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Spoken language. Music gives children an easy-to-enter window into practicing language and deciphering meaning. Dual language learning. Receptive language. Listening to music is an exercise in receptive language skills words that children understand but may not yet be able to say. But remember, music need not have words to communicate feelings or images. Toddlers who are just beginning to develop the ability to pretend play will revel in hearing and acting out this animal parade.
Phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness describes how well a child can hear, recognize, and use different sounds called phonemes. Children who are able to distinguish different sounds and phonemes are more likely to develop stronger literacy skills over time Ehri et al. Music supports this critical skill because most songs include rhyming or substituting one phoneme for another U.
Department of Health and Human Services, forthcoming. Just as children play differently with blocks at age 6 months mouthing than at age 2 years stacking , they also experience music differently as they grow. Thoughtfully planned music experiences can support and nurture each developmental domain— social-emotional, physical motor , thinking cognitive , and language and literacy.
Click to enlarge. Music plays a powerful role in the lives of young children. Through music, babies and toddlers can come to better understand themselves and their feelings, learn to decipher patterns and solve problems, and discover the world around them in rich, complex ways.
The cost of a parachute? Using music activities to enrich the lives of babies and toddlers? Carlton, E. Learning through music: The support of brain research. Ehri, L. Willows, B. Schuster, Z. Reading Research Quarterly — Flom, R. Infant Behavior and Development 31 4 : — Ilari, B.
Polka, L. International Journal of Music Education 24 1 : 7— Trainor, L. Infant preferences for infant-directed versus noninfant-directed playsongs and lullabies.
Infant Behavior and Development 19 1 : 83— Music—News you can use. Weikart, P. HighScope ReSource 6 1 : 8— Rebecca Parlakian. Read Early and Often. It addresses the same vital…. And advanced 'soft robotics' built using malleable outer materials will soon allow patients to be positioned quickly and comfortably using robotic hands. Pushing affordable proton technology forwards will require combined efforts from device companies, venture capitalists, academics and medical practitioners. But these groups currently work in silos. Most technology development is left to industry.
Hospitals buy off-the-shelf and do not actively seek input from researchers. Only a few national labs in different countries work on technologies related to proton therapy. But, overall, there has been little work in universities with the clear goal of improving the affordability and clinical utility of proton-therapy systems. Although the utilization of proton therapy is growing, the gap between the number of patients receiving the treatment and those who could potentially benefit from it is still substantial see 'Unmet need' 8. The primary reason is cost; availability is another barrier, as are a lack of knowledge of the therapy's benefits and difficulties referring patients.
As technology improves, the number of patients who could benefit clinically from proton therapy will rise, too. The therapy is not like a pill: its success depends on how it is delivered. It has more room for improvement than other, more-established radiation treatments, such as X-rays.
Developing proton therapy's physical advantages — in particular its ability to focus and thus lower the overspill of radiation — would make it the best treatment for most patients who need radiation therapy. In some cases, it might outperform surgery. Sharpening the spot of the proton beam gives it the precision of a scalpel.
Unlike X-ray photons, fast protons entering the patient are slowed because they interact with body tissues. Most of the beam's energy is deposited at a point called the Bragg peak.
The speed of the proton, or its kinetic energy, determines the depth at which the spot reaches below the skin. Protons with energies of around 50 MeV penetrate to a depth of a few centimetres; those at more than MeV reach 30 cm. Uncertainties in this slowing process can affect whether the dose spot hits the tumour as intended, or overshoots into healthy organs. Yap et al.
Better imaging methods are needed to locate and guide the proton spot. Its position is currently known to within only 0. This is similar to X-rays but blurs the radiation dose, making it impossible to stop the beam precisely in front of crucial structures such as the spinal cord. Improving the accuracy and precision from centimetres to millimetres is necessary. This is a particular challenge when targeting moving tumours, such as those in the lung and liver.
Higher accuracy would mean that smaller margins would need to be irradiated around tumours — overshoot is the standard way to deal with uncertainties.
This would transform treatments for lung cancer, for example, in which proton therapy does not yet show a substantial physical advantage over X-rays. Several methods for measuring the range of the proton spot have been explored 9. Sound waves are also given off when tissues expand and contract as they are heated by pulses of protons. Such techniques have reached accuracies of a few millimetres in experimental settings, but do not yet have the millimetre accuracy needed for use in patients. The technical hurdles are surmountable but require more concerted efforts, both public and private.
The high cost of proton therapy means that most countries and insurers restrict its use. England and several European nations, including Denmark and the Netherlands, offer proton therapy only for cancer types for which the reduction of long-term side effects is thought to be greatest, such as tumours in the skull base chordoma and chondrosarcoma , in the eyes melanoma and many tumours in children.
But individuals and tumours vary.
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Sarcomas, for instance, occur in many different forms and sites. The benefit of proton treatment depends on tumour size, shape and proximity to organs. But those with a tumour on their left breast might benefit because proton therapy could help to spare the heart from radiation damage 3.
The Netherlands has taken a step in the right direction, using individual treatment plans and a biological model of complications in normal tissues to select patients who stand to benefit most from proton therapy. But the probabilities of side effects predicted by biological dose—response models are uncertain. The models consider only severe complications, such as blindness, which are rare.
They do not consider more common aspects such as a reduced IQ score in children, for instance. Compact proton-therapy systems, such as this one at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, eliminate the need to house the equipment in large, dedicated buildings. In the United States, several hospitals have tried to recoup the costs of proton centres by focusing on common and easy-to-treat tumours such as prostate cancer.
Insurers are reluctant to cover such treatment, but many wealthy men pay for themselves. So the most common cancer treated with protons is one in which it makes the least clinical difference. Because there are relatively few proton centres, patients must be referred to them from other hospitals. But many oncologists are unaware of what the therapy can do, and local, private physicians and hospitals fear losing revenue if their patients are treated elsewhere. Patients, too, are loath to travel long distances, sometimes between countries.
As a consequence, too few patients are referred. Sweden has improved these logistics. Maybe we should continue the conversation at dinner, or at the next offsite. If the issues on the table have been reasonably vetted, the choices are equally attractive, and there is still no clear answer, then admit that there is no clearly identifiable right way to go and just decide. It helps if you can make the decision smaller, with minimal investment, to test it. The time you save by not deliberating pointlessly will pay massive dividends in productivity.
Hold on, you may protest. If I do spend more time on it, an answer will emerge. Sure, maybe.
Contact Thomas R. There are lots of us like you. Bekelman, J. Yet most hospitals do not offer proton therapy. Protons can be targeted more precisely than X-rays 1 , so the tissues around the tumour receive two to three times less radiation.