Lyme disease is the most common vector-borne disease. Most cases caused by the bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi transmitted through the bites of infected black-legged or deer ticks. Children between the ages of 5 and 9 years account for a large proportion of the approximately 476,000 Lyme disease cases diagnosed and treated. Common symptoms of Lyme disease include: fever; headache; fatigue; and a distinct skin rash called erythema migrans. Without treatment, the infection can spread to joints, the heart and the nervous system. Antibiotic treatment resulting in full recovery is successful in most Lyme cases. For some, however, symptoms of pain, fatigue, or difficulty thinking persist or return after antibiotic treatment. Symptoms that substantially reduce levels of activity and impact quality of life for more than six months after treatment are classified as post-treatment Lyme disease (PTLD) syndrome. The research studied the long-term outcomes of children with Lyme disease through a cross-sectional evaluation using validated surveys. The study collected survey responses from the parents of 102 children ages 5 to 18 years who had been diagnosed with Lyme disease between six months and 10 years before enrollment. Adolescents ages 10 to 18 years old were also invited to complete adolescent-specific questionnaires. According to these parent survey responses, 75% of children fully recovered within six months of completing treatment: 31% of all children recovered within one month; 30% recovered in one-to-three months; and 14% recovered in four-to-six months. Approximately 22% of children in the study experienced at least one symptom that persisted six or more months after completing treatment; of those, 9% had symptoms classified as PTLD syndrome. Six percent of the children were not fully recovered at the time of the survey, with 1% experiencing symptoms significant enough to impair daily functioning. This study supports previous data showing an excellent overall prognosis for children with Lyme disease, which should help alleviate understandable parental stress associated with lingering non-specific symptoms among infected children. The researchers suggest this new data could help reduce the potential for families seeking dangerous alternative therapies for children who experience prolonged recovery times.

Prenatal maternal stress life events are associated with adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes in offspring. Biological mechanisms underlying these associations are largely unknown, but a chemical reaction in the body in which a small molecule known as a methyl group gets added to DNA, called DNA methylation, likely plays a role, according to researchers. These findings could provide new insights into how the fetal environment potentially influences not only neurodevelopment, but metabolism and immunologic functions as well. More than 5,500 people took part in the study .The study is the first to look at such a large sample size and examine. The research examines five separate categories of stress that expectant moms face during pregnancy. They are financial stress, conflict with a partner, conflict with a family member or friend, abuse (including physical, emotional and mental) and death of a friend or relative, plus a cumulative score that combines all the categories. Researcher found that when mom experienced a cumulative amount of stress during pregnancy, there was, in fact, an association with DNA methylation in umbilical cord blood, which is a kind of epigenetic modification in the baby that's developing in the womb. An epigenetic modification is something that doesn't change the sequence of the DNA, however, the DNA is modified which is something that's dynamic and can change in response to environmental exposures & found five specific locations of DNA methylation with three different maternal stressors during pregnancy. These were occurring in genes that have been shown to be involved in neurodevelopment. The next steps are to do some functional analyses to see how these genes really work and how DNA methylation affects their expression. Epigenetic modifications are a very dynamic process, there are a lot of changes that can happen in response to environmental factors. It's fascinating as a biologist to begin to uncover some of the biological clues to how neurodevelopment is affected during fetal development.