Want your teenage daughter to have strong bones? Steer her to soccer or other impact sports, experts suggest, and you may help her prevent low bone density later in life.
Sports such as soccer with the combination of weight-bearing exercise and repetitive, “impact-loading” from jumping and running have been shown to build bone mineral density in adolescent girls better than some other activities.

Building bone density during the teen years is considered crucial for healthy bone development, helping to ward off osteoporosis, the disease that causes bones to become brittle and break later on in life. Peak bone mass is typically achieved by age 30, according to the National Osteoporosis Foundation. “It’s those years of adolescence, and early teens to late 20s, that are most important” for bone building,” said James W. Bellew, an associate professor of physical therapy at Louisiana State University Health Science Center-Shreveport.
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A new study in the journal Sleep upholds the widely accepted notion that body weight plays a large role in how well a person sleeps. Francesco P. Cappuccio, MD, of Warwick Medical School in England, and colleagues reviewed worldwide literature regarding obesity and short sleep duration in children and adults to determine if existing evidence supported a link between short sleepers and obesity.

The researchers’ analysis showed a “striking, consistent” pattern of increased odds of being a short sleeper if you are obese regardless of age. According to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, you are a short sleeper if you regularly sleep fewer hours than the average member of your age group. For this analysis, short sleep was defined as five hours or less for adults and less than 10 hours for children. “The 60% to 80% increase in the odds of being a short sleeper amongst obese was seen in both children and adults,” the researchers write in the journal article.

The study review included 634, 511 males and females ages 2 to 102 identified from studies around the world. “This study is important as it confirms that this association is strong and might be of public health relevance. However, it also raises the unanswered question of whether this is a cause-effect association. Only prospective longitudinal studies will be able to address the outstanding question,” Cappuccio says in a news release. …read more

Moreover, male postpartum depression may have more negative effects on some aspects of a child’s development than its female counterpart, says James F. Paulson, PhD, of the Center for Pediatric Research at the Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk, Va. Paulson and colleagues reviewed data on more than 5,000 two-parent families with children aged 9 months. They found that one in 10 new dads met standard criteria for moderate to severe postpartum depression.

That’s a “striking increase” from the 3% to 5% of men in the general population that have depression, Paulson says. The research, presented here at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association (APA), also showed that the 14% of new moms have postpartum depression. That compares to 7% to 10% of women in the general population.

The researchers looked to see whether the parents’ depression affected their interaction with their children. “What we found,” Paulson says, “is that both moms and dads who were depressed were significantly less likely to engage in interactions such as reading, telling stories, and singing songs to their infants.”
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Lower-income Americans experience pain much more frequently than those making more money, according to a study that had nearly 4,000 people keep a diary in which they scored their feelings of pain on a scale of 0 to 6 for randomly selected 15-minute intervals. People with household incomes below $30,000 a year reported moderate to severe pain 20 percent of the time. Those making more than $100,000 a year said they experienced pain less than 8 percent of the time.

“The arrows point in both directions,” said study co-author Alan Kreuger, a professor of economics at Princeton University, explaining the findings reported in the May 3 issue of The Lancet. “First, people with lower skills tend to do more physically demanding labor, and that leads to pain. Secondly, people who have a lot of pain in their lives find it hard to work.”
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