PubMed Health⌕ Search

Biomedical subjects

J N Constantino

Publications and source records attributed to J N Constantino.

5 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1996

Monoamine metabolites in 'leftover' newborn human cerebrospinal fluid--a potential resource for biobehavioral research.

Although variations in monoamine neurotransmission have been implicated in a variety of psychopathologic outcomes in man, little is known about how monoamines influence or are affected by developmental processes early in childhood. In this study, assays for 5-hydroxyindoleacetic acid (5-HIAA), homovanillic acid (HVA), and 3-methoxy-4-hydroxyphenylglycol (MHPG) were obtained from leftover cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) of 119 human newborns. The levels of these monoamine metabolites were in keeping with pre-existing 'normative' data from two small previously published studies. The levels were largely unaffected by variations in the infants' physiologic condition at the time of lumbar puncture, and exhibited evidence for circadian rhythms. Among 32 infants (8 neurologically normal, 24 neurologically compromised) for whom more than one CSF sample was obtained during the first year of life, the correlations between baseline and follow-up measurements for 5-HIAA and HVA were on the order of 0.75. Correlations between twins (four sets) were significantly higher than those between unrelated individuals for 5-HIAA and HVA. At 9-month follow-up, neurologically normal infants in the lower extreme 15% of the distribution for 5-HIAA exhibited a trend toward lower scores for sociability on the Colorado Childhood Temperament Inventory (maternal report) than their counterparts at the upper extreme of the 5-HIAA distribution. Leftover CSF is a readily available resource for measurements of monoamine metabolites (and possibly other CSF constituents) in population-based samples of human newborns.

Brain Damage, Chronic↗
PubMed1996

Intergenerational aspects of the development of aggression: a preliminary report.

Across studies in a variety of environmental settings, secure attachment relationships early in life are associated with a lower rate of abnormally aggressive patterns of behavior later in childhood. The quality of an attachment relationship can be predicted by a recently developed measure of parents' mental representations of their own early childhood relationships, the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI). AAI classifications of single parents of abnormally aggressive preschoolers (n = 10) from two low income day care centers were compared with those of single parents of age-, race-, sex-, and center-matched controls (n = 10). All abnormally aggressive children had parents classified as insecure on the AAI; parents of all but one of the nonaggressive controls were classified as secure (p < .001). The AAI may be a useful intergenerational predictor of antisocial and resilient outcomes among children for whom a single caregiver is the only resource for longstanding attachment relationships. Efforts to enhance the constellation of children's early attachment relationships may serve to prevent antisocial outcome.

Adult↗
PubMed1993

Testosterone and aggression in children.

OBJECTIVE: A link between serum testosterone and aggressive behavior, which has been demonstrated in numerous animal studies and suggested in several studies of adult men, has never been investigated in children before the time of puberty. METHOD: We measured serum testosterone, sex hormone binding globulin (SHBG), dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA), and dehydroepiandrosterone sulfate (DHEAS) in 18 highly aggressive prepubertal boys, ages 4 to 10, hospitalized for violent or unmanageable behavior at a state children's psychiatric facility in New York City (the Bronx). We compared them with a group of age and race matched controls from the same demographic area, screened negative for aggressive behavior problems. All the aggressive subjects met DSM-III-R criteria for conduct disorder and scored higher than the 98th percentile on the aggression subscale of the Child Behavior Checklist (mean T = 80 for the group). RESULTS: There were no significant differences between aggressive and nonaggressive children for T, SHBG, DHEA, DHEAS, or ratios of combinations of these variables. CONCLUSIONS: These findings raise questions about inferences from adult studies that testosterone may play a causal role in the development of human aggression. Testosterone does not appear to be a useful biological marker for aggressivity in early childhood.

Aggression↗