Youngsters Face Heart Health Risks From Too Much Screen Time

The following is excerpted from an online article posted by HealthDay.

The time children and teens spend video gaming, scrolling through social media, or watching TV could be putting their future heart health at risk, a new study says.

Each additional hour of screen time is associated with an increase in heart risk factors like blood pressure, cholesterol, and blood sugar levels, researchers reported today in the Journal of the American Heart Association.

“It’s a small change per hour, but when screen time accumulates to three, five or even six hours a day, as we saw in many adolescents, that adds up,” lead investigator David Horner, a researcher at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, said in a news release.

“Multiply that across a whole population of children, and you’re looking at a meaningful shift in early cardiometabolic risk that could carry into adulthood,” Horner added.

For the study, researchers pooled data from more than 1,000 participants in two Danish studies of childhood health.

Each child received a heart health risk score based on factors like waist size, blood pressure, “good” HDL cholesterol, triglycerides, and blood sugar, researchers said. Parents reported on the kids’ screen time.

Every hour a child or teen spent glued to a screen caused those risk factors to tilt toward the bad, results showed.

A child’s sleep patterns contributed to this risk, researchers added.

Both shorter sleep duration and hitting the sack later intensified the relationship between screen time and heart health risk, results show. Kids and teens who had less sleep showed a significantly higher risk associated with the same amount of screen time.

Since this was an observational study, the research cannot prove a direct cause-and-effect relationship between screen time and heart health, researchers noted.

Source: HealthDay
https://www.healthday.com/health-news/child-health/youngsters-face-heart-health-risks-from-too-much-screen-time