News
Tech Trouble: How Parents’ Smartphone Addiction Impacts Their Children
Rising smartphone use among parents is linked to increased mental health issues in children, highlighting the need for more mindful device usage.
United States: Smartphone use is ultimately increasing across the globe which is becoming a central part of daily life for many. This rise in usage is basically raising serious concerns about its impact on both individuals and society. As more people spend hours each day on their devices, experts worry about the potential effects on mental health, personal relationships, and overall well-being.
Impact on Family Dynamics
At dinner time, a child might talk about their day at school or share a fight with a friend, but if parents are too busy looking at their smartphones to listen, it could be hurting the child’s feelings. A new study shows that this happens a lot every day in America and might be bad for kids’ mental health.
Study Findings on Child Development
As reported by HealthDay, Kids at the ages of 9 years to 11 years who said that their parents spent away too much on their smartphones are more likely to get anxiety and attention issues and hyperactivity later as compared to the youngsters of the parents who weren’t phone-obsessed, Canadian researchers reported that.
“When children’s emotional and physical needs are consistently ignored or inappropriately responded to, they are at risk of developing mental health difficulties,” explained a team led by Sheri Madigan, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Calgary in Alberta.
Technoference’s Long-Term Effects
According to the background data from the study one recent study found out that parents of infants now spend an average of almost more than five years on their smartphones daily, including looking at the smartphone 27 percent daily which includes looking at a smartphone 27 percent of the time they are engaging with their baby.
Here another study found 68 percent of the parents admitting they are often distracted by their smartphones as they interact with their kids for sure.
Research has shown that this kind of “technoference” while parenting means less attention paid to children, less parent-child conversation and play and even a higher risk for child injuries.
During adolescence, technoference is linked to “higher levels of parent-child conflict and lower levels of parental emotional support and warmth,” Madigan’s team noted.
Research Insights
Investigating the issue the further the Calgary group looked at the data form almost more than a thousand Canadian children ages from 9 to 11 and provided at the multiple points between 2020 and early 2022.
The children were also assessed for the various and different types of mental health issues such as anxiety and depression and hyperactivity and the inattention that developed over time.
According to Madigan’s team, “higher levels of [child] anxiety symptoms that were associated with higher levels of perceived parental technoference later in development.”
Too much parental time spent on the smartphone can lead forward to the higher levels of the inattention and hyperactivity symptoms later in the development.
News
Naloxone Could Help Revive People After Opioid-Induced Heart Failure
The study highlights that naloxone significantly improves survival rates in cardiac arrests due to opioid overdoses and beyond.
United States: A new study shows that naloxone, a special medicine, can help save people who have had a heart stop because of an opioid overdose. Naloxone works quickly by stopping opioids from affecting the brain, which helps someone start breathing again if they’ve stopped due to the overdose. Opioids can also cause the heart to suddenly stop beating during an overdose, but naloxone can help fix this problem.
Increasing Drug-Related Cardiac Arrests
As reported by HealthDay, “The incidence of drug-related cardiac arrests has skyrocketed in the past two decades, and there is an urgent need for evidence to guide possible naloxone use in this circumstance,” said researcher Davis Dillon who is purely an assistant professor or we can say an educator of emergency medicine at the University of California, Davis.
Most of the cardiac arrests due to the heart attacks or electrical problems in the heart of but the opioid OD-related cardiac arrests are a major cause of death among the adults who ages between 64 said the researchers.
So hereby almost or can say more than 15 percent of the opioid OD cases are treated by paramedics involve in the cardiac arrest the American Heart Association says.
Study Findings
To accomplish this research, the investigators assessed data on 7,960 patients with opioid-associated cardiac arrest in three Northern California counties between 2015 and 2023.
In the OD cardiac arrest patients, the investigators also noted that out of 9 patients who received naloxone, 1 had a shockable cardiac rhythm and their heart began beating again with restored blood circulation.
Data of this study showed that one of the patients treated with naloxone was alive and was discharged from the hospital after every 26 patients.
The new study is here, JAMA Network Open, and it was released on August 20.
Implications of the Research
“To our surprise, our research revealed that use of naloxone was actually linked to a better survival rate in cardiac arrest incidents resulting from overdose or those unrelated to drugs,” the author of the university news release quoted Dillon. “This is important because it contributes our knowledge about efficacy of naloxone with regards to drug related, OHCA.
News
AI-Driven Implant Provides Adaptive Relief for Parkinson’s Patients
United States – A recently published clinical study has revealed an utterly inspiring new feature – an AI-powered device that can be implanted in the brain and help treat Parkinson’s disease. These are more effective for the patients, according to the researchers, because this new implant logs the patient’s symptoms and interacts with the patient in treatment.
How the AI-Powered Implant works
Parkinsonian disease where motor control and mobility is variable during waking hours, and at night. This new implant which is partially based on artificial intelligence continuously monitors these changes and relays the information to doctors. Where it identifies a form of activity that is unwanted it then triggers mild electric shocks to the specific area –DBS — which helps in eradicating the impacts, as reported by HealthDay.
This closed-loop system ensures that the implant adjusts the level of stimulation required to address the patient’s symptoms as he or she goes through activities in his or her daily life.
Promising Results from Phase 1 Study
In a phase 1 trial involving four patients, the implant was shown to reduce the most problematic symptoms of Parkinson’s disease by 50%. The study, published in Nature Medicine on August 16th, highlights the potential of this technology to significantly improve the quality of life for Parkinson’s patients.
“This is the future of deep brain stimulation for Parkinson’s disease,” said Dr. Philip Starr, senior researcher and co-director of the UCSF Movement Disorders and Neuromodulation Clinic. “There’s been a great deal of interest in improving DBS therapy by making it adaptive and self-regulating, but it’s only been recently that the right tools and methods have been available to allow people to use this long-term in their homes.”
Parkinson’s disease is a progressive neurological disorder which occurs due to the loss of dopamine producing neurons and is estimated to affect around 10 million people in the globe. When the motor symptoms do set in, the patients have difficulty with movement, developing tremors, rigidity, and balance problems. Although effective, traditional DBS therapy is monopolar, meaning that the electrical current is constant rather than dynamic, where DBS adaptation is necessary for corresponding to the condition of the patient and thereby affording reliable symptom management.
The new adaptive DBS implant, however, uses signals from the motor cortex to tailor the level of stimulation in real time. This personalized approach has shown significant promise in reducing the need for medication and improving symptom management.
A New Era of Neuro-Stimulation Therapies
Dr. Simon Little, an associate professor of neurology at UCSF, emphasized the significance of this breakthrough: “With adaptive DBS the big shift that we’ve made here is we are now able to tell at any given time how severe the symptoms of the patient are and properly match it with the amount of stimulation the patient needs.
Apart from enhancing the motoric feature of the disease, the adaptive DBS implant has also been noted to reduce sleep disorders in Parkinson’s disease patients according to a Nature Communication publication done this year, as reported by HealthDay.
Scientists are now trying out similar DBS treatments for other conditions of the brain; depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder. “We are aware that it has a great effect on patients, indicating that it can be used not only for Parkinson’s crown but possibly also for psychiatric disorders,” Starr stressed. “We are now simply in the starting line when it comes to neuro-stimulation therapies. ”
News
Health Alert: US Reports Dramatic Rise in Pertussis Cases
As pertussis cases surge, Connecticut families are urged to ensure timely vaccinations to protect against this escalating health threat.
United States: The Department of Public Health is issuing a warning about a rising health concern: pertussis which is also known as whooping cough.
This is ultimately very highly contagious respiratory infection, which could primarily affect children and is really becoming more prevalent. The CTDPH is advising parents to be vigilant and ensure their children are up to date with vaccinations to help prevent or stop the spread of this serious illness.
Vaccination Urged to Combat Growing Pertussis Threat
As reported by News8, “It’s unclear why we’ve seen the rise right now, but we can hypothesize that part of the pandemic effect — that maybe some children that either had delayed childhood vaccines or that vaccines in the 4-6 range or the 11-12-year-old range, where they would have been boosted, may not have received their vaccines, and that may be part of the reason,” Dr. Manisha Juthani, the commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Public Health.
Drastic Surge in Cases: 93 in 2024 Compared to 11 in 2023
In the words, of CTDPH, this is the biggest outbreak in years; as of 2024, there were 93 cases, compared to 11 total for the entire year of 2023.
“That’s almost a tenfold to last year,” Bridgeport Hospital Yale Medicine Pediatricians Chair of Paediatrics Dr. Magna Dias said. “Bless you, bless you and whoop!”
Symptoms and Impact: A Concerning Situation for Families
Dias said ‘the whoop is very characteristic’ but kids don’t have to have the whoop. Dias opined that the flu-like disease begins as a flu and hence is transmissible and circulating until flu symptoms get worse in about 10 to 14 days of the onset.
“It is really very painful to see a child struggling with whooping cough or pertussis”, Dias said. “For the parents, and as a paediatrician when you watch a baby choke like this, when they are just trying to breathe in. Ten fatalities of babies due to pertussis in the UK.
Dias added that one of the reasons that continues fuels the outbreak is ‘vaccination rates are down’.
Community Reaction: Shock and Concern Among Parents
‘You start to lose that herd immunity which is very important because some kids are just too young to be vaccinated,’ she said.
Teams of sympathetic parents we interviewed Monday could hardly believe their ears, whooping cough is back.
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