(Press-News.org) UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- Depression can be a common problem for teens and adolescents, and while many treatments exist, they don't always work for everyone. A new study found that feeling more informed about their health may help teens take better care of themselves, leading to less depressive symptoms.
The researchers also found that trust played a factor in whether receiving health information improved depression. The more that adolescents trusted their parents or teacher as a credible source of health information, the more likely they were to experience less depression.
Additionally, even though adolescents reported that they trusted traditional media -- like TV, radio and newspapers -- more than online content, only content from social media or websites resulted in actual changes in behavior.
Bu Zhong, associate professor of communications at Penn State, said the findings -- recently published in the journal Child: Care, Health and Development -- suggest that while adolescents are probably taught to be skeptical of online content, websites and social media have the potential to powerfully affect adolescent health.
"The kids weren't purposefully being misleading when they said they didn't trust information online, even though that information was ultimately linked with lower depression," Zhang said. "They were probably told by their parents and teachers to be wary of information found online or on social media. But our research found that online content has a strong impact on their health behavior and depression mitigation strategies, which are not found in the traditional media content."
According to the researchers, depression is one of the most common mental disorders among adolescents in China. In the United States, the National Institute of Mental Health reported that 13.3% of the U.S. population aged 12 to 17 in 2017 had at least one major depressive episode.
Additionally, previous work has shown that depression increases the risk of adolescents experiencing poorer school performance and social withdrawal, along with an increased risk of self-harm and suicide ideation.
"This study was actually inspired by my students, after several of them came to me really stressed out," Zhong said. "I know firsthand how widespread depression can be among students, so I was interested in what kind of health information people shared with the young people and if it can help them cope with depression."
The researchers recruited 310 adolescents from elementary, middle and high schools in North China for the study. Participants answered information about health information -- such as seminars, classes, pamphlets and other media -- they recently consumed, including its quality and whether the source and information were credible.
They also answered questions about their health, including their symptoms of depression and whether consuming health information led to changes in their behavior, such as whether they felt it helped them prevent disease and if it increased their likelihood to discuss and share health information with friends.
The researchers found that the older participants were, the more likely they were to be depressed. Additionally, participants with higher GPAs were also more likely to be depressed. Zhang said this could be because the longer students were in school, and the better their grades were, the more likely they were more likely to feel more pressure to succeed.
However, the more frequently participants used social media, the more likely they were to change their health behaviors, which led to less depression.
Lastly, adolescents felt more depressed when their mothers had a higher level of education, but less depressed when their fathers had a higher level of education. Zhong described this finding as the "tiger mom effect."
"These findings don't mean that a mom's education causes their kids' depression, but one interpretation could be that it may not be a good idea for moms to dominate their children's school life and push them too hard," Zhong said. "Kids may do much better at school and more importantly are less likely to experience stress or other depressive symptoms. Parents may learn from each other in educating their teen children."
Overall, the researchers said the results suggest that health information has the potential to be strategically used to help mitigate depression in teens and adolescents.
"Our research is interested in providing long-term health outcomes, not just temporary relief," Zhong said. "So we're looking for anything in addition to drugs, in addition to therapy, that can help people with their depression, and this offers another possibility. It may not be able to remove all the stressors causing teen depression, but it's possible we could equip adolescents with better health information gathering skills to help battle depression."
INFORMATION:
Juan Chen, South China University of Technology, collaborated with Zhong on this research.
Bands and artists on independent record labels get less than their fair share of access to the most popular playlists on streaming platforms such as Spotify - argues a new paper from the University of East Anglia.
The paper, published today, looks at whether streaming platforms offer a level playing field for artists and record labels.
It finds that major labels have an unfair advantage when it comes to playlist access - and that they take the lion's share of subscription revenue as a result.
As a possible remedy, the research team suggests changing the payment system, so that royalties generated by individual listener subscriptions go direct to the labels, bands and artists they are listening to.
They also ...
As researchers around the world work to identify and address risk factors for severe COVID-19, there is additional evidence that certain blood types could be associated with greater risk of contracting the disease. A new Blood Advances study details one of the first laboratory studies to suggest that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, is particularly attracted to the blood group A antigen found on respiratory cells.
In the study, researchers assessed a protein on the surface of the SARS-CoV-2 virus called the receptor binding domain, or RBD. The RBD is the part of the virus that attaches to the host cells, so it is an important research target for ...
Adolescents who vape cannabis are at greater risk for respiratory symptoms indicative of lung injury than teens who smoke cigarettes or marijuana, or vape nicotine, a new University of Michigan study suggests.
The result challenges conventional wisdom about vaping nicotine, says the study's principal investigator, Carol Boyd, the Deborah J. Oakley Collegiate Professor Emerita at the U-M School of Nursing.
"I thought that e-cigarettes (vaping nicotine) would be the nicotine product most strongly associated with worrisome respiratory symptoms," she said. "Our data challenges the assumption that smoking cigarettes ...
A healthy system of gut bacteria, or microbiota, is crucial to health: Gut bacteria not only aid with digestion, but also play an important role in the body's immune response. Infants, however, are not born with full-fledged gut microbiota, which makes it difficult for them to fight off intestinal infections.
Although little is known about how the immune system develops during infancy, new research from the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine's Department of Biomedical Sciences and Pathobiology sheds significant new light on the subject.
A research team from principal investigator ...
DURHAM, N.H.-- In business, as in life, it is important to make a good first impression and according to research at the University of New Hampshire a positive initial trust interaction can be helpful in building a lasting trust relationship. Researchers found that trusting a person early on can have benefits over the life of the relationship, even after a violation of that trust.
"It's not just an old adage, first impressions really do matter especially when it comes to trust," said Rachel Campagna, assistant professor of management. "During an initial interaction, one of the most important and immediate factors people consider about another person is trustworthiness. It can impact their willingness to accept risk and vulnerability ...
Although the use of pesticides in agriculture is increasing, some farms have transitioned to organic practices and avoid applying them. But it's uncertain whether chemicals applied to land decades ago can continue to influence the soil's health after switching to organic management. Now, researchers reporting in ACS' Environmental Science & Technology have identified pesticide residues at 100 Swiss farms, including all the organic fields studied, with beneficial soil microbes' abundance negatively impacted by their occurrence.
Fungicides, herbicides and insecticides protect crops by repelling or destroying organisms that harm the plants. In contrast, organic agriculture management strategies avoid adding ...
In earlier days of the COVID-19 pandemic, before diagnostic testing was widely available, it was difficult for public health officials to keep track of the infection's spread, or predict where outbreaks were likely to occur. Attempts to get ahead of the virus are still complicated by the fact that people can be infected and spread the virus even without experiencing any symptoms themselves.
When studies emerged showing that a person testing positive for COVID-19 -- whether or not they were symptomatic -- shed the virus in their stool, "the sewer seemed like the 'happening' place to look for it," said Smruthi Karthikeyan, PhD, an environmental engineer and postdoctoral researcher at University of California ...
Healthy human bodies are good at regulating: Our temperatures remain around 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, no matter how hot or cold the temperature around us. The sugar levels in our blood remain fairly constant, even when we down a glass of juice. We keep the right amount of calcium in our bones and out of the rest of our bodies.
We couldn't survive without that regulation, called homeostasis. And when the systems break down, the results can cause illness or, sometimes, death.
In presentations at the American Association for the Advancement of Science's annual meeting, researchers argued that mathematics can help explain and predict those breakdowns, potentially offering new ways of treating the systems to prevent or fix them when things go wrong. The meeting ...
Imagine seeing the world in muted shades -- gray sky, gray grass. Some people with color blindness see everything this way, though most can't see specific colors. Tinted glasses can help, but they can't be used to correct blurry vision. And dyed contact lenses currently in development for the condition are potentially harmful and unstable. Now, in ACS Nano, researchers report infusing contact lenses with gold nanoparticles to create a safer way to see colors.
Some daily activities, such as determining if a banana is ripe, selecting matching clothes or stopping at a red light, can be difficult for those ...
Land stores vast amounts of carbon, but a new study led by Cranfield University's Dr Alice Johnston suggests that how much of this carbon enters the atmosphere as temperatures rise depends on how far that land sits from the equator.
Ecosystems on land are made up of plants, soils, animals, and microbes - all growing, reproducing, dying, and breathing in a common currency; carbon. And how much of that carbon is breathed out (also known as ecosystem respiration) compared to how much is stored (through primary production) has impacts for climate change. ...
