 |
submitted by /u/mubukugrappa [link] [comments] |
Teens who participate in extracurriculars, get less screen time, have better mental health: A new study finds that teens, especially girls, have better mental health when they spend more time taking part in extracurricular activities, like sports and art, and less time in front of screens
Teens who participate in extracurriculars, get less screen time, have better mental health: A new study finds that teens, especially girls, have better mental health when they spend more time taking part in extracurricular activities, like sports and art, and less time in front of screens
https://ift.tt/3emgj6f November 03, 2020 at 11:21AM https://ift.tt/1R552o9
Teens who participate in extracurriculars, get less screen time, have better mental health: A new study finds that teens, especially girls, have better mental health when they spend more time taking part in extracurricular activities, like sports and art, and less time in front of screens
|
submitted by /u/mubukugrappa [link] [comments] |
T-cell study gains insight into COVID-19 immunity, asymptomatic people could be safer
T-cell study gains insight into COVID-19 immunity, asymptomatic people could be safer Scientists presenting the findings, from 100 non-hospitalised COVID-19 patients in Britain, said they were "reassuring" but did not mean people cannot in rare cases be infected twice with the disease. https://ift.tt/eA8V8J
There May Be a Link Between COVID-19 and Preterm Birth, CDC Says
Contracting COVID-19 during pregnancy may put expectant mothers at a higher risk of delivering early, according to new data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The CDC’s new report is based on data from almost 4,500 people who were diagnosed with COVID-19 during pregnancy and provided public health departments with information about their pregnancy outcomes. Roughly 3,900 mothers gave information about their baby’s gestational age. Within that group, nearly 13% of babies (about 500) were born preterm—slightly but significantly higher than the 2019 national rate of about 10%.
Preterm birth—a birth that occurs before the 37th week of pregnancy—has been on the rise around the world in recent years, though researchers aren’t entirely sure why. Preterm birth is the leading cause of death for children under five years old, according to the World Health Organization. Babies born early can experience both short- and long-term health problems, which tend to be more serious the earlier a baby is born.
Understanding a possible connection between COVID-19 and preterm birth could help inform obstetric care for the rest of the pandemic. Many of the characteristics that put people at increased risk for severe COVID-19 infection, including preexisting health conditions, also increase the risk of preterm birth. Black women also experience higher-than-average rates of both preterm birth and COVID-19 infection. The CDC’s dataset disproportionately included women of color, many of whom had prior health problems, so it’s possible the data reflects some of those preexisting disparities.
The CDC’s report didn’t specify why pregnant women may be at risk of delivering early, but prior studies suggest expectant mothers who get sick with coronavirus are more likely than the general population to have severe symptoms and require intensive care. There may be a link between the two findings.
The report also found that babies were fairly unlikely to contract COVID-19 in the womb. Test results were not available for most babies included in the study, but among the 610 with results available, only 2.6% tested positive within a week of birth. Women diagnosed with COVID-19 a week or less before giving birth appeared to be the most likely to pass the virus to their child, according to the agency.
Half of the babies that tested positive for COVID-19 were born early, but this high positivity rate may reflect better testing practices within intensive care units, the report says.
The CDC’s recommendations for pregnant women and their families are the same as for the general population: wear masks in public spaces, practice social distancing and wash hands frequently. Pregnant women should also stay up-to-date with vaccinations and prenatal appointments to ensure general health, the CDC says.
Don’t Jog, It’s Too Dangerous: Part 2
Dr. DeVany’s title quote has haunted me for years; I typically ponder the significance of this deadpan assertion during my morning jog. “Come on, this can’t be dangerous, can it?” I assert that my morning jog helps me enjoy nature, clear my mind for the impending busy day in front of a screen or microphone, and seemingly contributes to both my fitness base and my health.
But only if I go slow!
That is the revelation I have come to appreciate over decades of devoted endurance training. Walking is perhaps most health and longevity promoting activity of them all, the ultimate human experience of life and planet that our genes require daily for healthy functioning. This is especially true as you age. A UCLA study of the elderly revealed that walking more than 4,000 steps a day makes for a thicker hippocampus, faster information processing, and improved executive function.1 Sedentary folks were found to have thinner brains, lower overall cognitive function and increased disease risk. From a base of frequent daily walking (and other forms of low level movement like yoga), if you are fit enough to jog at a heart rate below “180 minus age” in beats per minute, there is pretty strong evidence that you are boosting health. If your “jogging” routinely drifts above that important MAF cutoff (surely the context for DeVany’s warning), you are likely actualizing the quote and endangering your health.
This article details how I destroyed my health during a six-month binge of high volume aerobic exercise (playing Speedgolf, where you run around five miles while playing 18 holes as fast as possible) after a long layoff from real training. I overestimated my aerobic maximum heart rate by 12 beats (and exceeded that beeper limit on the golf course frequently as well!) and experienced that familiar steady spiral into declining energy and burnout. First, I delivered a free testosterone reading that was clinically low—as in, a candidate for hormone replacement. Next, on the heels of a two strenuous workouts in 100-degree temperatures over four days, I found myself in the hospital with extreme dehydration, a ruptured appendix and emergency surgery. Months of complications and follow up surgeries ensued. Doctors might assert that an appendix will blow out randomly, but I’m certain that my problems were driven by the six-month chronic cardio binge.
With five months of enforced rest and trading my slightly too difficult cardio for easy jogging and walking (after surgeries), I doubled my testosterone levels—going from clinically low to exceeding the 95th percentile for my age. In the aftermath of the ordeal, which coincided with me hitting the big Hawaii 5-0, I turned my attention to fitness goals better suited for longevity: building power, speed, explosiveness, flexibility, balance, and mobility. I increased my devotion to sprinting and strength training, and integrated the wonderful drills and skills highlighted in the basic running drills and advanced running drills videos and morning flexibility/mobility exercises video. I’ve gone from an aging ex-triathlete still capable of jogging or pedaling (increasingly slowly with each passing year) to high jumping at a world class level for my 55-59 age group. Granted, attrition in this event is a driving factor in my positioning in the rankings, but in many respects I am a fitter, stronger, faster human than the narrowly adapted endurance athlete I was decades ago.
Here are some ideas to trade steady state cardio sessions for sessions that deliver broader fitness benefits and are more fun, more challenging, and more rewarding.
What to Do Instead of Steady State Cardio
Morning Flexibility, Mobility, Dynamic Stretching, and Core Strengthening
The sequence of exercises that I present in the video take about 12 minutes, and I’m on a good streak of daily execution for nearly four years now. What’s happened with my recent transition away from my consistent morning jog is that I continue to add more and more fun stuff to the daily template. At first, it’s extremely important for habit forming to design an initial routine that’s easy and doable, meaning short in duration. Once you build some momentum, you can add to the complexity and degree of difficulty of your routine. Today, I burn up at least 45 minutes with an exact sequence of exercises that I repeat every day. I regularly add, subtract, and modify the sequence, but it’s important to have a repeatable routine that doesn’t require creative energy. This way, you can relax and get into the zone of simply counting out the desired reps of each drill and move on to the next. You’ll see this same dynamic in a flowing yoga class.
I’m not suggesting that you squeeze a 45-minute routine into your already busy mornings, but starting small with a 12-minute session can be a great way to broaden your fitness experience. For me, the lengthy and quite strenuous morning routine has pushed my morning jog into the “optional” category. As mentioned in the previous post about the paltry requirement for optimizing aerobic fitness (Dr. O’Keefe’s Goldilocks Zone), shifting from daily jogging to a few per week causes no loss in aerobic conditioning. Furthermore, an ambitious routine of flexibility/mobility drills without break from start to finish is aerobic in nature. I obtain all the cardiovascular benefits of jogging in addition to all the additional flexibility, mobility, core strengthening, and balancing benefits.
Walk – Jog – Jump
We’ll discuss the broad-based benefits of jumping in a future post. Mark says, “Nothing cuts you up like sprinting,” due to the profound genetic signaling that occurs from brief, all-out high impact sprinting on flat ground. Any act of jumping falls into the same esteemed category. You are building bone density, improving the resiliency of your muscles and connective tissue, and sending a strong genetic signal to reduce excess body fat.2 The reason for the latter is the same as with sprinting—the penalty for carrying excess fat is severe when you are trying to get off the ground.
Head out the door for your session on the roads or trails at your aerobic jogging pace. After 10 minutes of warmup, do some jumping drills of your choice. You can simply stand in place and jump up and down off of two feet. Dr. Michael Roizen, co-author with Dr. Oz of the popular You: The Owner’s Manual book series and Chief Wellness Officer at the Cleveland Clinic, recommends jumping up and down 20 times every morning and evening to preserve bone mass in the spine and lower extremities. “Jumping is thought to create an electrical current that stimulates the bone and thickens internal bone mass,” says Roizen.
Options for jumping abound, pun intended. You can get a three-step running start and jump off of one foot like you are going for a slam dunk, land and repeat three times. You can do some explosive skipping, trying to maximize the height of each leap into the air. You can try the bicycle drill as seen at 1:18 in the Advanced Running Drills video below. Perhaps you’ll want to try some vertical jumps onto a park bench or retaining wall, jump over a bush or traffic cone, or other appealing challenges along your route.
Remember, your explosive efforts should last between 10-20 seconds and no longer. Review the HIIT versus HIRT post to understand why 10-20 seconds is the sweet spot. After you do your jumping sequence, walk for five times as long as your burst lasted—so that’s between 50 seconds and 1 min, 40 seconds. After you feel fresh and recovered, resume your jogging pace slowly and eventually work back up to your “180 minus age” heart rate. After 1-3 minutes of jogging, initiate another jumping sequence.
Cardio Plus Calisthenics
If your go-to workout is on a cardio machine in the gym, do you thing for 5-10 minutes and then take a quick break for a set of burpees, squats, pullups, mini-bands, TRX moves, or other exercises you’re fond of at the gym. Take your time returning to your cardio exercise, and resume at a very slow pace. Work up to your usual aerobic training pace for a few minutes, then dismount again for different activity.
Power Walk
You’ll completely bypass steady state cardio in this session; you’ll either be walking or jogging very slowly (20-40 beats below your MAF heart rate), or doing a 10-20 second explosive effort. This could be an uphill sprint, a set of stadium or building stairs, or a few kettlebell swings if you are taking laps around the block and returning to your garage every ten minutes.
For those dutiful endurance athletes monitoring training heart rates to stay below MAF, note that the explosive efforts in each of the aforementioned formats will cause your heart rate to exceed aerobic maximum. You’ll hear the beep somewhere between the middle and the end of your burst, and it may take 30-60 seconds for heart rate to return to MAF or below. This is nothing to be concerned about and will not hinder your aerobic development like exercising for sustained periods above MAF at many workouts. Exercise physiologists call the heart rate zone above MAF where you still feel pretty comfortable but are burning more glucose and less fat the “black hole.” This is a no-man’s land where you are sabotaging desired aerobic benefits but not going hard enough for a truly anaerobic effort that can stimulate performance breakthroughs when done occasionally and correctly.
JFW (Just F@$&ing Walk!)
Let’s put in a plug here for trading the occasional jog for a walk. The common fitness edict of, “consistency is key” can easily be misapplied to the extent that the daily and weekly application of exercise stress is not adequately balanced with recovery time and down time. I’d like you to view the “consistency is key” principle over a wider time frame that the typical obsession with delivering a tidy weekly schedule of repeat template workouts (e.g., Sunday long run, Tuesday night track intervals, Thursday spin class, etc.) Realize the body is really good at preserving fitness even with the occasional week or month of drastically reduced training. Popular studies from renowned exercise physiologist Dr. David Costill of the Ball State University Human Performance Lab reveal that extreme tapering delivers outstanding results. One decades-old Costill study of elite swimmers revealed that reducing swimming volume by 67 percent for 15 days delivered a four percent performance increase! A study from McMaster University in Toronto of serious runners averaging 50 miles per week showed the control group that cut volume by 88 percent (six miles a week, but featuring hard intervals) improved performance by 22 percent!
If you are reluctant to embrace any workout that doesn’t introduce discomfort and sweat, realize that a brisk walk still delivers an outstanding aerobic training effect that will support peak performance efforts at all faster speeds. Envision a cruise ship with 12 massive turbine engines. On the open seas with all 12 at full throttle, the mighty ship can hit 25 knots. When cruising into port at two knots, imagine only two engines are running at half power. However, those two engines still make a contribution to the effort when cruising at full speed. You are easily doubling your resting heart rate during a walk recruiting the same aerobic enzymes and muscle fibers to perform that you call upon when you deliver a peak performance effort. For endurance athletes, walking is a low stress way to build and build more fitness without the risk of breakdown and burnout from black hole workout.
Hopefully these suggestions will get your creative juices flowing when you head out the door for future workouts. You can let your imagination run wild here, unleash your childlike spirit, and look for forgotten ways to engage your body with nature for physical challenge. Take inspiration from Nutritious Movement queen Katy Bowman, MS—here’s some people having fun on one of her “Move Your DNA weekends.”
References
The post Don’t Jog, It’s Too Dangerous: Part 2 appeared first on Mark's Daily Apple.
Defusing the “Benadryl challenge”: Discussing danger with teens
http://ifttt.com/images/no_image_card.png
Let’s start with the bottom line: Parents of teens need to help them understand that just because they have been “challenged” to do something doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. But as simple as that sounds to us, it’s tough for many teens to grasp.
The latest challenge in the news is the “Benadryl challenge” that appeared on TikTok, a popular social media video platform. The idea was to take a whole lot of Benadryl (diphenhydramine, a common antihistamine) in order to cause a high, with hallucinations. While it’s true that diphenhydramine can make you high and make you hallucinate, when you take too much of it you can also have seizures, pass out, have heart problems, or even die. And indeed, emergency rooms across the country have treated overdoses of diphenhydramine, and at least one death has been attributed to the challenge.
Dangerous challenges appeal to teens
To TikTok’s credit, they say that they have taken down the videos and are monitoring for any new ones. When I searched the site myself, nothing came up when I searched “Benadryl.” But it’s not like it’s the only challenge out there on social media. We’ve had the cinnamon challenge, the nutmeg challenge, and others like the “Kiki challenge” where people get out of their slow-moving cars and dance alongside them, or the “skull-breaker challenge” which, well, speaks for itself. Getting rid of all challenges is not really possible; it’s a game of whack-a-mole.
The reason teens do this stuff is actually rooted in evolutionary biology. The adolescent and young adult brain is growing and changing rapidly to meet the needs of their particular moment in life. As teens enter adulthood and become independent, they need to be able to learn a lot of information quickly. Their brains are set up to help them do that.
Entering adulthood and becoming independent also requires being brave and taking risks. There is so much that is new and scary as you enter adulthood, which is why many of us are glad we are past that part of life. The development of the adolescent brain takes that into account, too: the last part of the brain to develop is the prefrontal cortex, the part that helps us control our impulses and avoid risk. By the mid-20s or so, the process is complete.
Working with the teen brain
This doesn’t mean that parents, teachers, and others should just throw up their hands and quit trying to talk to teens about making safer decisions. We absolutely need to keep trying, day after day. But it does mean that we have to understand why these challenges may have so much appeal, and why teens may not fully appreciate the risks. It means that our efforts need to be not just ongoing, but understanding. We need to work with the teen brain, not against it.
There’s no easy way to do that. But here are some ideas:
- Listen as much as you talk. Ask questions. The more you understand about their behavior, the better chance you will have of finding strategies that work.
- Don’t jump to judgment. Besides the fact that they are wired to make impulsive and sometimes dangerous decisions, if teens feel judged they are less likely to listen to anything you have to say.
- Try to engage your teen in coming up with ideas to keep him or her safe. Not only do they know themselves and their peers better than you do, they may be more invested in an idea they come up with themselves.
- Ask for help. Teens don’t always listen to parents, but they may listen to other adults in their lives. And definitely, if you feel like your child is doing things that are dangerous and you can’t stop them, talk to your doctor.
Follow me on Twitter @drClaire
The post Defusing the “Benadryl challenge”: Discussing danger with teens appeared first on Harvard Health Blog.
Kids Are Participating in COVID-19 Vaccine Trials. Here’s What Their Parents Think
Katelyn Evans, 16, has never met Randy Kerr—and there’s no reason she should have. It was 66 years ago that Kerr, then 6, became briefly famous, receiving the first injection of Jonas Salk’s experimental polio vaccine during the massive field trial of hundreds of thousands of children in the spring of 1954. History notes that the vaccine worked, and the children who stepped forward to receive either the actual shot or a placebo were heroically dubbed the Polio Pioneers.
Evans is a pioneer of the modern age, one of an eventual group of 600 children in the 16-to-17 year-old age group (along with 2,000 more between 12 and 15) to volunteer to be part of a Phase 3 trial to test an experimental COVID-19 vaccine made by the multinational pharmaceutical giant Pfizer. The company had already enrolled 42,113 adult volunteers in its Phase 2 and 3 trials, but only recently did the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) give approval to include children. And Evans, a high school junior in Cincinnati, was among the earliest, receiving her first of two injections on Oct. 14, at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital.
“She was the youngest one to receive the vaccine at that point in time,” says her mother, Laurie Evans, an elementary school teacher. In the spring, the family saw a news report that Pfizer was looking for volunteers and Evans and both of her children signed up. “Katelyn was the only one who got the call,” Laurie says. “I know from the response we’ve gotten that there are some people out there who don’t think this is the smartest thing for us to have done. But I’m more afraid of COVID than the vaccine.”
With good reason. The 8.8 million Americans who have contracted the disease include about 800,000 children, with the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) reporting a 13% increase in total pediatric cases in just the first two weeks of October. Children with COVID-19 may typically fare better than adults who catch the virus, but they can still become severely ill: some 3.6% of total U.S. COVID-19 patients who have had to be hospitalized have been children, according to the AAP. That reality makes volunteering for the Pfizer field trial more than an act of public-service heroism; it is also a potential act of preventive medicine.
Certainly, that’s the way Sharat Chandra saw things. Sharat was already part of the Pfizer adult trial and when word first went around that children would soon be included too, he and his wife discussed the possibility of enrolling their 12-year-old son Abhinav, and then posed the question to him.
“I raised it to my son and we felt that it might be a good thing for him because if he got the vaccine, it could protect him from getting the virus himself,” Sharat says. “Because he was attending school in person, we felt that it would be good to minimize his risk for infection, if we can.”
Even younger kids could eventually receive the same experimental prevention as part of expanded trials before long. The FDA requires all drugs submitted for approval have a pediatric plan, but that rule is lenient to the point of being no rule at all. “The plan can be simply ‘We don’t have a plan,’” says Dr. Robert Frenck, director of the Cincinnati Children’s Hospitals Center for Vaccine Research. That means a COVID-19 vaccine tested only in adults and then approved could potentially be prescribed off-label to kids—but doctors don’t especially like that idea.
“It’s a hard sell for pediatricians to say to parents, ‘I have a licensed vaccine that hasn’t been tested in the pediatric age group, but I want to give it to your children,’” says Frenck.
For that reason, he and other doctors are advocating for robust testing in the 12-17 age group, pausing to see how that goes, and, if the results are good, continuing to test in younger cohorts. “We are looking to test in older kids and then age de-escalate, even down to as young as six months,” he says.
For now, they’re a long way from that. Pfizer is currently the only company testing its COVID-19 vaccine in children of any age and the eventual sample group of 2,600 total children is not yet fully assembled. Still, while testing in children is not a requirement for the vaccine to be released and be used in kids, Frenck believes that other vaccine developers will take their cue from Pfizer and develop pediatric testing plans of their own. “My assumption is most of the companies—or many of the companies—will follow suit,” he says.
There are, of course, risks associated with choosing to participate in these studies. No experimental vaccine is 100% safe; determining the degree of risk is part of the reason for field trials in the first place. The Pfizer vaccine does not use a killed or weakened virus to trigger the immune response. Rather, it uses messenger RNA (mRNA) from SARS-CoV-2—the virus that causes COVID-19—which prompts the body’s cells to produce coronavirus proteins. That, in turn, causes the immune system to produce antibodies. A vaccine with no whole virus—killed or weakened—makes some parents more comfortable, but the field trial protocols nonetheless call for warning them of all possible adverse outcomes.
“They sent us a whole 11-page document of all the ifs and whys and hows and whats,” says Evans. “They told us [the side effects] that people got in the Phase 1 trials. And it was like a little bit of achy body. A low-grade fever. Little things like that. Nothing drastic or dire.”
Still, the overall process involves both commitment and a certain tolerance for pain and inconvenience. Subjects are enrolled in the trial for two years and in the early phases must report for periodic blood draws and nasal swabs, followed by half a dozen quicker check-ups over the remainder of the two-year period. None of that thrilled Abhinav.
“When we first spoke to him, he wasn’t too excited to be honest,” says Sharat. “And it was not so much the vaccine itself. He wasn’t too excited about the blood draw part of it. That was the main thing he wasn’t happy about.”
The families haven’t been happy about some other things either—not least the inevitable Internet trolling that seems to follow even the most virtuous act.
“I’ve gotten a few comments on Facebook—’What kind of mother would let her kids do that?'” says Evans. “But Katelyn has also had teachers and other students in the hallway say, ‘Hey, my gosh, that’s so cool’ and, ‘You’re so brave!'”
Neither the Chandras nor the Evanses feel especially brave, insisting that they trust the science and the assurances of the doctors who explained the risks and the benefits of participating. One thing they do worry about is whether or not their kids are receiving placebo or the actual injection. Laurie Evans frets that the two-year commitment to which Katelyn agreed means that, if she received a placebo she might be discouraged from getting the actual vaccine when it is approved since that would contaminate the ongoing research. Katelyn herself is concerned about that scenario—especially if her school requires kids to be vaccinated in order to attend. Laurie reports that Pfizer has so far been surprisingly vague on that point so far—not yet spelling out what it will expect from its placebo recipients. But the families have a fail-safe option: “We’re allowed to back out of the trial at any point,” Laurie says.
For now, they have no such plans. The long-ago polio pioneers were lauded as heroes—as they certainly were in an era in which science knew far less about immunology. The COVID-19 pioneers may not receive the same applause, but even if the risks they face are smaller, the nobility of their actions is not.
“We feel like normal, every-day people that are just doing a little teeny-tiny thing that we believe will help lots of people,” says Evans. “Someone has to.”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Popular Posts
|
