In this episode of Tiny Show and Tell Us, we talk about how climate change may impact the effectiveness of mental health medications and how heat waves impact mental health more generally. Then we cover how fetal heart rates can change depending on which language they’re hearing while in the womb.
Transcript of this Episode
Deboki Chakravarti: Welcome to Tiny Show and Tell Us, the bonus series where you write in with your favorite science news or factoid and we read your email aloud and then dive deeper. I'm Deboki Chakravarti and I'm here with my co-host, Sam Jones.
Sam Jones: Last time we talked about the FDA banning Red No. 3 and the science behind winter road maintenance. We have a really great bonus episode for you today. But before we get into it, a reminder that we are always looking for you to write to us to be featured in one of these episodes. You can email tinymatters@acs.org or you can fill out the form that's linked in the episode description. All right, let's hop into it. Deboki, do you want to kick things off today?
Deboki Chakravarti: I will get us started. So this is from Listener Milan and they wrote, "Climate change is affecting how medications for mental health are being absorbed and how they affect the body." I thought this was super interesting. So to start, according to Wellcome, rising temperatures are generally not great for people's mental health, which I think is very understandable and at least looking at heat waves, things aren't great. So during heat waves, hospitalizations for psychiatric disorders and emergency psychiatric visits tend to go up. Suicide rates also tend to be higher during heat waves. And we don't know why this is, obviously heat waves are miserable, but this is pretty stark. So going to Milan's original thing, how about medication? And so one of the big issues is that there are a number of medications that can mess with how a person's body regulates temperature or fluid balance, which can then make it really hard to get through heat waves. And so there's this general idea that maybe with climate change and rising temperatures and more frequent heat waves, people who are on these medications might be more vulnerable to other issues as well.
Sam Jones: Oh.
Deboki Chakravarti: Yeah. It's one of those things that I feel like I wouldn't have thought about. I wouldn't be like, "Oh, it's really hot. How's this going to mess with medication?"
Sam Jones: Totally. And I think also I think we, maybe it's just me, but hey, we always have the same internal temperature because of homeostasis and it's like actually, external heat can really impact. And if our internal temperature changes the slightest amount, it makes a huge difference.
Deboki Chakravarti: Yeah, definitely. And so that then affects the way that your medications work, or if your medications are messing with those systems, that's going to mess with your body overall. So some of the examples that Tien found for us, they're SSRIs, like Prozac and Zoloft that can be really, really helpful for people who have anxiety or depression, but they can also affect thermoregulation. And so if you're on them and it's really hot out, sometimes people can end up sweating either too much or too little. And as annoying as sweat is, it is a thing that is actually an important process for your body, especially when you're dealing with heat. And so losing too much fluid or not being able to regulate your temperature through sweat, that can be bad. And then another example that Tien found is that people who take lithium can also have a hot time in hot weather because lithium is a salt.
And so with hot weather and lots of sweating and fluid loss, people can end up with a quick rise in lithium levels and that can lead to a number of symptoms like dizziness, slurred speech, and confusion. And so yeah, these are some of the ways that-
Sam Jones: That's scary.
Deboki Chakravarti: That heat waves and thus kind of taking it further potentially to climate change and rising temperatures overall might impact people. I am curious, I feel like a lot of this comes down to thinking about this in the context of heat waves. I don't know, so there's the part of climate change that is just average temperatures rising, and so I don't know if that is necessarily going to be the thing that is causing these issues, but I think it's that next step of more frequent heat waves and worse heat waves that we've already seen happening every year. That's the thing that I assume is going to be the real challenge for people who are taking these medications.
Sam Jones: More extreme weather events more frequently.
Deboki Chakravarti: Yeah, exactly.
Sam Jones: Oh my gosh, I had no idea. This is definitely something I feel like where definitely talk to your subscriber, your psychiatrist or whomever.
Deboki Chakravarti: Yeah, we're not professionals, we are doctors of the other type.
Sam Jones: Yeah, we're the less useful doctors. So thank you Tien and thank you Milan for writing in.
Deboki Chakravarti: Yeah, we are not medical professionals, but we can link to an article from the CDC that has a table on the specific medications that are affected by heat and how they're affected by heat. So if you are curious if your medication is affected, that can be a helpful resource.
Sam Jones: Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so I have a tiny show and tell us from Listener Zhao, who wrote in and sent a link to a primary research article and then said, "Using fetal biomagnetometry, this study measured changes in fetal heart rate to assess discrimination of two rhythmically different languages, english and Japanese. Researchers showed that babies as early as in fetal stages show physiological signs that they start distinguishing rhythmic patterns underlying different languages. Broadly, this adds to the evidence that the acquisition of multiple languages is generally much easier at a younger age. Think about how kids can speak multiple languages fluently even without explicit instructions. Part of the kid's early advantage might be physiological and not just because kids might have easier lives than busy adults."
Deboki Chakravarti: I don't know. My kid is teething right now and I'm not sure that his life is easier than mine right now.
Sam Jones: That's a good point. Okay, so I thought that this was actually really interesting. And also I was thinking about it a lot, because I'm having a kid this summer and my husband's first language is Spanish and mine is English. Although I am working on my Spanish, but you'll never think I'm a native speaker, that is for sure. And so we want her to be able to speak both. And I think being able to speak more than one language first, it's so cool. Second, it's good for your brain. That's neither here nor there, but this research spoke to me. Okay, so I want to talk about it. We're going to break down this study a bit. So this work was done at the Hoglund Brain Imaging Center at the University of Kansas Medical Center. So 24 expectant mothers participated and they were at an average of 35.5 weeks into pregnancy. The fetus heartbeat was measured using fetal biomagnetometry, also known as fetal magnetocardiography. And this is a non-invasive technique for recording magnetic fields that are generated by the electrical activity of the fetal heart.
Deboki Chakravarti: That's so cool.
Sam Jones: Really cool. I didn't know about that. Okay, so of these 24 participants, 12 of the mothers were read a passage in English, and then they would take an 18 minute pause and then be read another passage in English. The other set of 12 mothers were read a passage in English, then went through a 18 minute pause, and then they were read a passage in Japanese. And what the researchers saw was no change in heart rate for the English to English group. And when I say heart rate, I mean fetal heart rate. So no change in fetal heart rate for the English to English group, but a change in the English-Japanese group where the fetal heart rate actually went up when they got that second passage in Japanese.
And so they concluded in part that rhythm is a prenatally available building block in language acquisition. That's what they call it. And so actually a study like this one had been done before, but with English and Chinese, and it was a similar setup, but the authors in this more recent study said one of the flaws was that different speakers recorded the passages in both English and Chinese. Whereas in the English and Japanese study, the passages were spoken by the same bilingual speaker. So it was kind of hard to distinguish is it because they're picking up a difference in the voice versus the rhythm of the actual language? And of course, there's only so much that you can really say, I think based on just biomagnetometry, even though it's cool. One of the authors says, quote, "Because direct measures of fetal brain function are limited metrics of heart rate and variability serve as proxies to central control. The heart does not, quote "hear". Therefore, we attribute the differences in heart rate to central auditory processing of the language stimuli." End quote.
So essentially they're saying, "This is really hard to measure. We are using this heart rate as a proxy for what the fetus is actually hearing." But again, not perfect. So there are of course still assumptions that are being made here, but ultimately the researchers hope that this could be a new tool for studying developmental language impairments. How helpful could that be? I don't know. I was thinking about it a lot. I think it would vary so much based on language and rhythm. And also how many times is it that a fetus wouldn't be exposed to the same person speaking both languages to them while they're in the womb? I think this was highly, highly controlled.
And I think that's not really how language acquisition often happens. I am just thinking for me, I'm not going to be the one speaking native Spanish to my fetus, it would be my husband. We sound very different. So I don't don't know where that comes into play. And also for studying developmental language impairments, thinking about, I don't know. I think sometimes when you get into that so early, this is a fetus. This is not even a born baby. We don't want to jump to those conclusions, I think.
Deboki Chakravarti: Yeah, for sure.
Sam Jones: We need to just take a step back. As someone who's pregnant and the number of things that you are told that could be wrong, that could go wrong, you will lose your mind if you listen to every single bit of information. And so that was sort of my initial reaction to this. But I do think it's super interesting. There's definitely no harm in talking to your baby.
Deboki Chakravarti: Yeah.
Sam Jones: Bring in those additional languages whenever you want, even when they're in the womb.
Deboki Chakravarti: Yep. I definitely feel the same way in terms of anytime you hear stuff like this before having a baby, it was like, "Oh, that's a really cool thing. I would do that. I'm going to do that when I'm pregnant." That kind of thing. And then you get pregnant and it's like there are so many things where you realize people have done this research that is really cool, but then at least for me, my brain automatically translates that to like, "Oh, I have to do this thing." And then it's like, "No, you don't." Humans have been making babies for so long without thinking or overthinking all of these little details that it'll be fine and it's going to be great.
Sam Jones: I mean, my mom was born in a time where the suggestion if you were pregnant and stressed was to smoke a cigarette and have a little alcohol. Fortunately, my grandmother was not a smoker and was not drinking during pregnancy, at least to my knowledge. But my mom's great, so I don't know. But yeah, I'm like, she grew up playing with toys that were for sure just coated in lead. She's doing fine. So anyways, don't feel like you need to speak to your fetus in multiple languages if you don't.
Deboki Chakravarti: Yeah. This did remind me of something that I had read recently that was actually about snake heartbeats in the egg.
Sam Jones: Whoa.
Deboki Chakravarti: Which is that, I had to quickly look up this paper, and so I'm just reading this off of the abstract. They showed that within a clutch, developing snake embryos use heartbeats emanating from neighboring eggs as a clue for their metabolic level in order to synchronize development and ultimately hatching.
Sam Jones: Whoa.
Deboki Chakravarti: Yeah. Isn't that really cool? There is a lot going on.
Sam Jones: That's so cool.
Deboki Chakravarti: So hearing about the different fetal heart beats, like reminded me of this where it's like, there's so much going on in there that it's just so mysterious to us.
Sam Jones: That's amazing. I love that. I wonder, I'm sure there's a lot of information on this, but I am not pregnant with twins, thankfully.
Deboki Chakravarti: Yeah, yeah.
Sam Jones: But are their heart rates synced up?
Deboki Chakravarti: That's a good question. I'm going to look that up.
Sam Jones: Yeah, let's do an on the job research on this.
Deboki Chakravarti: Twins, heartbeat, fetus. Let's see. So there's one paper from 1992 that I found that was looking at when fetal heart rates accelerate. And they found that in 15 sets of twins, they found in the twins that they were looking at that 36% of these accelerations were found to be simultaneously happening.
Sam Jones: But I wonder if they were synced. Maybe this is something that if someone knows.
Deboki Chakravarti: Yeah, because that's also really interesting. I guess I've never thought about when you're pregnant, and so you go in for the ultrasound and then in between ultrasound periods you usually go in and just get a Doppler reading where they measure the heartbeat. And so if anyone has had twins, I'm really curious if you can let us know what that Doppler reading is like.
Sam Jones: Is it just so chaotic?
Deboki Chakravarti: Yeah. Do you hear two heartbeats? I want to know. I'm so-
Sam Jones: And how do they detect that it's definitely two?
Deboki Chakravarti: Yeah, okay. So now I'm reading a Reddit post from someone when they went in for their ultrasound at seven weeks, their twins, there was a difference in heart rate, but this was seven weeks and one was slightly smaller than the other. So maybe that would cause some difference.
Sam Jones: Wow. So interesting. Maybe it's just different. And I wonder if they're identical versus fraternal, if there's the influence of the placenta. But I guess the placenta hasn't really developed at seven weeks, so I don't know.
Deboki Chakravarti: Oh, we're going to talk about this. I'm working on my placenta script. Because I actually, I also asked one of the researchers, I mean, I guess this is a preview or maybe not. I don't know.
Sam Jones: I think this episode will come out after placenta so this is a post view.
Deboki Chakravarti: But this might not actually make it into the script, so this will be bonus. But I did ask about whether or not twin placentas, like how that works when you have twins, do they each have their own placenta? And as we've talked about in the episode, which you've all heard by now, totally have listened to, have taken notes, everything about placentas, the whole point of the placenta is to both provide nutrients and gases and also carry away waste. It starts developing pretty much right away. And then by the end of the first trimester is set the blueprint for what it's going to be.
And so I asked one of our researchers about how twins handle placentas. Do they each have their own? Do they have multiples? And the answer is that it depends. They can end up with their own placenta. So obviously fraternal twins will usually end up with their own placenta. They're in their own amniotic sac, so they have their own placenta. With identical twins, apparently it depends on how the twin-ness actually happens. They could actually end up with a shared placenta or they could end up with their own placentas. It's really trippy. The placenta is weird. We could sit here all day and just talk about this, I feel like, and just talk about how weird it is to have a baby.
Sam Jones: Yeah, it is very odd. Thanks to Milan and Zhao for submitting to Tiny Show and Tell Us, a bonus episode from Tiny Matters created by the American Chemical Society and produced by Multitude. And a big thank you to science journalist Tien Nguyen, who did the research for this episode.
Deboki Chakravarti: You can send us an email to be featured in a future Tiny Show and Tell Us episode at tinymatters.acs.org. Or you can fill out the form that's linked in the episode description. We'll see you next time.
References:
- Who Is Affected by Climate Change?
- The Impact of Climate Change on Mental Health and Emotional Wellbeing: A Narrative Review of Current Evidence, and its Implications
- Heat and Medications – Guidance for Clinicians
- Explained: How climate change affects mental health
- 6 Medications That Put You at Risk for Heat Stroke
- Summer heat and sun risks when taking psychiatric medications
- Fetal rhythm-based language discrimination, a biomagnetometry study
- Magnetocardiography for Fetal Arrhythmias
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