Issue 10 March 2011
Quantum
Kids’ Health: The Dark Side of Video Games
Back in the day, when you spoke about children’s games you might have been referring to hopscotch, softball and rollerblading. Today, however, we mostly mean video and computer games. Recent studies are showing that kids can become addicted to video games and suffer the consequences. A study by the American Academy of Pediatrics reports that kids who are “pathological” gamers are subject to a distressingly high incidence of mental health problems, including anxiety, impulsiveness, social awkwardness and phobias, and even clinical depression. In other words, they show the health- related signs associated with addiction. There symptoms are similar to those associated with gambling addiction.
Men’s Health: Beating Prostate Cancer
Regular exercise is known to improve health overall and to generally help those with serious diseases to live a better quality of life and extend their life expectancies. A new study looking at exercise and the prognosis for prostate cancer patients has corroborated that good news.
Stacey Kenfield, a researcher at Harvard School of Public Health (Cambridge, MA, USA) announced that his team has conducted the “first study in men with prostate cancer to evaluate physical activity after diagnosis in relation to prostate cancer-specific mortality and overall mortality.” The finding is that three hours of moderate exercise a week lowered
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The study included more three thousand children of primary and secondary school age who were followed over a two-year period. Almost nine percent of them could be categorised as having “damaging” mental health effects from their frequency of video gaming. About the same percentage was found in kids studied in other countries. While the effects were alleviated when the children reduced their frequency of gaming, the problems did not disappear entirely, leaving these children open to problems well into their adulthood.
the risk of death in prostate cancer patients. Kenfield said, “We observed benefits at very attainable levels of activity... and our results suggest that men with prostate cancer should do some physical activity for their overall health, even if it is a small amount, such as 15 minutes of activity per day of walking, jogging or biking. Vigorous activity may be especially beneficial for prostate cancer, as well as overall health, at levels of three or more hours per week.”
While prostate cancer is one of the most common cancers among men, survival rates are high, with a ten-year survival rate of almost 93 percent. However, adding moderate to vigorous exercise upped the odds even more, improving survival times by 35 percent. And the effect of exercise was beneficial not only in relation to death from prostate cancer, but to men’s overall health, reducing the odds of death from any cause.
Quantum Health 17
HEALTH
Science in the News
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