The next time I babysit my video game-loving nephews, I may not be so quick to insist that they break from their hand-controlled strategy games to play Dance Central with me.
A study out today in Pediatrics suggests that playing active games does not necessarily render a kid more fit. For the study, researchers gave a group of 87 children ages 9-12 a Wii game console and either two active or two non-active games to play. They tracked the children’s physical activity levels over a 12-week period and found that children in the active-game group weren’t more physically active than those in the other. From a WebMD story:
Researchers say the results call into question the health benefit of so-called active video games, in which players use their bodies to simulate sports or dancing.
Previous laboratory studies have shown some increase in physical activity in children given active video games.
But researchers say their study offers no reason to believe that giving children an active game under normal circumstances at home will increase their physical activity.
The study does not suggest, however, that bowling with Wii Sports, practicing mindful breathing with Deepak Chopra’s Leela, or smurfing around with The Smurfs Dance Party aren’t still fun.
There’s more evidence today that regular exercise can offer benefits beyond an improved physique. Findings recently published in the Journal of Applied Psychology suggest that employees who engage in physical activity are less likely to experience deterioration in their mental health, including symptoms of burnout and depression.
In the study (subscription required), Israeli researchers evaluated the personal, occupational and psychological states of more than 1,600 healthy workers employed in both the private and public sectors. Volunteers completed questionnaires when visiting medical clinics for routine check-ups and had three follow-up appointments over a period of nine years. Based on their responses, participants were divided into four groups: no engagement in physical activity and three levels of exercise (75 to 150 minutes a week, 150 to 240 minutes a week and more than 240 minutes a week). PsychCentral reports:
Depression and burnout rates were clearly the highest among the group that did not participate in any physical activity, [said Tel Aviv University researcher Sharon Toker, PhD]
The more physical activity that participants engaged in, the less likely they were to experience depression and burnout during the next three years. The optimal amount of physical activity was a minimum of 150 minutes per week, where its benefits really started to take effect.
In those who engaged in 240 minutes of physical activity or more, the impact of burnout and depression was almost nonexistent, she said, adding that even 150 minutes a week will have a positive impact, helping people to deal with their workday, improve self-esteem, and stave off the spiral of loss.
Past research has down that exercise during pregnancy benefits mom as well as baby by, among other things, helping the fetal cardiac system grow stronger and healthier. Now findings published online in PLoS One suggest that owning a dog can be a powerful motivator to get pregnant women moving.
In the first-of-its-kind study, researchers from the United States and England examined the relationship between pet ownership and physical activity levels among pregnant women. The team drew on the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children to gather data on more than 11,000 pregnant women in the United Kingdom, and they found:
Dog ownership was associated with an increased (1.5 times) likelihood of undertaking at least 3 hours per week of activity ‘enough to work up a sweat’. Dog owners showed increased levels of brisk walking, but not other types of activity, thus the specificity of the finding makes it more likely that the association is causal. In addition, the trend of increasing likelihood of dog ownership with higher levels of activity and more hours of brisk walking per week also suggests a real effect of owning a dog.
The study showed that, overall, mothers-to-be who owned dogs were approximately 50 percent more likely to stay physically active during their pregnancy. Funding for the research was provided by a grant from WALTHAM Centre for Pet Nutrition, a subsidiary of Mars Petcare.
Earlier this year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported findings showing binge drinking in the United States is a bigger problem than previously thought. Statistics show an estimated 10.8 million young people between the ages of 12-20 are current drinkers and nearly 7.2 million binge drink.
Now findings (subscription required) published today in the Journal of Adolescent Health estimate that the total cost for hospitalizations related to underage drinking is about $755 million per year.
In the study, Mayo Clinic researchers analyzed most 2008 data from Nationwide Inpatient Sample, the largest all-payer inpatient care database in the United States, data from the U.S. Census Bureau for 2008 to determine the incidence rate of underage drinking hospitalizations, identify geographic and demographic differences in the incidence of alcohol-related hospital admissions and calculate costs of these hospitalizations. According to a Mayo Clinic release:
For adolescent males and females, hospitalization incidence was highest in the Northeast and Midwest, lowest in the South, and intermediate in the West. On multivariable analysis, older age and male gender were associated with alcohol-use disorder hospitalizations. In general, black Americans had lower hospitalization rates than whites, and Hispanics and Asian/Pacific Islanders had the lowest rates. The rates tended to be highest for Native and other/mixed-race Americans; however, the number of hospitalizations was relatively small, making estimates imprecise. The findings may help target substance abuse prevention efforts toward geographic and demographic groups at greatest risk.
Much of the hospitalization cost ($505 million) involved treatment of injuries. A total of 107 of those hospitalized died (.27 percent): Their age was 18.6 years, and 82 percent were male. Seventy-three percent of the deaths occurred during a hospitalization for injuries.
The report examined trends in the prevalence of U.S. adults receiving advice to exercise among those who had seen a health professional in the past 12 months. WebMD reports:
In 2010, 1 in 3 adults who saw a doctor or other health care professional was advised to increase their physical activity as a means of maintaining or improving their health. That’s a significant increase over 2000, when less than a quarter of consultations included such advice.
…
It’s an important development, the report indicates, because patients listen to their doctors. According to a 2008 study, overweight patients were nearly five times more likely to exercise if their doctors counseled them to do so. They were even more likely to keep active if their doctor followed up with them after the initial prescription.
Other key findings include:
Among adults aged 85 and over, the percentage receiving advice to exercise nearly doubled between 2000 (15.3%) and 2010 (28.9%)
Receiving advice to exercise increased for adults with hypertension, cardiovascular disease, cancer, and diabetes
Adults who were overweight or obese had the largest percentage point increases over the decade 2000–2010 in being advised to exercise
At each time point, women were more likely than men to have been advised to exercise.
Past studies have shown that exercising can reduce anxiety, help in treating depression and boost your mental health in other ways. Now a study (subscription required) recently published in Journal of Business and Psychology shows it could also make the workplace more enjoyable — that is if it’s your boss who’s hitting the gym.
Researchers asked 98 MBA students who were also employed full-time to rate how their supervisors treated them, by responding to statements like “[my boss] puts me down in front of others.” The researchers also had supervisors fill out a different survey, about their stress levels and weekly exercise. And, as the authors expected, the more stressed-out supervisors were, the more their employees felt belittled by them. But the employees felt better about bosses who exercised, whether it was yoga, cardio or weight lifting. And just one or two days a week did the trick.
Exercise didn’t simply melt away the stress—bosses who worked out reported feeling just as much pressure as their sedentary counterparts. Active bosses just spared subordinates the verbal attacks.
Hitting the gym or going for a jog could alleviate fatigue, depressive symptoms and other mental health issues among chronically ill patients, according to new findings (subscription required) published in Archives of Internal Medicine.
[Researchers] combed through 90 previous studies including more than 10,000 people with health problems like cancer, heart disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder (COPD), fibromyalgia, chronic pain or obesity.
In each study, people had been randomly chosen to do exercises — on average, three times a week over 17 weeks — or not.
According to [study author Matthew Herring, PhD], people’s depressive symptoms, as rated on a variety of psychological scales, dropped about 22 percent with exercise overall. That’s similar to the effects on fatigue, anxiety, pain and other mental health outcomes.
More study is needed – the researchers say they haven’t determined what types of exercise are most beneficial and how long the effects last – but the findings add to the evidence on the health benefits of exercise. As one of our surgeons opined in a recent Stanford Medicinearticle on the topic, “There’s practically nothing that exercise isn’t good for.”
Exercise physiologist Peter Janiszewski, PhD, wrote yesterday for the PLoS blog Obesity Panacea about a fantastic video that my colleague posted here last month. The video comes from the University of Toronto’s Mike Evans, MD, an associate professor of family medicine and public health at the university and a staff physician at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto. According to Evans’ bio:
My interests are in evaluating sustainable interventions that make for more informed health decisions. My target has traditionally been the primary care provider, but now has developed more into targeting the patient in the clinic or at “the kitchen table”. Specifically, what is the best way to bring together academic evidence-based information with the common media that people use (TV, news, print, social networks, Dr. Google, email, etc.). I also have a significant interest in shinny hockey, but am still working on a research angle.
I’d say this kitchen-table approach is working: The video has been viewed over a million times and has garnered 13,000 ‘likes’ on YouTube, and its popularity was featured on CBC last week. As for me, I just got around to watching the entire 10 minutes and am now planning to sneak out to the gym – that is, after I start following “Dr. Mike” on Twitter (@docmikeevans).
Rock-climbing during pregnancy? Though it’s something many women (myself included) couldn’t imagine doing, extreme sports such as this aren’t always avoided by expectant moms. A recent USA Todaypiece introduced readers to a Utah woman who’s scaling rocks while 39 weeks pregnant (!) and discussed the larger issue of exercise and moms-to-be:
Not only can exercise during pregnancy make for an easier labor and delivery, it can help prevent excessive weight gain, decreasing the risk of gestational diabetes and preeclampsia, or pregnancy-induced high blood pressure, a leading cause of illness and death in moms and babies.
“For years, women were discouraged from either continuing or initiating exercise in pregnancy,” says Andrew Satin, chair of obstetrics and gynecology at Johns Hopkins Bayview in Baltimore. “I think that’s recently been questioned on a lot of fronts.”
Still, Satin says, doctors often don’t encourage it because of safety concerns: “There’s been a lack of good quality research.”
The article went on to provide exercise tips for moms, and I would add that it would be prudent for pregnant women to err on the side of caution – and talk with their physician – when making decisions about exercise type. Stanford obstetrician Deirdre Lyell, MD, once told me she advises pregnant women to avoid activities that cause their heart rate to rise above 140 beats/minute or carry a high risk of a contact-related injury.
I’ve written before about having gestational diabetes with my current pregnancy. Having been diagnosed early on, I’ve been fortunate enough to manage my GD through a controlled diet and moderate (well, um, some) exercise. But while I know I should work out more than I do, a clinical study recently published in Obstetrics & Gynecology helps me feel a little less guilty about being a lazy pregnant woman this second go-around.
After randomly assigning 855 women in their 18th to 22nd week of pregnancy to two groups, Norwegian researchers found that pregnant women who exercised regularly were no less likely to develop gestational diabetes than those who did not. (By the third trimester, seven percent of the exercise group had been diagnosed with gestational diabetes, versus six percent of the comparison group.) From an article on The Atlantic today:
Those in the exercise program took an hour-long class once a week for 12 weeks — doing low-impact aerobics, plus strengthening and stretching exercises. They were also given an at-home workout to do twice a week. In the end, the exercise program showed no effect on gestational diabetes rates.
While exercise has been shown to help curtail the risk of Type 2 diabetes in the general population, the jury’s still out on whether it can prevent gestational diabetes. But lead researcher Signe N. Stafne, PT, cautions that these latest findings don’t mean that pregnant women should abandon physical activity altogether. ”It could be that exercise before pregnancy and in early pregnancy is more important, due to the metabolic changes that occur in early pregnancy… There are still many unanswered questions regarding gestational diabetes and the prevention of it,” he told Reuters Health.
And for what it’s worth, when I do find the time to exercise, I always see decreased blood sugar levels.
Many of us, myself included, have vowed to adopt healthier habits in 2012. But what if instead of making a few resolutions to exercise regularly, get more sleep or eat nutritious meals, you decided to follow all suggested guidelines for improving your health – things ranging from owning a pet to applying a shot glass size of sunscreen every two hours?
Author A.J. Jacobs tried just such an experiment for an entire year. In this TEDMED 2011 video, he discusses the life-altering project and some surprising things he learned.
Much has been written, here and elsewhere, about the benefits of exercise. For those wanting a little review, Well has a nice round-up of what we’ve learned about fitness in the past year – and blogger Gretchen Reynolds opens with some rather encouraging words:
If all the Phys Ed columns published this year have a single message is that now is a fine time to own a body. The diverse exercise-related experiments published in 2011 and covered in this space each week suggest that it’s possible to retain your cognitive powers, muscle mass, running speed and waistline, even as you age, and that a little exercise can go a long way in terms of physiological benefit. Recent, important science even tells us that coffee, chocolate and beer enhance exercise performance, which is fortunate, since I have no plans to give up any of those…
The long-term consequences of football-related concussions have become a focus of national attention. Over the past decade there has been a steady drumbeat of research correlating football collisions with chronic cognitive problems prompting congressional hearings and new rules on managing concussions in the National Football League.
But football-related head injuries are not just an issue for professional athletes. A 2006 study from the National Center for Injury Prevention found that 47 percent of high school football players say they suffer a concussion each season, with 35 percent of those reported multiple concussions in a season. Findings published in 2009 showed differences in physical maturity, neck strength and endurance among high school athletes could increase players’ risk for concussion.
Daniel Garza, MD, associate director of Stanford’s Lacob Family Sports Medicine Center and medical director for the San Francisco 49ers, and colleagues recently launched a study where Stanford football players are equipped with mouthpieces containing high-tech sensors to investigate these issues. In this Q&A, Garza fields questions on football-related concussions.
Why don’t football players’ helmets and equipment adequately project them against sustaining concussions?
It is questionable whether any helmet can prevent concussion. In reality, helmets were designed to help prevent skull and facial fractures. This is not to say that I do not hope for engineering advances that may make helmets better at preventing concussion.
For some, just the thought of the holidays can produce heartburn. But if you’re a serious sufferer of gastroesophageal reflux disease, you may be interested in a recent USA Todaypiece that highlighted some alternative remedies. Stanford’s Lauren Gerson, MD, provided one of the tips:
An easy remedy that helps relieve GERD by taking advantage of anatomy and gravity is simply sleeping on your left side, says… Gerson, gastroenterologist at Stanford School of Medicine. Her team’s review of research showed that right-side sleeping makes reflux worse. Other research found that stomach sleeping is the worst position for people with GERD because it puts extra pressure on the stomach and a key muscle in the esophagus.
It’s that time of year again: Jack Frost is nipping at your nose, and you’ve got lots of holiday celebrating, cooking and shopping to do. While the cold weather and a packed social calendar are easy excuses for not exercising, it’s still important to be physically active – and below, Joyce Hanna, associate director of Stanford’s Health Improvement Program, provides some useful advice for how to stay active and inspired.
What are some ways to stay motivated to exercise during the holidays?
The holidays can be a joyous time, but they can also be very stressful and a time of extreme sadness for some. It’s important to keep in mind that you’re going to feel better and be able to cope better with the holidays if you plan some exercise time into your day. Exercise will keep your stress level down, your mood and energy up and help deal with those extra holiday calories.
Having a sense of well–being will help you feel better about yourself and also help you be the kind of person you want to be for others. Research done by John Bartholomew, PhD, and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin shows that just acknowledging you’re maintaining an exercise program can have an impact on your energy level. When you’re pleased with yourself for exercising, you have a greater sense of vigor and energy after the workout and throughout the day.
As previously reported on Scope, Stanford geneticist Michael Snyder, PhD, and colleagues conducted an unprecedented analysis of Snyder's genome using a newly ...
