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Child fitness to start from schools

Agencies
August 2, 2018

New Delhi, Aug 2: Healthcare experts are arguing that there is a need for an all-inclusive and result oriented fitness for children in India.

Children's health is becoming a matter of concern globally. According to the World Health Organisation obese children tend to fall prey to lifestyle diseases to the extent of 60-70% when they reach their 30s and 40s (the most productive years of their lives)

Being the second most populated country of the world, the situation is even more alarming in India. Statistics provided by Indian Journal of Endocrinology and Metabolism shows that 5.74 to 8.82% school children in India are obese.

Meanwhile, a study published in Pediatric Obesity predicts that India will have about 17 million obese children by 2025. Another study shows that about 97,000 children India suffer from type 1diabetes.

Poor eating habit and sedentary lifestyle among children are two of the major reasons for the declining levels of physical fitness in children, leading to childhood obesity, diabetes and other lifestyle diseases

"It's estimated that a child 20 years from now is likely to suffer from diabetes and heart diseases which becomes unpreventable during adulthood. They can only be controlled" opines Dr. Arbinder Singal, CEO & Co Founder, Fitterfly

While health and fitness education provided in schools is seen as an important tool in dealing with this health issue, experts have noticed that the physical education programs being pursued by the schools in India are either obsolete or inadequate in addressing the emerging health challenges since they mostly revolve around theoretical aspects or random sports.

Education and healthcare experts point out that in India no more than 10% school going children are into active and competitive sports. This is because the schools tend to focus only on the diet of the kids who are expected to represent the school at local, regional, state and national level events, excluding a majority of children who end up as fence-sitters in the PE periods.

Commenting on this Dr Singal said,"It's a tragedy that still many people continue to see physical fitness as something that's required only for athletes or sportsmen. But, they don't realise that physical health is equally important for improved academic results too Also an objective assessment of fitness is a must as that is the only way to know where the child is and where the child ideally should be for his/her age and a gender."

According to Dr Bakul Parekh, Senior Pediatrician "Fitness in children can power them for a healthy future. Schools should focus physical education and school health checkups around physical literacy. It means that children should understand the importance of exercise, fitness and sports. So, there's a need for our PE to move beyond the romantic landscape of sports to general fitness for every child"

Home to the world's largest youth population, experts believe that India needs to introduce a mass Child Fitness programme - a programme that is scientific, workable, accurate and verifiable aided by data and technology.

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Agencies
August 2,2020

Washington, Aug 2: Children under the age of five have between 10 to 100 times greater levels of genetic material of the coronavirus in their noses compared to older children and adults, a study in JAMA Pediatrics said Thursday.

Its authors wrote this meant that young children might be important drivers of Covid-19 transmission within communities -- a suggestion at odds with the current prevailing narrative.

The paper comes as the administration of US President Donald Trump is pushing hard for schools and daycare to reopen in order to kickstart the economy.

Between March 23 and April 27, researchers carried out nasal swab tests on 145 Chicago patients with mild to moderate illness within one week of symptom onset.

The patients were divided into three groups: 46 children younger than five-years-old, 51 children aged five to 17 years, and 48 adults aged 18 to 65 years.

The team, led by Dr Taylor Heald-Sargent of the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital, observed, "a 10-fold to 100-fold greater amount of SARS-CoV-2 in the upper respiratory tract of young children."

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The authors added that a recent lab study had demonstrated that the more viral genetic material was present, the more infectious virus could be grown.

It has also previously been shown that children with high viral loads of the respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) are more likely to spread the disease.

"Thus, young children can potentially be important drivers of SARS-CoV-2 spread in the general population," the authors wrote.

"Behavioral habits of young children and close quarters in school and daycare settings raise concern for SARS-CoV-2 amplification in this population as public health restrictions are eased," they concluded.

The new findings are at odds with the current view among health authorities that young children -- who, it has been well established, are far less likely to fall seriously ill from the virus -- don't spread it much to others either.

However, there has been fairly little research on the topic so far.

One recent study in South Korea found children aged 10 to 19 transmitted Covid-19 within households as much as adults, but children under nine transmitted the virus at lower rates.

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News Network
February 26,2020

New York, Feb 26:  A new wearable sensor that works in conjunction with artificial intelligence (AI) technology could help doctors remotely detect critical changes in heart failure patients days before a health crisis occurs, says a study.

The researchers said the system could eventually help avert up to one in three heart failure readmissions in the weeks following initial discharge from the hospital and help patients sustain a better quality of life.

"This study shows that we can accurately predict the likelihood of hospitalisation for heart failure deterioration well before doctors and patients know that something is wrong," says the study's lead author Josef Stehlik from University of Utah in the US.

"Being able to readily detect changes in the heart sufficiently early will allow physicians to initiate prompt interventions that could prevent rehospitalisation and stave off worsening heart failure," Stehlik added.

According to the researchers, even if patients survive, they have poor functional capacity, poor exercise tolerance and low quality of life after hospitalisations.

"This patch, this new diagnostic tool, could potentially help us prevent hospitalizations and decline in patient status," Stehlik said.

For the findings, published in the journal Circulation: Heart Failure, the researchers followed 100 heart failure patients, average age 68, who were diagnosed and treated at four veterans administration (VA) hospitals in Utah, Texas, California, and Florida.

After discharge, participants wore an adhesive sensor patch on their chests 24 hours a day for up to three months.

The sensor monitored continuous electrocardiogram (ECG) and motion of each subject.

This information was transmitted from the sensor via Bluetooth to a smartphone and then passed on to an analytics platform, developed by PhysIQ, on a secure server, which derived heart rate, heart rhythm, respiratory rate, walking, sleep, body posture and other normal activities.

Using artificial intelligence, the analytics established a normal baseline for each patient. When the data deviated from normal, the platform generated an indication that the patient's heart failure was getting worse.

Overall, the system accurately predicted the impending need for hospitalization more than 80 per cent of the time.

On average, this prediction occurred 10.4 days before a readmission took place (median 6.5 days), the study said.

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Agencies
April 17,2020

Washington DC, Apr 17: In recent research, scientists have linked the emotional, social and psychiatric problems in children and adolescents with higher levels of genetic vulnerability for adult depression. The study implies that the genetics passed from parents may be linked with psychiatric problems in children and adolescents and may also leading to depression in adults.

University of Queensland scientists made the finding while analysing the genetic data of more than 42,000 children and adolescents from seven cohorts across Finland, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and the UK.

Professor Christel Middeldorp said that researchers have also found a link with a higher genetic vulnerability for insomnia, neuroticism and body mass index.

"By contrast, study participants with higher genetic scores for educational attainment and emotional well-being were found to have reduced childhood problems," Professor Middeldorp said.

"We calculated a person's level of genetic vulnerability by adding up the number of risk genes they had for a specific disorder or trait and then made adjustments based on the level of importance of each gene We found the relationship was mostly similar across ages," Middeldorp added.

The results indicate there are shared genetic factors that affect a range of psychiatric and related traits across a person's lifespan.

Middeldorp said that around 50 per cent of children and adolescents with psychiatric problems, such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), continue to experience mental disorders as adults, and are at risk of disengaging with their school community among other social and emotional problems.

"Our findings are important as they suggest this continuity between childhood and adult traits is partly explained by genetic risk," the Professor said.

"Individuals at risk of being affected should be the focus of attention and targeted treatment," Middeldorp continued.

"Although the genetic vulnerability is not accurate enough at this stage to make individual predictions about how a person's symptoms will develop over time, it may become so in the future, in combination with other risk factors. And, this may support precision medicine by providing targeted treatments to children at the highest risk of persistent emotional and social problems," Middeldorp added.

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