CURLING up into a ball and sucking your thumb often seems a great idea when the going gets tough. And a study on children shows that going foetal really can help.

British researchers have found that teaching children simple exercises that copy foetal movements in the womb can improve their schoolwork significantly.

It sounds a little ridiculous, admits Dr Martin McPhillips, who developed the programme. The Queen’s University Belfast research psychologist created it when working with special-needs children. Now it is being adopted by primary schools across Northern Ireland.

A new two-year study of more than 1,000 pupils at 13 schools shows that those who do the simple daily exercises improve in maths, reading and concentration.

McPhillips believes that babies practise movements in the womb that prepare them for life. They should grow out of them within a year, but many children do not. Like a stuck software program, this hinders their development. Practising the moves seems to work them out of the children’s system.

The Council for the Curriculum, Examinations and Assessment funded the study and is impressed by the results, but it wants more research. Meanwhile, if you still suck your thumb, take heart that it could actually be doing you good.

Mobile life-saver

A NEW gadget based on a mobile phone could help to save the lives of thousands of people who sustain head injuries in accidents or falls.

Blows to the head can cause hidden bruising and bleeding in the brain, called haematomas. If these are not detected in time, patients can suffer fatal or disabling brain damage.

The difficulty lies in the detection: paramedics and doctors can use rule-of-thumb diagnosis but often the only sure way is to give the patient a computerised tomography (CT) scan at hospital, which is both time-consuming and expensive. But a new hand-held device, being developed by biomedical engineers at Drexel University, uses near-infrared waves to scan patients’ skulls and detect any trauma beneath: bleeding parts of the brain absorb light differently.

The scanner is based on a personal digital assistant (PDA). Its screen highlights possible damage on a diagram of the skull. If it wins US government approval, the device may be available in America by next January.

Ginseng: the root to women’s health

GINSENG has often had big health claims made for it that lack scientific backing. But a large study indicates that it may boost the survival rates of women who have had breast cancer diagnosed.

The root has been used for more than 2,000 years in Chinese medicine and studies show that it contains more than 30 chemicals, called ginsenosides. In lab tests these have shown the ability to inhibit tumour cells. But clinical evidence of this effect has been sorely lacking.

Now the American Journal of Epidemiology reports how a ten-year study of 1,455 breast cancer patients found that those who had taken ginseng regularly before breast cancer was diagnosed had higher survival rates.

The research, by the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Centre in Nashville, studied women in Shanghai. It found that ginseng usage more than doubled among women who were given a breast cancer diagnosis. All the women also received Western therapies, such as surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy.

The women who started taking ginseng after being told that they had breast cancer reported that it improved their quality of life. However, only those who had already been taking it benefited from improved survival rates.

Reds nearly dead

HEALTHIER pigs won’t impress diehard communists. A study of more than 8,400 people in the former USSR reports that old Reds do not enjoy greens.

People who support the restoration of communism eat fewer vegetables and are 1.6 times more likely to be heavy vodka drinkers than fans of capitalism, says a study in Social Science and Medicine, by the University of Alabama. It’s still the salad days of democracy in the old Warsaw Pact nations.

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