both with and without fever, was significantly higher in the children of parents who reported high levels of emotional stress. The team also measured the levels of immune cells in the children, and found those with highly stressed parents were much more likely to have heightened immune activity - a sign that they were working hard to fend off infection (Brain, Behavior and Immunity, DOI: 10.1016/j.bbi.2008.01.007)

David Jessop at the University of Bristol in the UK calls the results fascinating, and thinks that future studies should aim discover which stress factors have the biggest impact on children's immunity.

[Acknowledgement: Newscientist.com]

This is quite interesting isn't it? But I thinks its quite ironic, in a sense that, sometimes, it's the children that gives the parents stress because maybe they are naughty, they don't do their homework etc..plus the stress that parents get from work..but the children in turn become sick. Another thing is that, probably when the parents are around their children, the children's mirror neurons are at work, so they "feel" what their parents are feeling. And as stress lowers our immune system, it may have caused them to fall ill more easily.

For more information on the mirror neurons, click here to read the article i posted.