COVID-19 increased weekday screentime for children: study

The COVID-19 pandemic led to increased weekday screentime for school-aged children says a new study involving the University of Ottawa published in JAMA Pediatrics

2023-04-12

(Press-News.org) The COVID-19 pandemic led to increased weekday screentime for school-aged children says a new study involving the University of Ottawa published in JAMA Pediatrics.

Researchers examined the change in children’s screen time from prior to the pandemic to three separate pandemic waves between 2020 and 2021. Researchers found a boost of up to 1.35 hours per day during the weekdays compared to prior to the pandemic, particularly with school closures at the onset of the pandemic.

While the weekend time was on par with pre-pandemic levels, this weekday jump was greater than expected for age-related growth.

Spikes in screen time

“We were interested in understanding whether initial spikes in screen time among school aged children were sustained during the pandemic,” explains Dr. Nicole Racine, the study’s co-author, and Assistant Professor in the School of Psychology at the Faculty of Social Sciences.

“We found that the biggest increases in screen time occurred during weekdays at the outset of the pandemic during school closures. When school resumed, weekday screen time decreased, but remained higher than pre-pandemic estimates. These findings suggest that children used screens to fill time otherwise spent at school or participating in extra-curricular activities.”

Dr. Racine is an ongoing collaborator with the All Our Families Study at the University of Calgary and she collaborated with researchers from the University of Laval and the University of Calgary on this study. Dr. Racine is also chair in child and youth mental health at CHEO and was part of the team behind a recent study showing a sharp increase in emergency department visits for attempted suicide and suicide ideation among children and adolescents during the pandemic.

END

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

In search of a better semiconductor chip

2023-04-12

A University of Texas at Arlington materials science and engineering researcher is working on a project to determine when failure happens in electronic device circuits. The research ultimately will help manufacturers design better semiconductor chips. Choong-Un Kim, professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, was awarded a $285,0000 grant from the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) for the project “Enabling Electromigration Solver for Solder Joint With Various Packaging Structures and Alloys.” This is the latest in a series of grants he has received from SRC that aims to answer the demand for improved device reliability. The SRC ...

All-optical quantum state sharing via continuous variable system

2023-04-12

Quantum information is a powerful technology for increasing the amount of information that can be processed and communicated securely. Using quantum entanglement to securely distribute a secret quantum state among multiple parties is known as “quantum state sharing.” An important protocol in quantum networks and cryptography, quantum state sharing works like this (in simple terms): a secret quantum state is divided into n shares and given to n players. The secret state can only be reconstructed ...

Father’s alcohol consumption before conception linked to brain and facial defects in offspring

2023-04-12

According to the U.S. Surgeon General, women should not drink alcoholic beverages during pregnancy because of the risk of birth defects in their unborn child. Now, research at Texas A&M University demonstrates that a father’s alcohol consumption before conception also links to growth defects that affect the development of his offspring’s brain, skull and face. Research investigating fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) exclusively examines maternal alcohol exposure. However, because men drink more and are more likely to binge drink than women, Dr. Michael Golding, an associate ...

New technique allows researchers to dig into molecular causes of pediatric bipolar disorder

2023-04-12

It’s extremely difficult to study the biological basis of psychiatric disorders, in part because researchers can’t easily collect brain cells from living people to study in the laboratory. Now, University of Utah Health scientists have developed a way around that. The researchers grew three-dimensional structures, called “organoids”, derived from blood cells donated by a patient with pediatric bipolar disorder and by several family members. The approach identified significant molecular changes linked to the psychiatric condition. The results, reported in Molecular Psychiatry, suggest that structural changes in the ...

COVID-19 pandemic will disrupt cancer reporting for years to come

2023-04-12

Key takeaways: American College of Surgeons research published in JAMA Surgery reveals the complexities and variations that occurred in cancer reporting in the National Cancer Database (NCDB) because of the pandemic. The number of reported cancer cases in NCDB declined by 14.4% compared with prior years, representing more than 200,000 cancer cases that were not diagnosed and/or treated at accredited facilities. Research offers guidance to centers across the country on how to interpret data from 2020 and onwards. CHICAGO: New research from the American College of Surgeons (ACS) outlines significant ways that the COVID-19 pandemic destabilized usual patterns of cancer care as reported ...

Is the language you speak tied to outcome after stroke?

2023-04-12

MINNEAPOLIS – Studies have shown that Mexican Americans have worse outcomes after a stroke than non-Hispanic white Americans. A new study looks at whether the language Mexican American people speak is linked to how well they recover after a stroke. The study is published in the April 12, 2023, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. “Our study found that Mexican American people who spoke only Spanish had worse neurologic outcomes three months after having a stroke than Mexican American people who spoke only English or were bilingual,” said study author ...

Archaeological sites at risk from coastal erosion on the Cyrenaican coast, Libya

2023-04-12

Archaeological sites along the Libyan shoreline are at risk of being damaged or lost due to increasing coastal erosion, according to a study published April 12, 2023 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Kieran Westley and Julia Nikolaus of Ulster University, UK and colleagues. The Cyrenaican coast of Eastern Libya, stretching from the Gulf of Sirte to the current Egypt-Libya border, has a long history of human occupation back to the Palaeolithic era, and it therefore hosts numerous important and often ...

Poor family cohesion is associated with long-term psychological impacts in bereaved teenagers

2023-04-12

The death of a parent can affect the health and well-being of children and adolescents, including higher risk of depression. A study published in PLOS ONE by Dröfn Birgisdóttir at Lund University, Lund, Sweden and colleagues suggests poor family cohesion is associated with long-term psychological symptoms among bereaved youth. Parentally bereaved children are at increased risk for mental illness including depression, anxiety, suicide attempts, and self-injurious behaviors. However, the relationship ...

The stripes of the Lesser Pacific Striped Octopus are as unique as our own fingerprints, enabling scientists to track individuals as they grow

2023-04-12

Article URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0265292 Article Title: Individually unique, fixed stripe configurations of Octopus chierchiae allow for photoidentification in long-term studies Author Countries: USA Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this work. END ...

Most retail cannabis may be less potent than claimed, with THC being at least 15% less potent than reported on the label in around 70% of products sampled in Colorado

2023-04-12

Article URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0282396 Article Title: Uncomfortably high: Testing reveals inflated THC potency on retail Cannabis labels Author Countries: USA Funding: Headspace Sensory LLC provided funding for purchase of 13 of the 23 Cannabis samples that were included as part of another study [47], but had no other involvement in this study. All other funding was provided by the McGlaughlin Lab at the University of Northern Colorado and by the first author. Mile High Labs provided support for this study in the form of salaries for VJ and JH. The specific roles of these authors are articulated in the ‘author contributions’ ...

COVID-19 increased weekday screentime for children: study

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES: