For Kids, More Screen Time Means Lower Fitness Scores
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If videogames like “Madden NFL” didn’t exist, 12-year-old Tom might go outside and toss around a real football — and he’d have a better chance of sprinting for a touchdown without getting winded.
Too much small-screen recreation could undermine physical fitness, Australian researchers have found, in a new study that looks at how e-mail and text messaging, TV, videogames and net surfing affect aerobic endurance in adolescents.
Two hours of daily screen time appears to be the “cut point” above which kids are significantly less likely to be fit, found researchers led by Louise Hardy, Ph.D., at the New South Wales Centre of Overweight and Obesity at the University of Sydney.
“The effect was consistently stronger among all girls compared with boys,” Hardy said. “The longer girls spent on screen recreation the less fit they were, and the evidence of this effect increases with age among girls.”
Study Helps Explain Connection Between Sleep Apnea, Stroke and Death
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Obstructive sleep apnea decreases blood flow to the brain, elevates blood pressure within the brain and eventually harms the brain’s ability to modulate these changes and prevent damage to itself, according to a new study published by The American Physiological Society. The findings may help explain why people with sleep apnea are more likely to suffer strokes and to die in their sleep.
Sleep apnea is the most commonly diagnosed condition amongst sleep-related breathing disorders and can lead to debilitating and sometimes fatal consequences for the 18 million Americans who have been diagnosed with the disorder. This study identifies a mechanism behind stroke in these patients.
The study, “Impaired cerebral autoregulation in obstructive sleep apnea” was carried out by Fred Urbano, Francoise Roux, Joseph Schindler and Vahid Mohsenin, all of the Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut. It appears in the current issue of the Journal of Applied Physiology.
Food regulation threat if obesity plan fails
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The government will consider regulating the food industry if a three-year health lifestyle campaign fails to reduce obesity levels in England, Health Minister Ben Bradshaw said on Friday.
The government kicks off the Change4Life campaign on Saturday with television, magazine and billboard adverts urging people to adopt a healthier lifestyle.
The action is being taken after forecasters said obesity was rising so fast that by 2050 four out of 10 children and nine out of ten adults will be overweight or obese.
Fast food near schools means fatter kids
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Adolescents who go to school within a half-mile of a fast-food restaurant are more likely to be overweight or obese than kids whose schools are further away, new research suggests.
The young people in the study also ate fewer servings of fruits and vegetables and drank more soda if there was at least one fast food restaurant within a half-mile radius of their school, Drs. Brennan Davis of Azusa Pacific University in Azusa, California and Christopher Carpenter of the University of California at Irvine found.
“Overall, our patterns are consistent with the idea that fast food near schools affects students’ eating habits, overweight, and obesity,” they conclude in a report in the American Journal of Public Health.
Chromosome disorder raises risk of death
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Turner syndrome, the most commonly diagnosed sex chromosome abnormality in women, not only leads to substantial illness but is also raises the risk of death, according to UK researchers.
“This study,” lead investigator Dr. Minouk J. Schoemaker told Reuters Health, “shows that mortality in women with Turner syndrome is three-fold higher than in the general population, and that mortality is raised for almost all major causes of death, and throughout adulthood.”
Turner syndrome is a genetic condition caused when one of the two X chromosomes that girls normally have is missing. It results in various physical characteristics and incomplete ovaries.
Study finds favorable trends in stroke
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Fewer people are suffering stroke and fewer people are dying from stroke, new research from Sweden hints.
To varying degrees, there have been improvements in the incidence of stroke and in stroke deaths among both diabetic and non-diabetic adults, Dr. Aslak Rautio and colleagues from Umea University report in the journal Stroke.
The researchers used data from a Swedish stroke registry to compare time trends in incidence, case-fatality, and death in stroke patients with or without diabetes. All strokes in patients 35 to 74 years old were registered from January 1, 1985, and December 31, 2003.
Family History of Prostate Cancer Does Not Affect Some Treatment Outcomes
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In a first of its kind study, a first-degree family history of prostate cancer has no impact on the treatment outcomes of prostate cancer patients treated with brachytherapy (also called seed implants), and patients with this type of family history have clinical and pathologic characteristics similar to men with no family history at all, according to a January 1 study in the International Journal of Radiation Oncology*Biology*Physics, the official journal of the American Society for Radiation Oncology.
“This information is relevant for both physicians and patients with new diagnoses as they embark on complex treatment decisions,” Christopher A. Peters, M.D., lead author of the study and a radiation oncologist at Northeast Radiation Oncology Center in Dunmore, Pa. (chief resident at Mount Sinai School of Medicine at the time of the study), said. “Now patients with a family history of prostate cancer can be confident that they have the same outcomes as patients with sporadic disease, regardless of the treatment modality they chose.”
According to the American Cancer Society, prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men behind skin cancer. Many patients diagnosed with prostate cancer have some type of family history of the disease and men with a family history do have an increased risk of developing the disease, but there is conflicting data on how family history impacts treatment outcomes.
