Is increasing urbanicity associated with changes in breastfeeding duration in rural India? An analysis of cross-sectional household data from the Andhra Pradesh children and parents study.

OBJECTIVE: To investigate whether village-level urbanicity and lower level socioeconomic factors are associated with breastfeeding practices in transitioning rural communities in India. SETTING: 29 villages in Ranga Reddy district, southern India between 2011 and 2014. PARTICIPANTS: 7848 children under 6 years identified via a cross-sectional household survey conducted as part of the Andhra Pradesh Children and Parents Study. OUTCOME MEASURES: Two key indicators of optimal breastfeeding: termination of exclusive breastfeeding before 6 months and discontinuation of breastfeeding by 24 months. Village urbanicity was classified as low, medium or high according to satellite assessed night-light intensity. RESULTS: Breastfeeding initiation was almost universal, and approximately two in three children were exclusively breastfed to 6 months and a similar proportion breastfed to 24 months. Using multilevel logistic regression, increasing urbanicity was associated with breastfeeding discontinuation before 24 months (medium urbanicity OR 1.45, 95% CI 0.71 to 2.96; high urbanicity OR 2.96, 95% CI 1.45 to 6.05) but not with early (<6 months) termination of exclusive breastfeeding. Increased maternal education was independently associated with both measures of suboptimal breastfeeding, and higher household socioeconomic position was associated with early termination of exclusive breastfeeding. CONCLUSION: In this transitional Indian rural community, early stage urbanicity was associated with a shorter duration of breastfeeding. Closer surveillance of changes in breastfeeding practices alongside appropriate intervention strategies are recommended for emerging economies.

Neurons in the human hippocampus and amygdala respond to both low- and high-level image properties.

A large number of studies have demonstrated that structures within the medial temporal lobe, such as the hippocampus, are intimately involved in declarative memory for objects and people. Although these items are abstractions of the visual scene, specific visual details can change the speed and accuracy of their recall. By recording from 415 neurons in the hippocampus and amygdala of human epilepsy patients as they viewed images drawn from 10 image categories, we showed that the firing rates of 8% of these neurons encode image illuminance and contrast, low-level properties not directly pertinent to task performance, whereas in 7% of the neurons, firing rates encode the category of the item depicted in the image, a high-level property pertinent to the task. This simultaneous representation of high- and low-level image properties within the same brain areas may serve to bind separate aspects of visual objects into a coherent percept and allow episodic details of objects to influence mnemonic performance.