Tag Archives: adults

Facebook, Instagram addiction in adolescents linked to inequality: Global study of 179,000 children suggests

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Adolescents from deprived backgrounds are more likely to report an addiction to Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and other social media, according to research published in the peer-reviewed journal Information, Communication and Society.

In the first study of its kind, the findings show a link between economic inequality and problematic use of social network platforms and instant messaging applications. The situation is worse in schools where wealth and social differences exist between classmates.

The authors say the results – based on more than 179,000 schoolchildren in 40 countries – suggest that new strategies are needed on social media use that reduce the impact of deprivation.

Action by policymakers could help limit young people’s dysfunctional or abnormal behaviour, add the authors. These negative patterns include being unable to reduce screen time or lying to friends and family about social media use.

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“These findings indicate the potentially harmful influences of inequality at the individual, school and country level on adolescents’ problematic social media use,” says lead author Michela Lenzi from the University of Padua, Italy, an Associate Professor in psychology.

“Policymakers should develop actions to reduce inequalities to limit maladaptive patterns of social media use by adolescents.”

“As the digital divide continues to close in many countries, economic inequalities persist and remain a robust social determinant of adolescent health and well-being. Schools represent an ideal setting to foster safe and prosocial online behaviours.”

Many young people use social media every day and the benefits to well-being are well-documented, as are the risks.

Problematic social media use (PSMU) is not formally recognised as a behavioural addiction. However, it is regarded as a health issue affecting young people.

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Social Media/Photo:indiainternationaltimes

This study aimed to investigate the links between socio-economic inequalities, measured at individual, school and country level, and adolescent PSMU.

In addition, the authors evaluated the role of peer and family support as moderators of these associations.

The findings were based on 179,049 children aged 11, 13 and 15 from 40 countries including most of Europe and Canada. Evidence came from the Health Behaviour in School-aged Children, an international World Health Organization collaborative study carried out every four years.

The researchers asked children to complete questionnaires in order to identify addiction-like behaviour associated with social media. The forms were filled out anonymously while supervised in the classroom by a teacher or trained interviewer.

Any child who reported six or more items was identified as having PSMU. These items included feeling bad when not using social media, trying but failing to spend less time using it, and using social media to escape from negative feelings.

An index based on material assets in the home or family activities was used to calculate scales of deprivation. Items included number of bathrooms, and how many family vacations out of the country in the past year.

The authors measured country wealth, and family/peer social support e.g. degree of help provided from relatives and friends. They also took into account the proportion of the population who used the internet in each country.

 

Findings showed that adolescents who were relatively more deprived than their schoolmates and attended more economically unequal schools were more likely to report PSMU.

The association with a wealth divide among pupils in the same class was stronger in youths with lower peer support. But a link between country income inequality and PSMU was only found in adolescents reporting low levels of family support.

There may be many reasons for the link between economic deprivation and PSMU. One theory suggested by the authors is that sharing images or videos resonates especially with the more deprived adolescents because they associate them with power and status.

They suggest that school-based prevention efforts might target ‘objective and perceived’ social class differences among schoolmates.

Also key, is increasing peer support which the authors found was a protective factor in the relationship between relative deprivation and PSMU.

Insufficient sleep in teenagers leads to obesity: Study

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Adolescents who sleep less than eight hours a night are more likely to be overweight or obese compared to their peers with sufficient sleep, said a new study presented at ESC Congress 2022.

Shorter sleepers were also more likely to have a combination of other unhealthy characteristics including excess fat around the middle, elevated blood pressure, and abnormal blood lipid and glucose levels, said the study by Jesús Martínez Gómez, a researcher at the Cardiovascular Health and Imaging Laboratory, Spanish National Centre for Cardiovascular Research (CNIC), Madrid, Spain.

“Our study shows that most teenagers do not get enough sleep and this is connected with excess weight and characteristics that promote weight gain, potentially setting them up for future problems,” said study author Gómez. “We are currently investigating whether poor sleep habits are related to excessive screen time, which could explain why older adolescents get even less sleep than younger ones.”

Sleep/en.wikipedia.org

This study examined the association between sleep duration and health in 1,229 adolescents in the SI! Program for Secondary Schools trial in Spain. Participants had an average age of 12 years at baseline with equal numbers of boys and girls.

Sleep was measured for seven days with a wearable activity tracker three times in each participant at ages 12, 14 and 16 years. For optimal health, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine advises sleeping 9 to 12 hours a night for 6 to 12 year-olds and 8 to 10 hours for 13 to 18 year-olds.3 To simplify the analysis, the study used 8 hours or more as optimal. Participants were categorized as very short sleepers (less than 7 hours), short sleepers (7 to 8 hours), and optimal (8 hours or more).

Overweight and obesity were determined according to body mass index. The researchers calculated a continuous metabolic syndrome score ranging from negative (healthier) to positive (unhealthier) values that included waist circumference, blood pressure, and blood glucose and lipid levels.

At 12 years of age, only 34% of participants slept at least 8 hours a night, and this dropped to 23% and 19% at 14 and 16 years of age, respectively. Boys tended to get less sleep. Teenagers who got the most sleep also had better quality sleep, meaning they woke up less during the night and spent a higher proportion of the time in bed sleeping compared to those with shorter sleep. The prevalence of overweight/obesity was 27%, 24% and 21% at 12, 14 and 16 years of age, respectively.

Compared with optimal sleepers, overweight/obesity was 21% and 72% more likely in very short sleepers at 12 and 14 years, respectively. Short sleepers were 19% and 29% more likely to be overweight/obese compared with optimal sleepers at 12 and 14 years, respectively. Similarly, both very short and short sleepers had higher average metabolic syndrome scores at 12 and 14 years compared with optimal sleepers.

Mr. Martínez Gómez said: “The connections between insufficient sleep and adverse health were independent of energy intake and physical activity levels, indicating that sleep itself is important.”

Weight loss for adults at any age leads to cost savings, study suggests

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Helping an adult lose weight leads to significant cost savings at any age, with those savings peaking at age 50, suggests a new Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health study.

The findings, which will be published online September 26 in the journal Obesity, suggests that a 20-year-old adult who goes from being obese to overweight would save an average of $17,655 in direct medical costs and productivity losses over their lifetime. If the same person were to go from being obese to a healthy weight, an average savings of $28,020 in direct medical costs and productivity losses can occur. Helping a 40-year-old adult go from being obese to overweight can save an average of $18,262. If the same person went from being obese to normal weight, an average savings of $31,447 can follow.

A high body mass index (BMI) is linked to a higher risk of serious conditions like diabetes, cardiovascular disease and some cancers. Subsequently, a high BMI and associated conditions can lead to high medical and societal costs and productivity losses. More than 70 percent of adults in the U.S. are considered to be overweight or obese, which in direct medical expenses alone costs nearly $210 billion per year.

“Over half the costs of being overweight can be from productivity losses, mainly due to missed work days but also productivity losses. This means that just focusing on medical costs misses a big part of the picture, though they’re a consideration, too,” says Bruce Y. Lee, MD, MBA, executive director of the Global Obesity Prevention Center (GOPC) at the Bloomberg School. “Productivity losses affect businesses, which in turn affects the economy, which then affects everyone.”

When absenteeism occurs in the workforce, others, at times, have to take on a larger workload. This all funnels downstream and adds to the societal costs of obesity. And health insurance premiums increase across the board, even for healthy patients, as insurers spread the cost of obesity and its associated conditions.

For the study, the researchers developed a computational simulation model to represent the U.S. adult population to show the lifetime costs and health effects for an individual with obesity, overweight and healthy weight statuses at ages 20 through 80 in increments of 10. The model used data from the Coronary Artery Disease Risk Development in Young Adults (CARDIA) and Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) studies and included 15 mutually exclusive health statuses that represented every combination of three BMI categories (normal weight, overweight and obesity) and five chronic health stages.

The model simulated the weight and health status of an adult as he or she ages year by year throughout his or her lifetime to track the individual medical costs and productivity losses of each person. The estimated direct medical costs to the insurer and health care facility, productivity losses and sick time were included.

The research team found that cost savings peak at age 50 with an average total savings of $36,278. After age 50, the largest cost savings occur when an individual with obesity moves to the normal weight category as opposed to the overweight category, emphasizing the importance of weight loss as people age. This finding is important because people aged 50 and older make up more than 60% incremental societal costs, which includes higher taxes to support government insurance and higher copays and other out-of-pocket expenses.

“Most previous models have taken into account one or a few health risks associated with obesity. Subsequently, the forecasted costs may be unrealistic,” says Saeideh Fallah-Fini, PhD, a former GOPC visiting scholar who was part of the research team. “In our study, the model we developed takes into account a range of immediate health complications associated with body weight, like hypertension or diabetes, as well as all major long-term adverse health outcomes, including heart disease and some types of cancer, in forecasting the incremental health effects and costs to give a realistic calculation.”

Results from this study could inform policymakers about the specific implications and costs associated with obesity in order to design more successful interventions that are tailored to specific groups (defined by age, current health condition and weight). Understanding the resulting lifetime costs and health effects for an individual with obesity at different ages can also aid physicians and other health care professionals in implementing more targeted preventive management decisions for patients with high BMIs and associated health conditions. On the flip side, it could be beneficial for patients to better understand the health outcomes associated with potential future health risks and impending medical costs, given their existing BMI status and health condition.

Finally, realizing the reverberating effects of obesity on the productivity of their employees and consequently their profits, employers may look to redesign or sponsor healthy lifestyle programs with weight-loss initiatives. In turn, this could decrease absenteeism and poor performance. “In the end, the heart of a business is its employees,” says Lee. “Having employees who are overweight and unhealthy is akin to a football team trying to compete with chronically injured players.”

Older users like to snoop on Facebook, but worried others might snoop on them

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Older adults are drawn to Facebook so they can check out pictures and updates from family and friends, but may resist using the site because they are worried about who will see their own content, according to a team of researchers.

In a study of older people’s perception of Facebook, participants listed keeping in touch, monitoring other’s updates and sharing photos as main reasons for using Facebook. However, other seniors listed privacy, as well as the triviality of some posts, as reasons they stay away from the site.

“The biggest concern is privacy and it’s not about revealing too much, it’s that they assume that too many random people out there can get their hands on their information,” said S. Shyam Sundar, distinguished professor of communications and co-director of the Media Effects Research Laboratory, Penn State. “Control is really what privacy is all about. It’s about the degree to which you feel that you have control over how your information is shared or circulated.”

The researchers, who report their findings in a forthcoming issue of Telematics and Informatics, available online now, said that Facebook developers should focus on privacy settings to tap into the senior market.

“Clear privacy control tools are needed to promote older adults’ Facebook use,” said Eun Hwa Jung, assistant professor of communications and new media, National University of Singapore. “In particular, we think that privacy settings and alerts need to be highly visible, especially when they [older adults] are sharing information.”

While older adults are leery about who is viewing their posts, they enjoy using the site to look at pictures and read posts from friends and family, according to the researchers.

“I am more of a Facebook voyeur, I just look to see what my friends are putting out there,” one participant told the researchers. “I haven’t put anything on there in years. I don’t need to say, ‘I’m having a great lunch!’ and things like that, I don’t understand that kind of communication.”

Sundar said that, in fact, many participants mentioned the triviality of the conversation that kept them from using Facebook.

“They believe that people reporting on the mundane and unremarkable things that they did — brushing their teeth, or what they had for lunch — is not worth talking about,” said Sundar. “That’s an issue, especially for this generation.”

Older users could be a significant resource to help drive the growth of Facebook and other social media sites, Sundar said.

“The 55-plus folks were slow initially in adopting social media, but now they are one of the largest growing sectors for social media adoption,” he said.

The researchers suggest that Facebook is helping to serve as a communications bridge between the generations and that young people are prompting their older family members to join the site.

“In particular, unlike younger people, most older adults were encouraged by younger family members to join Facebook so that they could communicate,” said Jung. “This implies that older adults’ interaction via social networking sites can contribute to effective intergenerational communication.”

The researchers recruited 46 participants who were between 65 and 95 years old to take part in in-depth interviews. The group included 17 male participants and 29 female participants, all of whom had a college degree. The participants also said they used a computer in their daily lives.

A total of 20 Facebook users and 26 non-users participated in the study. If participants had a Facebook account, researchers asked them about their experience and their motivations for joining. Participants who did not use Facebook were asked why they did not join.

Because all of the participants in this study lived in a retirement home, the researchers said that future research should look at the perception and use of Facebook by seniors who live alone.

Eating disorders linked to increased risk of theft and other criminal behavior

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In an analysis of nearly 960,000 females, individuals with eating disorders were more likely to be convicted of theft and other crimes.

The incidences of theft and other convictions were 12% and 7%, respectively, in those with anorexia nervosa, 18% and 13% in those with bulimia nervosa, and 5% and 6% in those without eating disorders. The associations with theft conviction remained in both anorexia and bulimia nervosa even when adjusting for psychiatric comorbidities and for familial factors.

The findings indicate that research is needed to investigate the potential mechanisms underlying the relationship between crime and eating disorder psychopathology, as well as efforts to determine how best to address this relationship in treatment.

“Our results highlight forensic issues as an adversity associated with eating disorders. Criminal convictions can compound disease burden and complicate treatment ,” said Shuyang Yao, lead author of the International Journal of Eating Disorders study. “Clinicians should be sure to conduct routine reviews of criminal history during assessments for eating disorders.”