Exercise and other lifestyle habits that may add over 10 years to your life

Washington D.C, Feb 10: Children's vulnerability towards depression, anxiety, impulsive behaviour, and poor cognitive performance could be determined by considering the hours of sleep they manage to get.

Sleep states are active processes that support the reorganisation of brain circuitry. This makes sleep especially important for children, whose brains are developing and reorganising rapidly.

In a study by researchers from the University of Warwick -- recently published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry -- cases of 11,000 children aged between 9 and 11 years from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development dataset were analyzed to find out the relationship between sleep duration and brain structure.

The study was carried out by researchers Professor Jianfeng Feng, Professor Edmund Rolls, Dr. Wei Cheng and colleagues from the University of Warwick's Department of Computer Science and Fudan University.

Measures of depression, anxiety, impulsive behaviour and poor cognitive performance in the children were associated with shorter sleep duration. Moreover, the depressive problems were associated with short sleep duration one year later.

The reduced brain volume of areas such as orbitofrontal cortex, prefrontal, and temporal cortex, precuneus, and supramarginal gyrus was found to be associated with the shorter sleep duration.

Professor Jianfeng Feng, from the University of Warwick's Department of Computer Science, comments: "The recommended amount of sleep for children 6 to 12 years of age is 9-12 hours. However, sleep disturbances are common among children and adolescents around the world due to the increasing demand on their time from school, increased screen time use, and sports and social activities."

A previous study showed that about 60 per cent of adolescents in the United States receive less than eight hours of sleep on school nights.

Professor Jianfeng Feng further added: "Our findings showed that the total score for behavior problems in children with less than 7 hours sleep was 53 per cent higher on average and the cognitive total score was 7.8 per cent lower on average than for children with 9-11 hours of sleep. It highlights the importance of enough sleep in both cognition and mental health in children."

Professor Edmund Rolls from the University of Warwick's Department of Computer Science also commented: "These are important associations that have been identified between sleep duration in children, brain structure, and cognitive and mental health measures, but further research is needed to discover the underlying reasons for these relationships."

Leading physicians are celebrating a small dose of good news that arrived Tuesday about dexamethasone, a cheap and widely used steroid shown to be able to save lives among COVID-19 patients, but also cautioning against releasing study results by press release during a global health emergency, like in the case of the latest dexamethasone study by University of Oxford.

"It will be great news if dexamethasone, a cheap steroid, really does cut deaths by one-third in ventilated patients with COVID19, but after all the retractions and walk backs, it is unacceptable to tout study results by press release without releasing the paper", Atul Gawande, surgeon and CEO of Haven Healthcare, tweeted.

"Bottom line is, good news," Dr. Fauci, America's foremost infectious diseases expert told a US newswire on Tuesday, soon after the dexamethasone results were announced in the UK.

Fauci, who has long championed the therapeutics-first view said that dexamethasone is a "significant improvement" in the available therapeutic options currently available.

On Medical Twitter and Facebook, doctors broadly agree that dexamethasone use aligns well with the way COVID19 attacks the body's immune system. Fauci said the results in the Oxford study make "perfect sense" in that context.

"We should see the number of people who actually survive go up, if the study holds up," virologist and epidemiologist Dr. Joseph Fair told a television network.

Global coronavirus cases crossed 8 million on Tuesday. In the US, Texas and Florida are facing a new wave of cases after lifting lockdown orders earlier than medical experts recommended. Amidst the relentless graph upwards, the dexamethasone study results injected hope for better survival rates among those most seriously ill.

World Health Organization chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan welcomed the results from the randomised control trial.

Dr Eugene Gu, Founder and CEO of CoolQuit tweeted that he is "genuinely impressed" with the UK dexamethasone trial. This may be a "game changer", he wrote.

"There's no conflict of interest as dexamethasone is a generic steroid. The mechanism of action makes sense because steroids can reduce cytokine storms and overactive immune systems that makes COVID-19 so deadly. The number needed to treat is 8 ventilated patients which is great."

The Oxford study found that dexamethasone reduced deaths by 35 percent in patients who needed treatment with breathing machines and by 20 percent in those only needing supplemental oxygen. Dexamethasone was one of 5 drugs studied in a large clinical trial in the United Kingdom named RECOVERY, short for Randomised Evaluation of COVID-19 Therapy.

Peter Horby, chief investigator of the University of Oxford clinical trial, said dexamethasone is the first drug to be shown to improve survival in COVID-19. Details of the study have not been released. The trial organisers said they made their announcement via a news release because of "the public health importance of these results." According to Horby's public comments, there was a lot of initial resistance to studying steroids.

During the study, 2,104 patients were randomly selected to be given 6 milligrams of dexamethasone once a day (either by mouth or by intravenous injection) for 10 days. That group was compared with 4,321 patients who received the usual care alone.

Researchers estimated that dexamethasone would prevent one death for every eight patients treated while on ventilators and one for every 25 patients on extra oxygen alone.

UK experts have called the study results a breakthrough in the fight against the virus. The researchers have promised they would publish the results soon.

New Delhi, Mar 16: A recent survey across 140 districts of the country shows that about 54 per cent of Indians are finding travelling to be unsafe as the deadly coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic sweeps globally.

The big worry that people have is community transmission, something that researchers from around the world have approximated at 10 per cent of total infections and more common in places like Wuhan in China, South Korea, Iran and Italy.

The months of March to June have historically been high travel season for most Indians, largely due to the summer vacations in schools. "But it seems that Indians do not want to take a chance with this rather scary virus and are either cancelling or postponing their travel plans," concluded the survey by LocalCircles.

The survey gathered more than 22,000 responses from participants in tier one, two and three cities. It said 48 per cent Indians plan to cancel their international business travel for the next four months.

Besides, nearly 38 per cent of respondents said they had to pay cancellation fee to the website, travel agent, airline or railways.

"These are testing times for the entire travel and tourism industry -- airlines, hotels, travel agents as well as small tour and taxi operators. The best solution at this point is to adjust cost structures, stay flexible and work with a collective approach to minimise the period of impact to both citizens and business," said LocalCircles.