The fish in the St. Lawrence Seaway are likely much happier given the increased amount of antidepressants found in the river’s water, according to the University of Montreal.
According to Dr. Sébastien Sauvé and PhD candidate André Lajeunesse, antidepressants are increasingly being found in the water and are accumulating in the tissues of the fish as well as affecting their brain activity.
The study, published online in Chemosphere, notes that about 24 per cent of Montrealers take some kind of antidepressant, which are subsequently passed into the watershed and ingested by the fish.
“We know that antidepressants have negative side effects on human beings, but we don’t know exactly how these chemicals are affecting the fish, and by extension, the St. Lawrence River’s ecosystem,” SauvĂ© said.
Because Montreal’s sewage system essentially only removes solid waste and antidepressants are so difficult to filter, the chemical pollution has increased. Both writers, however, state there is no risk to human beings, stating the amount measured is “equivalent to a grain of salt in an Olympic-size swimming pool.”
Part of the solution in fighting childhood obesity might lie in the sleep patterns of children, according to a study published in Pediatrics.
A research team set out to explore what effect if any the duration and regularity of sleep has on a child’s body mass index (BMI) and metabolic regulation. The team recruited 308 community kids aged four to 10 and measured BMI, blood-glucose before breakfast, blood fats and cholesterol. In a smaller group, they also measured the level of C-reactive protein, a marker used to assess cardiovascular disease risk.
Each child wore a wrist monitor for a week that measured physical activity, how often and when the children slept and for how long. The results showed that, on average, every child slept for eight hours, regardless of BMI. However, children considered obese showed sleep patterns that were inconsistent. Further analysis showed that swings in sleep duration were reflected in changes in insulin, LDL cholesterol and C-reactive protein. Further, children who slept the least showed a greater health risk when it came to combination of BMI and blood markers.
In the end, just half-an-hour’s extra sleep every night was linked to a lower BMI and improved blood marker measurements. Also, sleeping in on weekends to catch up was linked to a lower risk of obesity.
The more children play video games, the more likely their schoolwork will suffer and they will experience psychological disturbances, including anxiety, depression and social phobias, according to an international team.
Published in Pediatrics, the research team based in Iowa, Japan and Hong Kong spent two years following 3,000 Grade 3 to 8 students in Singapore. They first attempted to find the markers for video game addiction or what they called pathological gamers using in-class surveys at school and studying those surveys against the diagnostic and statistical manual definitions of addiction. Once they reached a consensus, the team’s analysis found that about eight to 10 per cent of those in the study could be classified as pathological gamers.
They further concluded that, “Greater amounts of gaming lower social competence and greater impulsivity seemed to act as risk factors for becoming pathological gamers, whereas depression, anxiety, social phobias and lower school performance seemed to act as outcomes of pathological gaming.”
The problems also seem to increase as children become more addicted. To be considered a pathological gamer, the person has to be experiencing damage to several areas of life such as school, social, family, occupational and psychological functioning. Pathological gamers also played video games an average of 31 hours per week.
“The gaming must be causing problems for it to be considered pathological,” the authors wrote.
Adolescents are extremely vulnerable to tobacco advertising, according to a new study.
Conducted in Germany, researchers looked at the results of a longitudinal survey of 2,102 teens aged 10 to 17 who had never smoked. After all were exposed to ads for six different brands of cigarettes and eight commercial products at different frequencies, 13 per cent of adolescents had started to smoke after nine months.
It was the exposure to the tobacco ads and not the commercial products that had the biggest effect. Smoking could not be predicted by exposure to ads for clothes or cellphones. But seeing cigarette ads remained a significant predictor of smoking initiation.
“The study results support the notion of a content-related effect of cigarette advertisements and underline the specificity of the relationship between tobacco marketing and teen smoking initiation,” the authors wrote.
The study was published in the latest edition of Pediatrics.
