Featured

Less educated Americans leaving religion behind

While religious service attendance has decreased for all white Americans since the early 1970s, the rate of decline has been more than twice as high for those without college degrees compared to those who graduated from college, according to new research to be presented at the 106th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association. Read more »

World

Girl power surges in India

By putting 18 million cracks in the proverbial glass ceiling, Hillary Clinton changed the way Americans think about women in politics, and new Northwestern University research suggests that an affirmative action law in India is doing the same for Indian women.

The research, to be published Jan. 12 in the journal Science, focused on the long-term outcomes of a law that reserved leadership positions for women in randomly selected village councils in India.

The law has led to a direct role model effect and is changing the way the girls as well as their parents think about female roles of leadership and has improved their attitudes toward higher career aspirations and education goals for women, said Lori Beaman, an assistant professor of economics at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern.

Results of the study show that affirmative action laws can help create positive role models by opening opportunities that were previously unavailable to a group.

“India is definitely a place where women are constrained in their opportunities,” said Beaman, who is also a faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern and one of the authors of the study. “This law gave Indian women, at the village level, a chance to demonstrate that they are capable leaders.”

Beaman’s research team collected data in West Bengal between 2006 and 2007 on 8,453 male and female teenagers and their parents in 495 villages. The law was implemented in that region starting in 1998 and from that time a village council spot could have been reserved for a female leader once, twice or never.

Here’s a glimpse at how the gender gap narrowed in villages with two terms of female leadership versus the villages that never had a female leader:

• Gender gap in aspirations for their children’s career and education closed by 25 percent in parents
• Gender gap in career and education aspirations closed by 32 percent in adolescents

The decline in the gender gap is entirely driven by an increase in girls’ aspirations, not by a decrease in boys,’ Beaman said.

In a change of behavior, adolescent Indian girls were more likely to be attending school and spent less time on household chores in the villages that reserved political positions for women.

“There weren’t any concurrent changes in education infrastructure or career options for young women during this time,” Beaman said. “The changes in behavior among adolescents can be contributed to the role model effect of the women leaders.”

The randomized process in which the government implemented the policy allowed the researchers to cleanly compare survey results of parents and teens in villages with a female leader for one term and two terms versus parents and teens in villages that had never had a female leader.

The positive effect of the exposure to capable female leaders seemed to mitigate against the perception that the female leaders’ achievements were not due to merit, Beaman said.

The results of this study support the idea that quotas and affirmative action in response to the underrepresentation of women in politics and perhaps in other areas, such as science and the corporate boardroom, is a positive action that creates influential role models and pays off in the long run, Beaman said.

Contact: Erin White
ewhite@northwestern.edu
847-491-4888
Northwestern University

Health

The onset of cognitive decline begins at 45

Increased life expectancy implies fundamental changes in the composition of populations, with a significant rise in the number of elderly people. These changes are likely to have a massive influence on the life of individuals and on society in general. Abundant evidence has clearly established an inverse association between age and cognitive performance, but the age at which cognitive decline begins is much debated. Recent studies concluded that there was little evidence of cognitive decline before the age of 60.

However, clinical studies demonstrate a correlation between the presence of amyloid plaques in the brain and the severity of cognitive decline. It would seem that these amyloid plaques are found in the brains of young adults.

Few assessments of the effect of age on cognitive decline use data that spans over several years. This was the specific objective of the study led by researchers from Inserm and the University College London.

As part of the Whitehall II cohort study, medical data was extracted for 5,198 men and 2,192 women, aged between 45 and 70 at the beginning of the study, monitored over a 10-year period. The cognitive functions of the participants were evaluated three times over this time. Individual tests were used to assess memory, vocabulary, reasoning and verbal fluency.

The results show that cognitive performance (apart from the vocabulary tests) declines with age and more rapidly so as the individual’s age increases. The decline is significant in each age group.

For example, during the period studied, reasoning scores decreased by 3.6 % for men aged between 45 and 49, and 9.6 % for those aged between 65 and 70. The corresponding figures for women stood at 3.6% and 7.4% respectively.

The authors underline that evidence pointing to cognitive decline before the age of 60 has significant consequences.

“Determining the age at which cognitive decline begins is important since behavioural or pharmacological interventions designed to change cognitive aging trajectories are likely to be more effective if they are applied from the onset of decline.” underlines Archana Singh-Manoux.

“As life expectancy continues to increase, understanding the correlation between cognitive decline and age is one of the challenges of the 21st Century” she adds.

This research is part of the Whitehall II cohort study and focused on more that 7,000 people over a ten-year period.

Sources

Timing of onset of cognitive decline: results from Whitehall II prospective cohort study
Archana Singh-Manoux research director 1 2 3, Mika Kivimaki professor of social epidemiology 2, M Maria Glymour assistant professor 4, Alexis Elbaz research director 5 6, Claudine Berr research director7 8, Klaus P Ebmeier professor of old age psychiatry9, Jane E Ferrie senior research fellow10, AlineDugravot statistician 1
1Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (INSERM), U1018, Centre for Research in Epidemiology and Population Health, Hôpital Paul Brousse, 94807 Villejuif Cedex, France;
2Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, University College London, London, UK;
3Centre de Gérontologie, Hôpital Ste Périne, AP-HP, France;
4Department of Society, Human Development, and Health, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, MA, USA;
5Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (INSERM), U708, F-75013, Paris, France;
6UPMC Univ Paris 06, UMR_S 708, F-75005, Paris;
7Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (INSERM) U1061 Université Montpellier 1, Montpellier,France;
8CMRR Languedoc-Roussillon, CHU Montpellier;
9Oxford University Department of Psychiatry, Warneford Hospital, Oxford, UK;
10University of Bristol, Bristol, UK
BMJ janvier 2012

Contact chercheur
Archana Singh Manoux
Email : Archana.Singh-Manoux@inserm.fr

Contact: Inserm Press Office
presse@inserm.fr
INSERM (Institut national de la santé et de la recherche médicale)

US News

President Obama calls for sustained investment in research

In his State of the Union address, President Barack Obama presented the nation with a new economic blueprint which includes maintaining our commitment to funding research and development that can improve our quality of life. Noting that “innovation also demands basic research,” the President urged Congress not to gut investments in the nation’s research budgets. He also pointed out that students come from all over the world to train at American research institutions. “Don’t let other countries win the race for the future. Support the same kind of research and innovation that led to the computer chip and the internet,” he stated.

Joseph C. LaManna, PhD, President of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) responded, “We enthusiastically support the President’s emphasis on innovation and join him in urging Congress to maintain the federal commitment to research. It is abundantly clear that research-based innovation has dramatically improved the quality of life for Americans and people around the world. Sustainable budgets allow scientists to pursue new ideas and address scientific challenges with increased sophistication. Our best hope for future progress remains a strong commitment to science and technology.”

LaManna also praised the President for acknowledging that public research dollars have helped develop advanced technologies. “Basic research funded by the federal government is at the heart of medical progress, but it is the kind of investment that no individual or private business could afford to undertake. If we do not have public support for the investigation of fundamental scientific principles, this work would not be done,” stated LaManna.

FASEB sincerely appreciates President Obama’s commitment to maintaining the nation’s research enterprise and will soon launch a new campaign to encourage biomedical scientists and engineers to become more involved in advocacy for science.

FASEB is composed of 26 societies with more than 100,000 members, making it the largest coalition of biomedical research associations in the United States. Celebrating 100 Years of Advancing the Life Sciences in 2012, FASEB is rededicating its efforts to advance health and well-being by promoting progress and education in biological and biomedical sciences through service to our member societies and collaborative advocacy.

Contact: Lawrence Green
lgreen@faseb.org
301-634-7335
Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology