Background TV disruptive for very young children

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) — Having the television on in the background while preschoolers play with their toys disrupts their efforts to sustain attention, even when they don't pay much attention to it, and may harm their development, researchers report in current issue the journal Child Development.

Paediatricians recommend no TV for children under age two, yet studies show that three quarters of very young children in America live in homes where the TV is on most of the time, notes the research team led by Dr. Marie Evans Schmidt of the Center on Media and Child Health at Children's Hospital Boston.

In a controlled setting, the researchers observed 50 children, who were 12-, 24- and 36-months old, play with a variety of age-appropriate toys for one hour.

For half of the hour, a television was on in the room, showing an episode of the adult game show Jeopardy! with commercials. During the other half-hour, the TV was turned off. They found that when the TV was on in the background the toy play of the children at every age was disrupted, even when they paid scant attention to it, glancing at it for only a few seconds at a time and less than once per minute.

When the TV was on, the children played for significantly shorter periods of time and the time they spent focused on their play was shorter, compared with when the TV was off.

"Background TV, as an ever-changing audiovisual distractor, disrupts children's efforts to sustain attention to ongoing play behaviours," Schmidt said in a press statement.

"Even though the effects of background television on play behaviour found in this study are small, they may have a cumulative impact through large amounts of exposure at home," the investigators wrote. "These may include poorer cognitive and language development and attention deficit symptoms."

"Background TV is potentially a chronic environmental risk factor affecting most American children. Parents should limit their young children's exposure to background television," Schmidt concludes.

Half of kids with peanut allergy don't have Epi-Pen

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) — Children with peanut allergies may run the risk of not receiving life-saving treatment for a severe allergic reaction called anaphylaxis because they don't have their epinephrine autoinjector with them at school, Canadian researchers report.

"When we say take the Epi-Pen on you at all times it means literally on you, and not in an office or somewhere else that might give you a false reassurance," Dr. Moshe Ben-Shoshan of McGill University Health Center in Montreal, a study author, told Reuters Health.

Studies have shown that the main factor in whether an anaphylactic reaction is fatal is whether or not the person was carrying an epinephrine self-injector with them, he added.

Ideally, a person should get a shot of epinephrine within ten minutes of the start of an anaphylactic reaction.

Ben-Shoshan and his colleagues investigated whether children with peanut allergy had Epi-Pens readily available to them at school by surveying 271 Quebec schoolchildren, all with documented peanut allergy.

Four of the children had not been prescribed an autoinjector at all, while 48 percent of the group didn't carry the device with them. More than three quarters of the children who didn't have an Epi-Pen on hand kept it in the school nurse's office, but just 18.5 percent of these offices were staffed by full-time nurses.

It's not clear at what age children can be trusted to give themselves a shot, Ben-Shoshan noted. "For now, every parent has to decide for himself."

But no matter what the child's age, having the Epi-Pen with them will make it more accessible to a person trained to recognise and treat anaphylaxis, he and his colleagues say.

On the other end of the age spectrum, the researcher said, teens may be at increased risk of failing to keep an Epi-Pen on hand. "The problem is usually with teenagers because they don't want to carry things on their body that will make them less fashionable," he said, noting that adolescents also have a sense of "omnipotency" that may make them less concerned about their risk.

Thirty-five states in the US have enacted legislation allowing peanut-allergic students to carry their Epi-Pens with them at school, according to Ben-Shoshan, but no such laws are on the books in Canada.

Neighbourhood may affect high blood pressure risk

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) — Researchers found that people who lived in neighbourhoods with more opportunities for exercise, less crime, better grocery stores and a closer sense of community had a lower risk having high blood pressure — independent of factors such as income and education level.

The findings, published in the journal Epidemiology, suggest that building better neighbourhoods might also improve residents' cardiovascular health.

Walkable streets, recreational areas and better access to healthy foods may make it easier for people to exercise and maintain a healthy diet, explained Dr. Ana V. Diez Roux, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Michigan School of Public Health in Ann Arbor and a co-researcher on the study.

Stress may also play a role, she told Reuters Health. That is, living conditions that make it hard to people to relax and recover from life's daily stresses might contribute to blood pressure problems. The researchers based their findings on 2,612 adults ages 45 to 85 who took part in a larger study of cardiovascular health. All lived either in New York City, Baltimore or Forsyth County in North Carolina.

The study participants were surveyed about the conditions in the mile surrounding their home — including whether they felt safe, whether nearby markets had a good selection of fruits and vegetables, and whether it was easy to walk in the neighbourhood. They were also asked about the neighborhood's "social cohesion" — including whether their neighbours were generally friendly and willing to help each other out.