Tag: 4/1/23

Categories : Neurology PaediatricsTags :

Greater Cognitive Skills in Children who Play More Video Games

On By ModernMedia
Photo by Igor Karimov on Unsplash

Analysing magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) brain scans of nearly 2000 children, researchers found children who played video games for three or more hours a day did better in cognitive skills tests involving impulse control and working memory compared to children who had never played video games. Published in JAMA Network Open, this study analysed data from the ongoing Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study, which is supported by the and other entities of the National Institutes of Health.

“This study adds to our growing understanding of the associations between playing video games and brain development,” said National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) Director Nora Volkow, MD. “Numerous studies have linked video gaming to behaviour and mental health problems. This study suggests that there may also be cognitive benefits associated with this popular pastime, which are worthy of further investigation.”

Although a number of studies have investigated the relationship between video gaming and cognitive behaviour, the neurobiological mechanisms underlying the associations are not well understood. Only a handful of neuroimaging studies have addressed this topic, and the sample sizes for those studies have been small, with fewer than 80 participants.

To address this research gap, scientists at the University of Vermont, Burlington, analysed data obtained when children entered the ABCD Study at ages 9 and 10 years old. The research team examined survey, cognitive, and brain imaging data from nearly 2000 participants from within the bigger study cohort, comparing those who reported playing no video games at all and those who reported playing video games for three hours per day or more. This threshold was selected as it exceeds the American Academy of Paediatrics screen time guidelines, which recommend limiting videogames to one to two hours per day for older children. Researchers assessed their performance in two tasks that reflected the children’s ability to control impulsive behaviour and to memorise information, as well as brain activity while performing the tasks.

The researchers found that the children who reported playing video games for three or more hours per day were faster and more accurate on both cognitive tasks than those who never played. They also observed that the differences in cognitive function observed between the two groups was accompanied by differences in brain activity. Functional MRI brain scans found that children who played video games for three or more hours per day showed higher brain activity in regions of the brain associated with attention and memory than in never-gamers. At the same time, those children who played at least three hours of videogames per day showed more brain activity in frontal brain regions that are associated with more cognitively demanding tasks and less brain activity in brain regions related to vision.  

The researchers think these patterns may stem from practicing tasks related to impulse control and memory while playing videogames, which can be cognitively demanding, and that these changes may lead to improved performance on related tasks. Furthermore, the comparatively low activity in visual areas among children who reported playing video games may reflect that this area of the brain may become more efficient at visual processing as a result of repeated practice through video games.

While prior studies have reported associations between video gaming and increases in depression, violence, and aggressive behaviour, this study did not find that to be the case. The three hours or more group tended to report higher mental health and behavioural issues compared to the non-gaming children, but was not statistically significant. The researchers note that this will be an important measure to continue to track and understand as the children mature.

Further, the researchers stress that this cross-sectional study does not allow for cause-and-effect analyses, and that it could be that children who are good at these types of cognitive tasks may choose to play video games. The authors also emphasise that their findings do not mean that children should spend unlimited time on their computers, mobile phones, or TVs, and that the outcomes likely depend largely on the specific activities children engage in. For instance, they hypothesise that the specific genre of video games, such as action-adventure, puzzle solving, sports, or shooting games, may have different effects for neurocognitive development, and this level of specificity on the type of video game played was not assessed by the study.

“While we cannot say whether playing video games regularly caused superior neurocognitive performance, it is an encouraging finding, and one that we must continue to investigate in these children as they transition into adolescence and young adulthood,” said Bader Chaarani, PhD, assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Vermont and the lead author on the study. “Many parents today are concerned about the effects of video games on their children’s health and development, and as these games continue to proliferate among young people, it is crucial that we better understand both the positive and negative impact that such games may have.”

Through the ABCD Study, researchers will be able to track these children into young adulthood, looking for gaming-related changes in cognitive skills, brain activity, behaviour, and mental health.

Source: National Institutes of Health

Categories : Medical Research & TechnologyTags :

A New Way to Measure Blood Pressure: A Digital Camera

On By ModernMedia
Male doctor with smartphone
Photo by Ivan Samkov on Unsplash

Engineers have designed a system that can remotely measure blood pressure from video of a person’s forehead and using artificial intelligence algorithms to extracting cardiac signals across a range of skin tones. They describe their new technology in a new paper published in Inventions.

Using the same remote-health technology they pioneered for non-contact monitoring of vital health signs, this new technology could replace the existing uncomfortable and cumbersome method of strapping an inflatable cuff to a patient’s arm or wrist, the researchers claim.

The researchers, from the University of South Australia and Baghdad’s Middle Technical University, describe the technique, which involves filming a person from a short distance for 10 seconds and then using AI to extract cardiac signals from two regions in the forehead.

Experiments were performed on 25 people with different skin tones and under changing light conditions, overcoming the limitations reported in previous studies. Compared to a digital sphygmomanometer (itself subject to errors), the systolic and diastolic readings were around 90% accurate.

“Monitoring blood pressure is essential to detect and manage cardiovascular diseases, the leading cause of global mortality, responsible for almost 18 million deaths in 2019,” says UniSA remote sensing engineer Professor Javaan Chahl. “Furthermore, in the past 30 years, the number of adults with hypertension has risen from 650 million to 1.28 billion worldwide.”

“The health sector needs a system that can accurately measure blood pressure and assess cardiovascular risks when physical contact with patients is unsafe or difficult, such as during the recent COVID outbreak,” Prof Chahl continues. “If we can perfect this technique, it will help manage one of the most serious health challenges facing the world today.”

The cutting-edge technology has come a long way since 2017, when the UniSA and Iraqi research team demonstrated image-processing algorithms that could extract a human’s heart rate from drone video.

In the past five years the researchers have developed algorithms to measure other vital signs, including breathing rates from 50 metres away, oxygen saturation, temperature, and jaundice in newborns.

Their non-contact technology was also deployed in the United States during the pandemic for non-contact monitoring of COVID signs.

Source: University of South Australia

Categories : AgeingTags :

Adults Get the Least Sleep From Their 30s to 50s

On By ModernMedia
Photo by Ketut Subiyanto on Pexels

People sleep less in mid-adulthood than they do in early and late adulthood, according to a large study published in Nature Communications. The study investigators found that sleep duration declines in early adulthood until age 33, and then picks up again at age 53.

The study, involving 730 187 participants spread over 63 countries, revealed how sleep patterns change across the lifespan, and how they were largely the same across countries.

Study participants were playing the Sea Hero Quest mobile game, a citizen science venture designed for neuroscience research, which was designed to aid Alzheimer’s research by shedding light on differences in spatial navigational abilities. Thus far, over four million people have played Sea Hero Quest, contributing to numerous studies across the project as a whole.

In addition to completing tasks testing navigational ability, anyone playing the game is asked to answer questions about demographic characteristics as well as other questions that can be useful to neuroscience research, such as on sleep patterns.

The researchers, led by Professor Hugo Spiers (UCL Psychology & Language Sciences) and Dr Antoine Coutrot (CNRS, University of Lyon) found that across the study sample, people sleep an average of 7.01 hours per night, with women sleeping 7.5 minutes longer than men on average. They found that the youngest participants in the sample (age 19) slept the most, and sleep duration declined throughout people’s 20s and early 30s before plateauing until their early 50s and increasing again. The pattern, including the newly-identified key time points of age 33 when declining sleep plateaus and 53 for sleep to increase again, was the same for men and women, and across countries and education levels.

The researchers suggest the decline in sleep during mid-life may be from the demands of childcare and working life.

Professor Spiers said: “Previous studies have found associations between age and sleep duration, but ours is the first large study to identify these three distinct phases across the life course. We found that across the globe, people sleep less during mid-adulthood, but average sleep duration varies between regions and between countries.”

People who report sleeping the most are in Eastern European countries such as Albania, Slovakia, Romania and the Czech Republic, reporting 20–40 minutes extra sleep per night and the least in South East Asian countries including the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia. People in the United Kingdom reported sleeping slightly less than the average. People tended to sleep a bit less in countries closer to the equator.

The researchers found that navigational ability was unaffected by sleep duration for most of the sample, except for among older adults (aged 54–70) whose optimal sleep duration was seven hours, although they caution that the findings among older adults might be impacted by underlying health conditions.

Source: University College London

Categories : Ethics and LawTags :

Tembisa Hospital CEO and Senior Officials must Face Disciplinary Action, Tribunal Rules

On By ModernMedia

By Tania Broughton for GroundUp

Senior officials at the Tembisa Tertiary Hospital, including its former CEO Dr Lokopane Mogaladi, must be disciplined for their roles in the death of a patient, an independent ad hoc tribunal has ruled.

Shonisani Lethole was admitted to Tembisa Hospital on 23 June 2020 with COVID. He had chest pains, was weak and battling to breathe. He was intubated on 27 June. He died two days later.

But before he died, Lethole took to Twitter on 25 June to describe the unbearable and uncaring conditions he was experiencing. He said he had not eaten for two days.

An Ombud investigation was prompted by a complaint by the Minister of Health.

Health Ombud Prof Malegapuru Makgoba in January last year found that Lethole had been denied food for “100 hours and 54 minutes” and that medical staff had been grossly negligent. He recommended that 18 staff members, including doctors and nurses, should face disciplinary action.

Mogaladi was suspended almost immediately afterwards.

An appeal tribunal, set up in terms of the National Health Act, consisting of three members – two doctors, Prof Rudo Mathivha and Prof Ebrahim Variava, and retired Constitutional Court Judge Bess Nkabinde – considered appeals by Mogaladi and Dr Makhosazane Ngobese, head of the COVID unit at the time, against the Ombud’s findings and recommendations.

Mogaladi and Ngobese raised several grounds of appeal, including that there was no valid complaint, that the Ombud had acted beyond his mandate and that his findings were not supported by the evidence.

The tribunal returned two decisions. Judge Nkabinde said she would have upheld the appeal in its entirety. But the majority, Professors Mathivha and Variava, while setting aside some of the Ombud’s recommendations, said Mogaladi and Ngobese should still be disciplined.

Regarding Mogaladi, they said he should be disciplined for presiding over a hospital “that on two separate occasions could not provide Lethole food for prolonged periods”, and a “health establishment that showed poor record-keeping”. He should also face charges relating to substandard care at the hospital.

Regarding Ngobese, they set aside the findings against her except one, that she should face a disciplinary inquiry for her failure to ensure that critical care equipment in the COVID ward was available and functioning properly.

The tribunal said Lethole had been described by his family as a very responsible young man, a “son of the soil” who was deeply loved and cherished.

The two professors said they differed with Judge Nkabinde on the question of accountability.

“While we recognise the immense challenges brought by the Covid-19 pandemic, the norms and standards regulations remained applicable.

“Where we find, on a fair consideration of the facts, that these norms and standards have not been fulfilled, and where there is a prima facie indication that the appellants had some responsibility in relation to their non-fulfillment, we consider it appropriate and important to recommend that an accountability process follows,” they said.

Judge Nkabinde, in her ruling, placed emphasis on the impact of the pandemic on hospitals and said based on the rationality and procedural fairness grounds of appeal, the appeals should succeed.

“This conclusion should not, however, be understood to suggest that no-one should be held accountable when a proper case is made. It is difficult to accept a loss of life … but adverse factual findings and remedial action should be rational and should be right, just and fair.”

She said her judgment did not stop the Department of Health from taking steps to fix the systematic issues at the hospital or disciplining those “properly found” wanting in upholding a high standard of professionalism.

Read the ad hoc tribunal’s ruling.

Republished from GroundUp under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Source: GroundUp