Increased activity levels help children maintain a healthy weight.

Children play harder and longer when their child care centers provide portable play equipment (like balls, hoola hoops, jump ropes and riding toys), more opportunities for active play and physical activity training and education for staff and students, according to a study published in the January 2008 issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
Researchers at the University of North Carolina School of Public Health examined environmental factors that encourage children to be active with greater intensity and for longer periods of time, Physorg.com said.
Increased activity levels help children maintain a healthy weight, the researchers say, which is critical as obesity rates climb nationwide, especially among children.
“Childhood obesity is an epidemic that threatens the future health of our nation,“ said Dianne Ward, EdD, MS, director of the School of Public Health nutrition department’s intervention and policy division and a co-author of the study.
“We know that about 57 percent of all 3- to 5-year-olds in the United States attend child care centers, so it’s important to understand what factors will encourage them to be more active, and, hopefully, less likely to become obese.“
Researchers assessed the physical and social environmental factors thought to influence healthy weight at 20 childcare centers across North Carolina.
Then they evaluated the physical activity levels of children attending the centers. Additional data were gathered through interviews and documents provided by the child care directors.
The study showed that children had more moderate and vigorous physical activity and fewer minutes of sedentary activity when their center had more portable play equipment, including balls, hoola hoops, jump ropes and riding toys, offered more opportunities for active play (inside and outside), and had physical activity training and education for staff and students.
Stationary equipment, like climbing structures, swings and balance beams, were associated with lower intensity physical activity, researchers said, but are beneficial to other aspects of child development, such as motor and social skills.
The researchers also noted that centers with more computer and TV equipment actually scored better on activity levels.
“It’s unlikely that TV and computers promoted active behavior,“ Ward said, “but it could be that centers that have the resources to buy media equipment may also spend more on equipment and activities that promote physical activity and provide supplemental training and education for staff.“
Researchers said children in centers that ranked higher on supportive environment criteria in the study receive approximately 80 more minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity and 140 fewer minutes of sedentary activity per week compared to centers having less supportive environments.

Obesity can weaken the body’s immune system and reduce its ability to fight off infections, according to scientists.
According to Guardian, previous studies have hinted at a link between obesity and increased risk of bacterial infections, but there has been little research into how serious the effects are.
It is a pressing issue because obesity has reached epidemic proportions. In the UK, more than a fifth of adults are obese and of the remaining population half of men and a third of women are overweight.
Worldwide, there are an estimated 300 million obese people and obesity is already linked to heart disease, diabetes and premature death.
In their experiment, researchers led by Salomon Amar at Boston University infected obese mice with bacteria which cause gum disease. They found that compared with lean mice, the obese mice showed a 40 percent greater increase in tooth decay and loss of bone 10 days after being infected.
Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Dec. 11, the Boston researchers found that the obese mice also had more bacteria around their gums compared with lean mice, concluding that this was due to their inability to mount a proper immune attack on the bugs.
This meant the bacteria could linger in the mouth and cause more damage.
Though it is unclear exactly what causes obesity to affect the immune response, the researchers suggested that gaining weight might upset a mechanism in the body that reacts to foreign organisms.
They added that the effect would have implications for many bacterial infections.

Scans and blood tests sold by private health companies may be at best useless and at worst dangerous, says a leading specialist in preventive medicine.
“Full body scans“, which claim to spot early signs of disease, may often find benign abnormalities while missing real problems, says Professor Nicholas Wald, BBC said.
At the same time, scanner radiation may actually increase cancer risk, he wrote in the Journal of Medical Screening.
The Department of Health is due to issue a report on the issue next week.
People can pay hundreds of pounds for private screening, which can involve a whole range of scans and tests to pick up potential problems.
They are designed to offer “peace of mind“ to people who may not be suffering from any symptoms but who would like assurance that they have little to worry about.
But Professor Wald said in fact screening “always causes anxiety“.
“Many abnormalities turn out to be false-positives frequently after sleepless nights waiting for the results of a definitive diagnostic test or procedure,“ he wrote.
“In medical screening, there is always some harm, which is only acceptable if there are also confirmed benefits that outweigh the harm.“
The article singled out a brochure from Saga Insurance, which offered heart, colon, bone density, cholesterol and diabetes screening for £530.
The heart scan appeared to be a relatively poor tool for spotting problems, he said, while the benefits and harm of a virtual colonoscopy by CT scan had yet to be established.
Bone density scanning was a poor test for osteoporosic fractures, as was cholesterol testing for ischaemic heart disease, while screening for diabetes was still of “uncertain value“.
Screening was being presented as desirable on the basis of a belief in its value, rather than on evidence of that, he added.
John Giles, an NHS consultant radiologist and clinical director of Lifescan, which provides the tests for Saga, rejected Professor Wald’s assertions.
“We’re not offering a full body scans in any event. This is targeted screening which gives very clear results and is unlikely to cause unnecessary worry.“
“You can’t have a one size fits all policy: some people don’t want to know, some people do. Screening is a personal decision and people are fed up with this paternalistic approach which tells them they can’t make choices for themselves.“

Here’s another reason to throw away the cigarettes: Smoking, already known to cause lung cancer, heart disease and stroke, also raises one’s risk for the most common form of diabetes, researchers said.
According to Reuters, smokers faced a 44 percent increased risk of developing Type 2 diabetes when compared to nonsmokers, the Swiss researchers found.
Dr. Carole Willi of the University of Lausanne in Switzerland and colleagues analyzed 25 studies exploring the connection between smoking and diabetes published between 1992 and 2006, with a total of 1.2 million participants tracked for up to 30 years.
They found risk was even higher for heavy smokers. Those who puffed on at least 20 cigarettes a day had a 61 percent higher risk for diabetes than nonsmokers.
Quitting smoking cut the risk, with former smokers seeing a 23 percent higher risk than nonsmokers, far lower than the risk for current smokers, they reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
“On a public health level, this is very important because diabetes incidence is dramatically increasing. The avoidance of diabetes would then be another good reason for smokers to quit or for nonsmokers not to begin,“ Willi said by e-mail.
Type 2 diabetes, the form of the disease often associated with excess body weight, poor diet and a sedentary lifestyle, is becoming increasingly common in many countries.
Cigarette smoking is the leading preventable cause of death globally, killing about 4 million people a year or about 9 percent of deaths worldwide, the researchers noted.
In addition to causing most lung cancer cases as well as other types of cancer, it also can lead to heart attack, stroke, chronic lung disease and other illnesses.
“The consequences of this finding are also important because both diabetes and cigarette smoking are major cardiovascular risk factors,“ Willi said.
Willi noted that the research was not designed in a way that could conclude that smoking actually caused diabetes in the people in the 25 studies who developed it.
But Willi said the fact that more smoking led to a higher diabetes risk suggested that smoking was causing the disease. In addition, smoking preceded the development of diabetes in the participants in all the studies, Willi said.
Smoking can lead to insulin resistance, the researchers said--meaning that it can interfere with how well the body uses insulin. Insulin resistance usually precedes Type 2 diabetes.
In an editorial accompanying the research, Eric Ding and Dr. Frank Hu of the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston said public health recommendations for preventing Type 2 diabetes should include an anti-smoking message.

Today’s mine haul tracks are massive vehicles in which drivers have limited vision and cannot see anything within around 30 meters. If a smaller vehicle on the mine site gets in the way of one of these monsters, the consequences can be dire.
CSIRO Exploration & Mining’s Dr Patrick Glynn is leading a research project to help solve this problem by developing a 360 degree proximity detection system.
“We took a standard Doppler radar system and adapted it with integrated signal processing,“ Dr Glynn says, ScienceDaily reported.
“The technology will alert the driver if a hidden object is moving relative to the mine haul truck, what direction it is moving, what its rate of change is, and whether a collision will occur. In all cases the system reports to the driver in one tenth of a second, far shorter than the average reaction time for a driver of about one second.“
While the research is still in its development stage, a prototype has been tested at Goonyella riverside, one of the largest open cut coal mines in Australia, located in Queensland’s Bowen basin southwest of Mackay.
Current plans are to tie in the system with an existing reversing camera and monitor. Additional video cameras will automatically display a detected vehicle on the monitor, along with its speed and position.
“The real challenge is to provide information in a natural way so that the driver does not have to take eyes off the road. Drivers already have a lot on their hands and should not be overloaded with information,“ Dr Glynn says.
“In a recent accident in South Africa, a light vehicle came between two haul trucks. Dust hid the light vehicle from the second truck which ran straight over it.
“I want to avoid a repeat of any incident such as this. If they had effective collision avoidance technology on board, they could have taken evasive action.“
The Australian Coal Association Research Program, which is funding this research, awarded Dr Glynn a 2007 ACARP Award for Research Excellence.

Elderly people with high blood pressure may be more likely to develop thinking and learning problems that can lead to dementia, researchers said.
Hypertension was linked to one of two types of mild cognitive impairment, a condition that can foreshadow the development of dementia, but not the type strongly associated with Alzheimer’s disease, according to the study published in the journal Archives of Neurology, Reuters reported.
People with mild cognitive impairment can have difficulties with language, memory, attention span or other mental functions significant enough to be noticeable to other people and to be detected in tests. One type significantly affects memory, and the other does not.
The impairment is not enough to interfere with daily life and the person does not show other symptoms of dementia.
The elderly people with high blood pressure in this study often had a form of mild cognitive impairment that can be a precursor to vascular dementia, the second most common form of dementia after Alzheimer’s disease. High blood pressure raises the risk for stroke.
“It looks like hypertension leads to a cognitive impairment which is actually not really memory impairment but impairment in other cognitive domains,“ in particular, language and the ability to perform familiar tasks, Dr. Christiane Reitz of Columbia University Medical Center in New York, one of the researchers, said.
The researchers tracked 918 people in New York, average age 76, who did not have mild cognitive impairment when they entered the study from 1992 through 1994.
They were given physical exams and cognitive tests when they entered the study, and then were reexamined about every 18 months. They were followed for an average of 4-1/2 years, during which 334 of them developed mild cognitive impairment.
Those with high blood pressure had a 40 percent increased risk of developing mild cognitive impairment, and, more significantly, a 70 percent higher risk for the “non-amnestic“ form that does not involve broader memory difficulties.
“These findings suggest that prevention and treatment of hypertension may have an important impact in lowering the risk of cognitive impairment,“ the researchers wrote.

A band of Aurora Borealis, the Northern Lights, stretches over the Chugach Range near Palmer, Alaska in this February file photo.

Scientists think they have discovered the energy source of auroras borealis, the spectacular color displays seen in the upper latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere.
New data from NASA’s Themis mission, a quintet of satellites launched this winter, found the energy comes from a stream of charged particles from the sun flowing like a current through twisted bundles of magnetic fields connecting Earth’s upper atmosphere to the sun, AP said.
The energy is then abruptly released in the form of a shimmering display of lights, said principal investigator Vassilis Angelopoulos of the University of California at Los Angeles.
Results were presented Tuesday at the American Geophysical Union meeting.
In March, the satellites detected a burst of Northern Lights over Alaska and Canada. During the two-hour light show, the satellites measured particle flow and magnetic fields from space.
To scientists’ surprise, the geomagnetic storm powering the auroras raced 400 miles in a minute across the sky. Angelopoulos estimated the storm’s power was equal to the energy released by a magnitude 5.5 earthquake.
“Nature was very kind to us,“ Angelopoulos said.
Although researchers have suspected the existence of wound-up bundles of magnetic fields that provide energy for the auroras, the phenomenon was not confirmed until May, when the satellites became the first to map their structure some 40,000 miles above the Earth’s surface.
Scientists hope the satellites will record a geomagnetic storm next year and end the debate about when the storms are triggered.