Health News You Can Use
The latest studies that impact your health.
Heavy Internet Use May Put Teens at Risk for High Blood Pressure
In a study published in the Journal of School Nursing, researchers found teens who spent at least 14 hours a week on the Internet had elevated blood pressure. Of 134 teens described by researchers as heavy Internet users, 26 had elevated blood pressure.
This is believed to be the first study to show a link between time spent on the Internet and high blood pressure. The findings add to growing research that has shown an association between heavy Internet use and other health risks like addiction, anxiety, depression, obesity and social isolation.
Andrea Cassidy-Bushrow, a researcher at Henry Ford’s Department of Public Health Sciences and the study’s lead author, says the take-home message for teens and parents is moderation.
“Using the Internet is part of our daily life, but it shouldn’t consume us,” she says. “In our study, teens considered heavy Internet users were on the Internet an average of 25 hours a week. It’s important that young people take regular breaks from their computer or smartphone, and engage in some form of physical activity. I recommend to parents they limit their children’s time at home on the Internet. I think two hours a day, five days a week is good rule of thumb.”
For more information, visit newswise.com/articles/view/640936?print-article.
Repeating Aloud to Another Person Boosts Recall
Repeating aloud boosts verbal memory, especially when you do it while addressing another person, says Professor Victor Boucher of the University of Montreal’s Department of Linguistics and Translation. His findings are the result of a study to be published in the next edition of Consciousness and Cognition.
“We knew that repeating aloud was good for memory, but this is the first study to show that if it is done in a context of communication, the effect is greater in terms of information recall,” Boucher explains.
To demonstrate this, Boucher asked 44 French-speaking university students to read a series of lexemes on a screen. (A lexeme is a word such as it is found in a dictionary.) During the task, the participants wore headphones that emitted white noise to mask their own voices and eliminate auditory feedback. The subjects were submitted to four experimental conditions: repeating in their head, repeating silently while moving their lips, repeating aloud while looking at the screen and finally, repeating aloud while addressing someone. After a distraction task, they were asked to identify the lexemes they recalled having said from a list that included lexemes not used in the test.
The results show a clear difference when the exercise was performed aloud in the presence of someone else, even though the participants had heard absolutely nothing. Repeating in one’s head without gesturing was the least effective way to recall information.
“The simple fact of articulating without making a sound creates a sensorimotor link that increases our ability to remember, but if it is related to the functionality of speech, we remember even more,” Boucher says.
Previous studies conducted at Boucher’s Phonetic Sciences Laboratory have shown that when we articulate a sound, we create a sensory and motor reference in our brain by moving our mouth and feeling our vocal chords vibrate.
“The production of one or more sensory aspects allows for more efficient recall of the verbal element. But the added effect of talking to someone shows that in addition to the sensorimotor aspects related to verbal expression, the brain refers to the multisensory information associated with the communication episode,” Boucher says. “The result is that the information is better retained in memory.”
For more information, visit newswise.com/articles/view/640952?print-article.
Others’ Holiday Cheer Can Turn to Your Holiday Fear
“I do feel like the fear of missing out can be particularly difficult around the holidays,” says Carolyn Ievers-Landis, a pediatric psychologist at University Hospitals Rainbow Babies & Children’s Hospital. “I think that extends to what kids are getting for Christmas: if your friend gets the latest shoes or they have the latest electronics and you don’t.”
Fear of missing out (FoMO) is a form of social anxiety in which people are compulsively concerned about missing a party, event, interaction or experience. Ievers-Landis says this anxiety is fueled by connectivity through social media, through which everyone seemingly knows what everyone else is doing.
“People who might have [compared themselves] in the regular world without social media can now do it more and more, so it can have more of a cumulative effect to harm their mood,” Ievers-Landis says.
She also notes that depression is a real and serious consequence of FoMO, with tweens and teens being most vulnerable to the dangers of downward social comparison, or always thinking people are doing more interesting things than you.
“If people are constantly comparing themselves to other people and constantly hooked in to see what they’re doing, compared to other people, it can really affect your mood,” she says.
Five Tips to Avoid FoMO
1) Enjoy the moment (mindfulness)
2) Limit social media
3) Be grateful
4) Keep busy
5) Embrace occasional solitude (joy of missing out, or JoMO)
For more information, visit newswise.com/articles/view/627843/.
Can Work Stress Be Linked to Stroke?
Having a high-stress job may be linked to a higher risk of stroke, according to the analysis of several studies. The meta-analysis is published in the Oct. 14 online issue of Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.
“Having a lot of job stress has been linked to heart disease, but studies on job stress and stroke have shown inconsistent results,” says Dr. Dingli Xu with Southern Medical University in Guangzhou, China. “It’s possible that high-stress jobs lead to more unhealthy behaviors, such as poor eating habits, smoking and a lack of exercise.”
The analysis focused on all the available research on job strain and stroke risk. The six studies analyzed involved a total of 138,782 participants, who were followed for three to 17 years. Jobs were classified into four groups based on how much control workers had in their jobs and how hard they worked, or the psychological demands of the job.
The job demands included time pressure, mental load and coordination burdens. Physical labor and total number of hours worked were not included. Passive jobs are those with low demand and low control (janitors, miners and other manual laborers). Low-stress jobs are those with low demand and high control (natural scientists, architects). High-stress jobs, which are high-demand and low-control, are found in the service industry (restaurant servers, nursing aides). Active jobs with high demand and high control include doctors, teachers and engineers. In the six studies, the percentage of those with high-stress jobs ranged from 11 percent to 27 percent of participants.
The analysis found women with high-stress jobs had a 33 percent higher risk of stroke than women with low-stress jobs. People with high-stress jobs were 58 percent more likely to have an ischemic stroke (the most common type caused by blockage of blood flow) than those with low-stress jobs. People in passive and active jobs did not have any increased risk of stroke. The researchers calculated that 6.5 percent of women’s stroke risk was due to their high-stress jobs.
“Based on this study, it is reasonable to consider testing interventions aimed at increasing job control, such as decentralization of decision making and flexibility in job structure, such as telecommuting,” says Dr. Jennifer J. Majersik with the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and a member of the American Academy of Neurology who wrote a corresponding editorial. “If effective, such workplace changes could have a major public-health impact,”
For more information, visit newswise.com/articles/view/641123?print-article.
Staying Healthy Through the Years
Share