WEDNESDAY, April 22 (HealthDay News) -- When teens go on a binge drinking episode, they may be doing serious damage to the sensitive "white matter" in their brain, a new MRI-based study suggests.

White matter is involved in relaying information between brain cells, the researchers said. This means that damage caused to the developing brain by bouts of heavy drinking could affect thinking and memory, even lowering school performance.

Although white matter impairment has been seen in the brains of adult alcoholics, "we were somewhat surprised that these adolescents who had histories of binge drinking showed significantly poorer quality of their white matter," said lead researcher Susan F. Tapert, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego, and director of Substance Abuse/Mental Illness at the VA San Diego Healthcare System.

The cause of the damage is not fully understood, Tapert said. "It could be that episodes of binge drinking during the teenage years, when their brain is still developing, could have adversely influenced the brain's white matter development," she said.

Heavy drinking among adolescents remains a major problem, Tapert said. About 55 percent of high school seniors report having been drunk, and 25 percent say they have had five or more drinks on at least one day over the past two weeks, she said. That means that "a quarter of our high school seniors could be at risk for these kind of problems," the researcher believes.

The report was published in the April 22 online edition of Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research.

For the study, Tapert's team used a type of MRI imaging called diffusion tensor imaging to look at the brains of 28 teenagers. Among these individuals, 14 had a history of binge drinking, which is defined as having consumed four to five drinks in a day. Although some of the teens had a history of binge drinking, they did not meet the criteria for alcohol abuse or alcoholism, the researchers noted.

According to the MRI scans, teens with a history of binge drinking showed damage to their brain's white matter -- specifically, a lower "coherence" of white matter fibers, which suggests poorer white matter health, Tapert said.

White matter is a main part of the central nervous system and is necessary for passing messages between different areas of gray matter within the nervous system.

Tapert noted that if this damaged white matter was just an image on a scan, it wouldn't be a problem. "But we have seen in other studies reductions in thinking and memory ability in adolescents who had histories of heavy drinking," she said.

In those studies, teens with a history of heavy drinking retrieved about 10 percent less information compared with teens who were not binge drinkers, Tapert said. "We have also seen that if you start drinking heavily in adolescence, you are more likely to go downhill on other measures of thinking and information processing," she said.

Although this study is only a snapshot of a small number of teens, Tapert takes the results seriously. "I feel compelled to make sure my son is not getting involved with drinking as he moves into the adolescent years," she said.

Dr. John R. Knight, an associate professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and director of the Center for Adolescent Substance Abuse Research, Children's Hospital Boston, agreed.

"This is further evidence of the deleterious effects of heavy drinking on the developing adolescent brain," Knight said. "There is a growing body of scientific evidence on alcohol-related neurotoxicity, as well as evidence that brain development continues well into the third decade of life," he said.

The findings also have important policy implications, Knight said.

"We strongly recommend not lowering the legal drinking age, as some well-intentioned -- but very misguided -- college presidents have recently advocated. We do not strive to deprive teens and young adults, only to protect their futures," he said.

More information

For more on alcohol abuse, visit the U.S. National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.

MONDAY, April 20 (HealthDay News) -- Newborns who were not breathing at birth and had to be resuscitated have an increased risk of having a low IQ, even if they showed no signs of mental problems in early infancy, British researchers report.

It has been thought that when the cause of the mental retardation and cerebral palsy is a period of lack of oxygen, newborns will show signs of brain damage immediately following birth called encephalopathy. The signs of encephalopathy can be seizures, abnormalities of muscle tone, abnormal movements and/or an abnormal mental state. It has also been assumed that newborns who require resuscitation at birth but are free of encephalopathy will have normal growth and development.

"It was felt that if infants were neurologically normal after resuscitation, then they were going to do OK later," said Dr. Maureen Hack, from Rainbow Babies and Children's Hospital at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, and author of an accompanying journal editorial.

"These researchers found that infants who were asymptomatic had lower IQs than children who needed no resuscitation," Hack said. "Since there are a lot of children who need resuscitation but have no symptoms, there are going to be a lot of children who have lower IQs at school age," she said.

However, Hack does not think the findings of the study are convincing. For example, the differences in IQs between the children who needed resuscitation at birth were not significantly different from those who did not need to be resuscitated, she said.

Despite this, the results seem to make sense, Hack said. One problem is how the effects of low oxygen were evaluated in the study, she noted.

"The neurologic exam after birth is a subjective exam," Hack said. "To say a child is normal or abnormal based on a clinical exam is difficult. To say that if they have symptoms, they may have problems, and if they don't have symptoms, they are going to be fine is a bit naive. The results make sense, but the results need to be replicated."

The report is published in the April 21 online edition of The Lancet.

For the study, a research team led by Dr. David Odd, from the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at Southmead Hospital in Bristol collected data on children who participated in the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children.

The researchers looked at children who were resuscitated at birth but had no symptoms of encephalopathy, which is any disease of the brain that changes brain function or structure. Among these children, 815 had no further neonatal care, and 58 had care for encephalopathy. They compared these children with 10,609 children who did not need to be resuscitated at birth, had no symptoms of encephalopathy, and received no neonatal care.

To assess brain function, Odd's group measured IQ when the children were an average of 8.6 years old. A score of less than 80 was considered a low IQ.

The researchers found that children who had to be resuscitated, but did not have symptoms of encephalopathy, had a 65 percent increased risk of having a low IQ. Children who had to be resuscitated and had symptoms of encephalopathy had more than a sixfold risk of having a low IQ.

Since there are many more children who did not have symptoms of encephalopathy after being resuscitated, they have a greater effect on society, Odd's team noted.

"Infants who needed resuscitation, even if they did not develop encephalopathy in the neonatal period, had a substantially increased risk of a low full-scale IQ score...The data suggest that mild perinatal physiological compromise might be sufficient to cause subtle neuronal or synaptic damage, and thereby affect cognition in childhood and potentially in adulthood," the authors concluded.

Hack noted that improved prenatal care has reduced the number of infants who need to be resuscitated. "Modern care does prevent as much as possible," she said.

Dr. John Fiascone, medical director of the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston, doesn't find the study convincing. "The concept of a continuum of brain damage is intuitively appealing. However, this study is not proof of that concept," he said.

"The biggest weakness with the paper is that about 50 percent of infants eligible for evaluation were, in fact, not evaluated," Fiascone said. "The group differences in IQ are not convincing. For example, the reference group has an average full scale IQ of 105 while the asymptomatic group has 104. Because of the large number of babies, this difference may be statistically significant, but what is the meaning for an individual of a difference of one point in their IQ? Probably nothing at all," he said.

The authors indicated that the rate of a low IQ is 7 percent in the reference group and 10 percent in the asymptomatic group, Fiascone noted. "A 3 percent difference is unimpressive in the setting where 50 percent of eligible infants were not tested," he said.

More information

For more about encephalopathy, visit the U.S. National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.

MONDAY, April 20 (HealthDay News) -- Good nutrition may be more an issue of supply than demand in the poorest parts of the lower Mississippi Delta.

A new study found that children in these rural areas are open to eating more fruits and vegetables, but other research shows these products are not readily available and could become even less so if the economy continues to lag.

The findings are from two studies that were to be presented Sunday at the Experimental Biology conference in New Orleans as part of a program sponsored by the American Society for Nutrition.

In a study of an Arkansas summer camp program, children were offered fruits and vegetables as their daily snack, rather than the junk food they'd been offered in the past. More than half of the children, who were aged 5 to 12, tried most of the 16 different fruits and vegetables presented to them during the five-week program -- even though many of the children had never before had some of the food and both the children and their parents had said before the camp started that the kids would not eat the seemingly strange but healthy offerings.

However, research nutritionist Beverly McCabe-Sellers of the U.S. Department of Agriculture/Agricultural Research Service in Little Rock, Ark., noted in a news release from the conference sponsors that these foods are often in short supply in the poor, rural communities in which the children live. Convenience stores and gas stations tend to be the main food shopping locations rather than grocery stores, she said, and often fast-food restaurants where someone might purchase a salad are also hard to find.

McCabe-Sellers said that her research and experience has shown that obtaining reasonably priced, high-quality fresh produce is the major challenge in out-of-the-way areas. The problem has only grown worse, she noted, with the economic downturn and increases in food and fuel costs, which also have affected fruit and vegetable shipments used for school lunch programs.

The Lower Delta region -- including parts of Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi -- has among the highest obesity rates in the country for children and adults, according to the news release.

More information

The Baylor College of Medicine has more about children and nutrition  .

THURSDAY, April 16 (HealthDay News) -- When children write about their values, these self-affirmation exercises can help boost grades, new research suggests.

However, the positive effect seems to only translate into higher marks for black students, according to the study, which appears in the April 17 issue of Science.

"This psychological intervention can have a long-term positive impact on children's academic performance and help to close the racial achievement gap," said study author Geoffrey Cohen, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

But, added Cohen, "This is not a silver bullet. The improvements came from the psychological interventions paired with good resources and good teachers."

For this study, Cohen and his colleagues had three groups of seventh-graders: European-American children, high-performing black children and low-performing black children. Each group was split into two, with half receiving the intervention and the other half serving as a control. Each group had between 65 and 75 children.

The intervention was a series of structured writing assignments where the kids were asked to select a value and then write about that value. Each writing assignment took about 15 minutes to complete, and was repeated between three and five times throughout a year.

"What we found is that African-Americans who received the intervention did better academically over the two-year study. Grades improved almost a half a grade point for low-performing African-Americans. The intervention consistently closed the racial achievement gap," said Cohen.

For blacks, the rate of remediation or grade repetition dropped from 18 percent to 5 percent for those children who received the intervention.

One of the ways this type of intervention helps children, according to Cohen, is by reducing stress. "If I have a moment to think about my family, to reflect on what matters to me during an important performance situation -- such as before a test -- the stressful performance situation becomes less stressful, and I think of myself as capable and good," he said.

This type of change in thinking might be especially important for minority students, he said, because they may feel that they'll be judged in a stereotypical way.

"African-Americans might have more stress in school, because they have the extra burden of a stereotype threat. They may worry that they'll be seen by teachers or peers through the negative lens of stereotyping," said Cohen.

And, more good news from this study was that the benefits of the intervention persisted for at least two years. Cohen said that's likely because the intervention breaks the negative downward spiral that's often seen in middle school.

"Because it's a recursive cycle, early outcomes make a huge difference. Recursive cycles are sensitive to initial outcomes, and early experiences have a lasting impact," he said.

Dr. Debra Hollander, chief of psychiatry at Providence Hospital in Southfield, Mich., wasn't surprised that the intervention helped some children improve their grades. "The kids were being asked to be more reflective, to think about what's important to them and what they value. This can help reset where they want to be, and it can empower them," she said.

But, Hollander said she was surprised that the positive effects were only seen in black children, and added that it's something that should be explored further in research.

What's important for parents and educators to take away from this study, she said, is that, "how we interact with one another, and the subtle messages we send, can have a huge impact on children."

For example, Hollander said, when children are struggling in school and their parents just sign them up for tutoring, the kids may interpret that to mean that they can't do well on their own. A better way, she suggested, is to ask your children what they want to accomplish and how you can help them get there.

More information

The Nemours Foundation offers advice on building kids' self-esteem  .