Breast is best for a healthy heart
PARIS
Children who are exclusively breast-fed in infancy enjoy the equivalent benefits in cardiac health as those who exercise regularly and restrict their salt intake, a study suggests. The benefit was spotted in research carried out in Denmark and Estonia on nearly 2,200 children aged nine to 15 to identify risk factors for coronary heart disease.
Breast-feeding scored best on systolic blood pressure--one of the two key indicators of cardiac well-being. Children who were exclusively breast-fed for six months had a much lower systolic reading than counterparts who had been partially breast-fed or fed only infant formula. And the longer the child had been breast-fed, the better the score.
But breast-feeding had no apparent impact on levels of cholesterol or insulin resistance. The study appears in Archives of Disease in Childhood. It was led by Debbie Lawlor of the University of Bristol.
Paternal depresssion affects baby's development
PARIS
A child whose father has suffered depression after the birth of his child faces an increased risk of psychological problems in early life, according to a study published in The Lancet.
Maternal postpartum depression is a well-studied issue, as is its effect on child development, but paternal depression after a baby is born is virtually unexplored territory.
Oxford University psychiatrist Paul Ramchandani and colleagues assessed the psychological state of thousands of British mothers and fathers, both at eight weeks after the birth of their baby and again at 21 months. They also gauged the child's emotional and behavioral development at the age of three and a half years.
Children born to fathers who had symptoms of depression after their children's birth were more than twice as likely to have emotional or social problems or hyperactivity compared with fathers who did not. The phenomenon was acute among young boys, most noticeably in their behavior.
"After the birth of a child, depression in fathers, as well as depression in mothers, should be actively considered," the paper says. It speculates that if men are depressed, that could hamper their ability to care "responsively" for their children. "Fathers play an important part in the early life and development of their children. In the case of paternal depression, this effect seems especially notable in boys."
The study, based on questionnaires returned by the parents, used data on 8,431 fathers, 11,833 mothers, and 10,024 children.
Bedroom TV hurts children's school performance
WASHINGTON
Elementary-school children have lower academic results when they have televisions in their bedrooms. A study of 400 California third-graders by Johns Hopkins University and Stanford University also found that having a computer in the room improved performance.
"In this study, we found that the household media environment was related to a child's academic achievement," said Dina Borze-kowski, who directed the study published in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine.
The study found students with a television in their rooms scored eight points lower in math and seven points lower in reading on standardized tests. However those with a computer in the room scored six points higher in math and four points in reading.
"This study suggests that something as logical and straightforward as taking TV sets out of kids' bedrooms, or not putting them there in the first place, may be a solution" to improving academic performance, said coauthor Thomas Robinson.
There's a fat chance TV is also to blame for obesity
PARIS
Toddlers who watch television for more than eight hours a week run a significant risk of developing childhood obesity, according to a study published by the British Medical Journal.
Prolonged TV-watching is among a watch list of eight risk factors identified by British doctors among three-year-olds who became obese by the time they were seven. The study was based on measurements of height, weight, and body-mass index (BMI) as well as family background and eating habits of 8,234 children aged seven years and 909 more who were taking part in a larger British study of parents and children. It was led by John Reilly, an expert in pediatric energy metabolism at Yorkhill Hospitals in Glasgow.
Parents and doctors should be vigilant if a child gains excess increase in weight in his first year or has "rapid" catch-up growth bet-ween birth and the age of two, the paper suggests. Another big warning sign is if one or both parents are obese. This could indicate a genetic vulnerability to obesity or a family habit of overeating.
Children who become couch potatoes are also at risk--more than eight hours spent watching television per week at age three is the benchmark. TV viewing not only fails to burn up calories, it also encourages snacking.
Toddlers who sleep badly or for short periods--less than 10 and a half hours per night at the age of three--are also statistically at risk of obesity. If a child sleeps well, that is a sign that he is physically active; if he goes to bed early, that reduces the risk of nighttime snacking. On the other hand, the study said that a predominantly junk-food diet presented a relatively minor risk of future obesity among three-year-olds compared with other dangers and that the evidence for the widespread belief that breast-feeding helps protect against obesity was inconclusive.
Teenagers who give up sport and slump in front of the TV or computer screen are also at the greatest risk of obesity, a separate study in The Lancet said. American researchers tracked more than 2,200 girls, half of them black and the other half white, measuring their weight, body fat, calorific intake, and physical activity every year from the age of eight or nine until 18 or 19. The food intake remained high but largely unchanged during this period. But for many girls, physical exercise declined dramatically from the age of 15 or 16--and as a result, the surplus energy became stored as fat.
Inactive black girls were particularly prone to the problem, gaining between 13.2 and 19.8 pounds in excess weight during adolescence compared with active counterparts. Inactive white girls gained 8.8 to 13.2 pounds) in weight when compared with active ones.
The study could provide important new guidelines for public-health experts fighting the global epidemic of obesity. A conventional view is that obesity is acquired little by little over time. But the latest research provides evidence of a risk period in adolescence, when the imbalance between food intake and energy use puts a young adult on the fast track to becoming obese, The Lancet said in an editorial. "In adolescents now, lifestyles are extremely obesogenic," it said.
Its authors, led by University of New Mexico researcher Sue Kimm, say inactive teenage girls can stave off weight gain just by walking briskly for 30 minutes a day, five days a week.
Early piano practice gets brain on course
STOCKHOLM
Practicing the piano as a young child gives the human brain a musical capacity that is difficult to acquire later in life, Swedish scientists found in a study.
It is well known that most of the world's great pianists were already practicing their scales and arpeggios while still under 10 years old, and the study, published in Nature Neuroscience, shows that this is no coincidence. Childhood is the best time in life to boost the brain's so-called white matter, according to the study, and boost the pyramidal tract, which is a major pathway of the central nervous system, transmitting signals between the brain and the pianist's fingers.
The scientists, who investigated the brains of eight concert pianists in their 30s who started practicing as young children, found that the pyramidal tract is "more structured in pianists than in nonmusicians."
Fredrik Ullen, one of the scientists and himself a pianist, said he did not yet know how exactly the white-brain-matter development improves a concert performance. "But it is likely that it gives pianists that extra boost to reach the absolute top level," he said, adding that similar brain mechanisms may help explain the performances of top dancers and athletes.
Aircraft noise affects children's reading, memory
PARIS
Exposure to loud and persistent aircraft noise damages children's learning ability, according to a study in The Lancet, the largest health study conducted on the matter.
The research, led by Stephen Stansfeld of the Bart and the London Queen Mary's School of Medicine, entailed tests in reading and writing and health questionnaires answered by more than 2,800 children aged nine to 10 in primary schools located near Amsterdam's Schiphol airport, Barajas airport near Madrid, and London Heathrow. Levels of aircraft noise and traffic noise were also measured.
Aircraft noise impaired the acquisition of essential skills and increased stress among children, and the higher the noise level the worse the effect. In children exposed to high levels of aircraft noise, reading age was delayed by up to two months near Heathrow and by up to a month near Schiphol for every five-decibel change in exposure.
But road-traffic noise did not have an effect on reading, and unexpectedly was found to improve memory skills.
Parents urged to restrict kids' mobile-phone use
PARIS
The French Agency for Environmental Health Safety (AFSSE) has recommended precautionary measures to limit children's use of mobile phones, although it saw no evidence that these devices posed a health risk to youngsters.
It suggested that parents who give a phone to their child should have a restricted list of numbers to limit use of the phone, and that the child use a hands-free kit. Makers and service providers should not target children in their advertising and product range "until more is known about possible effects on children" from the radio waves emitted by phones, it said.
The recommendations were drawn up in response to a request by the ministries of health and the environment. They were made by a 10-member panel of experts who sifted through all the international studies on mobile-phone safety. The experts said they found no evidence from these papers that radiation emitted by mobile phones or relay antenna was any threat to health. But they urged caution, saying that further studies were needed to bolster present knowledge.
In January, Britain's National Radiological Protection Board (NRPB) recommended vigilance for children under eight, saying there was no hard evidence of a real threat to health from mobile-phone technologies, but stressed the need for a "precautionary approach."
Children face potentially greater risks to their health from radiation because their nervous system is still developing, the tissues of the head absorb more energy than those of adults, and they face a lifetime of radiation exposure, the NRPB said.
Some epidemiological studies, mostly conducted in Sweden, have suggested a link between brain cancer and intensive use of mobile phones, although other research, including work on lab tissues, sees no such association. (See related story in NEW FRONTIERS)
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