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Introduction: The olfactory system is associated with several brain areas that might be involved in neurodegenerative processes and neurodevelopmental disorders. For this reason, investigation of the olfactory function plays an important role in the assessment of individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by an impairment in social communication and by a restricted and repetitive pattern of behaviors. The aim of this study was to examine odor detection threshold, discrimination, and identification in participants with ASD compared to typically developing (TD) controls.Methods: Thirty Italian subjects (15 with ASD, mean age 19 ± 0.5 years, and 15 TD controls, mean age 21.7 ± 0.4 years) were evaluated by means of the Sniffin’ Sticks extended test through three different parameters, odor detection threshold, discrimination, and identification, and their sum the threshold, discrimination, and identification (TDI) score.Results: Our results indicated that the participants with ASD showed an impairment in odor detection threshold and TDI score compared to TD controls. No differences were found in odor identification and discrimination. Participants with ASD were significantly poorer in correctly identifying the following odors: leather, apple, rose, cinnamon, garlic, cloves, and anis. However, they were significantly better than TD controls in correctly identifying the odor of the following fruits: orange, banana, and lemon.Conclusion and Implications: Our data provide a comprehensive evaluation of the three olfactory components in an Italian population and confirm an impaired odor detection threshold and TDI score in subjects with ASD compared to TD controls. In conclusion, these results suggest that the Sniffin’ Sticks extended test might be a valid tool in early detection and differential diagnosis of neurodevelopmental disorders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated social visual attention in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and with typical development (TD) in the light of Brockmann and Geisel's model of visual attention. The probability distribution of gaze movements and clustering of gaze points, registered with eye-tracking technology, was studied during a free visual exploration of a gaze stimulus. A data-driven analysis of the distribution of eye movements was chosen to overcome any possible methodological problems related to the subjective expectations of the experimenters about the informative contents of the image in addition to a computational model to simulate group differences. Analysis of the eye-tracking data indicated that the scanpaths of children with TD and ASD were characterized by eye movements geometrically equivalent to Lévy flights. Children with ASD showed a higher frequency of long saccadic amplitudes compared with controls. A clustering analysis revealed a greater dispersion of eye movements for these children. Modeling of the results indicated higher values of the model parameter modulating the dispersion of eye movements for children with ASD. Together, the experimental results and the model point to a greater dispersion of gaze points in ASD [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using eye-tracking methodology, we compared spontaneous gaze following in young children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (mean age 5.8 years) to that of typically developing children (mean age 5.7 years). Participants saw videos in which the position of a hidden object was either perceptually visible or was only represented in another person's mind. The findings indicate that children with Autism Spectrum Disorder were significantly less accurate in gaze following and observed the attended object for less time than typically developing children only in the Representational Condition. These results show that children with Autism Spectrum Disorder are responsive to gaze as a perceptual cue although they ignore its representational meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding sarcasm is a complex ability, which includes several processes. Previous studies demonstrated the possible roles of linguistic and meta-representative factors in understanding sarcasm in school children, while the influence of specific contextual variables still needs to be investigated. Here, we present two studies investigating the possible role of contextual, linguistics, and meta-representative factors in understanding sarcasm in school children. In Study 1, we investigated sarcasm comprehension in 8–9-year-old school children in three different contexts, in which both familiarity and authority were manipulated. We found that understanding sarcasm was facilitated when the conversational partner was characterized by a high level of authority and familiarity (the mother) rather than when the conversational partner was an adult with a lower level of both authority and familiarity (the cashier of a food store). In Study 2, we replicated and extended Study 1 by investigating the possible influence of the same contextual factors but in a more sizeable sample and at different ages: first, third, and fifth grades of primary school. We found that understanding sarcasm improved significantly with age. The results of both studies indicated that understanding sarcasm is influenced by contextual factors. Children at any age better understood sarcasm produced by a speaker with a high level of both familiarity and authority. This ability improved with age. These results expand our understanding of how children infer a speaker's intentions in sarcasm. This might be particularly of interest to develop possible interventions for children on the Autism Spectrum, who are known to misunderstand sarcasm at different levels of complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: We investigated the beneficial effects of drinking supplementary water during the school day on the cognitive performance and transitory subjective states, such as fatigue or vigor, in 168 children aged between 9 and 11years who were living in a hot climate (South Italy, Sardinia). The classes were randomly divided into an intervention group, which received water supplementation, and a control group. Dehydration was determined by urine sampling and was defined as urine osmolality greater than 800mOsm/kg H2O (Katz, Massry, Agomn, & Toor, 1965). The change in the scores from the morning to the afternoon of hydration levels, cognitive performance and transitory subjective states were correlated. In line with a previous observational study that evaluated the hydration status of school children living in a country with a hot climate (Bar-David, Urkin, & Kozminsky, 2005), our results showed that a remarkable proportion of children were in a state of mild, voluntary dehydration at the beginning of the school day (84%). We found a significant negative correlation between dehydration and the auditory number span, which indicates a beneficial effect of drinking supplementary water at school on short-term memory. Moreover, there was a positive correlation between dehydration and performance in the verbal analogy task. The results are discussed in the light of the complexity of the neurobiological mechanisms involved in the relationship between hydration status and cognition. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Owing to their developing cognitive abilities and their limited knowledge about the biological basis of illness, children often have less expertise at disease avoidance than adults. However, affective reactions to contaminants through the acquisition of disgust and the social and cultural transmissions of knowledge about contamination and contagion provide impetus for children to learn effective disease-avoidant behaviours early in their development. In this article, we review the ontogenetic development of knowledge about contamination and contagion with particular attention to the role of socialization and culture. Together with their emerging cognitive abilities and affective reactions to contaminants, informal and formal cultural learning shape children's knowledge about disease. Through this process, the perceptual cues of contamination are linked to threats of disease outcomes and can act as determinants of disease-avoidant behaviours. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The research reports on a study investigating the cognitive benefits of bilingualism in children who speak the minority languages of Sardinian and Scottish Gaelic, in addition to their respective ‘national’ languages of Italian and English. One hundred and twenty-one children, both bilingual and monolingual, were administered a series of standardised cognitive ability tests targeted at the four areas that have been previously shown to be advantageous to bilingual children in the literature, namely, cognitive control, problem-solving ability, metalinguistic awareness and working memory. The bilingual children significantly outperformed the monolingual children in two of the four sub-tests, and the Scottish children significantly outperformed the Sardinian children in one of the sub-tests. The differences found were largely due to the superior performance of the Scottish bilingual children who receive a formal bilingual education, in contrast to the Sardinian bilingual children who mostly only speak the minority language at home. The implications of the results are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The synthesis and anticancer activity of 2-arylamino-6-trifluoromethyl-3-(hydrazonocarbonyl)pyridines is described. The new trifluoromethylpyridine derivatives were evaluated for their anticancer activity toward human cancer cell lines by the National Cancer Institute (NCI). Most of them had excellent growth inhibition activity, having GI50 values in the low micromolar to nanomolar concentration range. The most potent 2,6-dichlorobenzaldehydehydrazone 29 inhibited the growth of all tested cancer cell lines with nanomolar potency, and did not show animal toxicity. Hydrazone 29 has been selected by the Biological Evaluation Committee of NCI for testing in vivo Hollow Fiber Assay. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

More recently, several studies have emphasized the value of the quality of father-infant early interactions to comprehend how fathers' interactions may contribute to a child's cognitive and affective development. However, most observational tools are created for assessing mother-infant interactions, and there is little empirical research that has analyzed the psychometric properties of these tools in fathers. In addition, we examined the association between father-infant feeding interaction and father-infant play interaction, as well as the effect of the infant's gender on father-infant feeding and play interactions. [Extracted from the article]

Objective: Little is known about the effectiveness of pharmacological interventions on autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This is a systematic review of the randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of oxytocin interventions in autism, made from January 1990 to September 2013. Method: A search of computerized databases was supplemented by manual search in the bibliographies of key publications. The methodological quality of the studies included in the review was evaluated independently by two researchers, according to a set of formal criteria. Discrepancies in scoring were resolved through discussion. Results: The review yielded seven RCTs, including 101 subjects with ASD (males=95) and 8 males with Fragile X syndrome. The main categories of target symptoms tested in the studies were repetitive behaviors, eye gaze, and emotion recognition. The studies had a medium to high risk of bias. Most studies had small samples (median=15). All the studies but one reported statistically significant between-group differences on at least one outcome variable. Most findings were characterized by medium effect size. Only one study had evidence that the improvement in emotion recognition was maintained after 6 weeks of treatment with intranasal oxytocin. Overall, oxytocin was well tolerated and side effects, when present, were generally rated as mild; however, restlessness, increased irritability, and increased energy occurred more often under oxytocin. Conclusions: RCTs of oxytocin interventions in autism yielded potentially promising findings in measures of emotion recognition and eye gaze, which are impaired early in the course of the ASD condition and might disrupt social skills learning in developing children. There is a need for larger, more methodologically rigorous RCTs in this area. Future studies should be better powered to estimate outcomes with medium to low effect size, and should try to enroll female participants, who were rarely considered in previous studies. Risk of bias should be minimized. Human long-term administration studies are necessary before clinical recommendations can be made. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The synthesis and antifungal activity of 2-acylhydrazino-5-arylpyrroles 21–62 are described. Pyrrole derivatives 21–62 were evaluated for their antifungal activity towards Candida albicans ATCC 10231 and three Candida non-albicans isolated from clinical specimens. Most of them showed very good antifungal activities against Candidae, having MIC values in the 0.39–3.12μg/mL range and enhanced inhibition potency as compared to that of fluconazole. In addition, some of the most active compounds were tested for cytotoxic activities against breast (MCF-7), lung (H-460), and central nervous system (SF-268) human cancer cell lines with the NCI anticancer drug screen. The activity of pyrroles described in this paper, along with the low toxicity, shows promise for the future development of non-toxic new antimycotic agents. The relationship between functional group variation and biological activity of the evaluated compounds is also discussed. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder that affects social interaction and communication, with restricted interests, activity and behaviors. ASD is highly familial, indicating that genetic background strongly contributes to the development of this condition. However, only a fraction of the total number of genes thought to be associated with the condition have been discovered. Moreover, other factors may play an important role in ASD onset. In fact, it has been shown that parental conditions and in utero and perinatal factors may contribute to ASD etiology. More recently, epigenetic changes, including DNA methylation and micro RNA alterations, have been associated with ASD and proposed as potential biomarkers. This review aims to provide a summary of the literature regarding ASD candidate genes, mainly focusing on synapse formation and functionality and relevant epigenetic and environmental aspects acting in concert to determine ASD onset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]