MONDAY, Aug. 3 (HealthDay News) -- Young children who spend too much time in front of the television, the computer and video games might be at increased risk for high blood pressure, a new study suggests.

American and Spanish researchers examined the association between sedentary behavior and blood pressure in 111 boys and girls, 3 to 8 years old. For seven days, the children wore a special device that recorded their activity levels. In addition, their parents reported how much time the youngsters spent watching TV, playing video games, painting, sitting or doing other low-level activities.

The researchers also measured the children's height, weight, fat mass and blood pressure.

TV time was defined as time spent watching TV, videotapes or DVDs. Screen time was defined as the total amount of time using a TV, video, computer or video game.

The children were sedentary an average of five hours a day and had an average of 1.5 hours of screen time each day. Boys spent more time using computers than girls, but they spent about the same amount of time on other sedentary behaviors.

"Sedentary activity was not significantly related to systolic blood pressure [the top number in a reading] or diastolic [bottom number] blood pressure, after controlling for age, sex, height and percentage of body fat," wrote David Martinez-Gomez, of Iowa State University and the Spanish National Research Council in Madrid, and his colleagues. "However, TV viewing and screen time, but not computer use, were positively associated with both systolic blood pressure and diastolic blood pressure after adjusting for potential confounders."

They noted that children with the lowest amount of TV and screen time had lower levels of systolic and diastolic blood pressure than kids with the highest amounts of TV and screen time.

"The results of this study showed that TV viewing and screen time were associated with elevated blood pressure independent of body composition in children," the researchers wrote.

"Given that total objective sedentary time was not associated with elevated blood pressure, it appears that other factors, which occur during excessive screen time, should also be considered in the context of sedentary behavior and elevated blood pressure development in children," they concluded.

The study appears in the August issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.

The researchers noted that rising rates of childhood obesity are a major public health issue, with obesity's effects on blood pressure an area of particular concern.

"The clustering of cardiovascular disease risk factors in overweight youth suggests that risks may be immediate and not just indicative of potential future problems," they wrote.

More information

The Nemours Foundation has more about overweight and obese children  .

MONDAY, Aug. 3 (HealthDay News) -- Pain relief isn't the main reason why one in 10 high school seniors have tried opioid drugs, a new U.S. study finds.

The most common reasons included relaxation, feeling good or getting high, experimentation and then pain relief. Students used drugs such as hydrocodone, oxycodone, hydromorphone, meperidine, morphine and codeine without a prescription, researchers say.

"The results of this study provide compelling evidence that adolescents have a wide range of motives for using prescription opioids non-medically, and these motives should be carefully considered in efforts to reduce this behavior," said study author Sean Esteban McCabe, a research associate professor at the Substance Abuse Research Center of the University of Michigan.

Other studies have found many adolescents get opioids from their own previous prescriptions, McCabe said. "These results suggest that appropriate pain management and careful therapeutic monitoring could contribute to reductions in the non-medical use of prescription opioids among adolescents," he said.

The report is published in the August issue of the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.

For the study, McCabe's team collected data on opioid use among 12,441 U.S. high school seniors (most aged 18 years). The students were asked if they used opioids and their reasons for doing so.

The researchers found that 12.3 percent of the students said they had used opioids for non-medical reasons; 8 percent said they had used them during the past year.

The top reasons for using these drugs were to relax or relieve tension (56.4 percent), to feel good or get high (53.5 percent), to experiment (52.4 percent), to relieve physical pain (44.8 percent) or to have a good time with friends (29.5 percent), McCabe said.

However, students who used prescription opioids only for pain relief were less likely to drink heavily or use other drugs, he noted.

Dr. Adam Bisaga, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Columbia University and addiction psychiatrist at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, said more than 90 percent of these students used these drugs for reasons other than to treat pain. "That is for their psychoactive effects, either to achieve euphoria or to relieve psychological distress," he explained.

"Not surprisingly, those who use opioids for their psychoactive effects were more likely to use other substances with addictive potential and show early signs of substance use disorder," Bisaga said.

These data indicate that use of prescription opioids to achieve psychoactive effects is highly prevalent among high schoolers, and puts them at risk to develop more serious drug-related problems, Bisaga added.

"This suggests that adolescents should be routinely screened for prescription painkiller use, particularly those that are regular users of alcohol, marijuana or cigarettes, and those who show signs of psychological distress," he said.

"Early identification of individuals at risk, and development of preventive and treatment strategies appropriate for these individuals, is likely to impede the development of addictive disorders and their devastating psychological, medical and social consequences," Bisaga said.

Another expert, Dr. Thomas Kosten, the Jay H. Waggoner chair and a professor of psychiatry, pharmacology & neuroscience at Baylor Medical College in Houston, said many of those who use these drugs for pain relief "may not represent persons with addictive behaviors who will need, benefit or accept opiate addiction treatments."

Kosten said, "These adolescents without addictive behaviors would benefit from some education about the need for professional medical supervision when using opiates because of the potential for complications including drug interactions and dependence, tolerance and withdrawal syndromes."

More information

For more information on drug abuse, visit the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse.

FRIDAY, July 31 (HealthDay News) -- In the last 25 years, rates of severe childhood obesity in the United States have tripled, putting increasing numbers of children at risk for diabetes and heart disease, says a new study.

Researchers looked at National Health and Nutrition Survey data on 12,384 youths, ages 2 to 19 years, and found that the prevalence of severe obesity increased from 0.8 percent in the period from 1976 to 1980 to 3.8 percent in 1999 to 2004. Severe obesity correlates to a body mass index that's equal to or greater than the 99th percentile for age and gender.

The finding could mean that 2.7 million children in the United States are severely obese, the researchers said.

Black and Mexican-American children had the largest increases in severe obesity, along with children in families below the poverty level. For example, the percentage of severely obese Mexican-American children rose from 0.9 percent to 5.2 percent.

The researchers also found that a third of severely obese children had metabolic syndrome, a group of risk factors for diabetes, stroke and heart attack. The risk factors include high blood pressure, cholesterol and insulin levels.

The study appears online in Academic Pediatrics.

"Children are not only becoming obese but becoming severely obese, which impacts their overall health," Dr. Joseph Skelton, an obesity expert at Brenner Children's Hospital, part of Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem, N.C., and lead author of the study, said in a news release from the center.

"These findings reinforce the fact that medically based programs to treat obesity are needed throughout the United States, and insurance companies should be encouraged to cover this care," Skelton said.

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention offers tips to help children maintain a healthy weight.

THURSDAY, July 23 (HealthDay News) -- Science now confirms what parents have long sensed: Children who are inactive during the day have more trouble falling asleep at night.

In fact, every hour of inactivity adds three minutes to the time it takes a child to fall asleep, a new study from New Zealand researchers has found. But children who are active during the day fall asleep faster and sleep longer, the researchers added.

"I believe that, in an environment that can offer technological toxicity to our children in the form of increased inactivity, this study reminds parents and clinicians alike of the importance of childhood exercise," said Dr. Robert Vorona, an assistant professor of sleep medicine at Eastern Virginia Medical School.

More and more data associates insufficient sleep not only with neuro-cognitive consequences but also with such conditions as hypertension, diabetes and obesity, Vorona said.

"This article demonstrates an association between increased levels of activity and a shorter time to sleep onset as well as the converse," he said. "The information is potentially important, and I do not find the association between activity and sleep latency surprising."

The report is published online July 23 in Archives of Disease in Childhood.

For the study, Edwin Mitchell, a professor of child health research at the University of Auckland, and his colleagues collected data on the sleep patterns and daytime activity of 591 children, all 7 years old.

On average, it took the children an average of 26 minutes to fall asleep, but the time ranged from 13 minutes to 42 minutes.

For the one in 10 children who found it difficult to fall asleep quickly, it took about 15.5 minutes longer to fall asleep, the researchers found.

Children who were active during the day took less time going to sleep than inactive children. And the more vigorous the activity, the faster they fell asleep, the study found.

But for sedentary children, every hour of inactivity increased the time it took to fall asleep by three minutes, Mitchell's group found.

About 16 percent of parents of school-age children say their child has difficulty falling asleep, according to the researchers, who noted that poor sleep patterns have been linked to poorer school performance and an increased risk of a child becoming overweight or obese.

"This study emphasizes the importance of physical activity for children, not only for fitness, cardiovascular health and weight control, but also for sleep," the researchers concluded.

Taking longer to fall asleep, though, is not really a problem, said Dr. David Rapoport, director of the New York University Sleep Disorders Center.

"The finding goes with our biases," Rapoport said. "The more you run around as a child, the better you will sleep at night. But it suggests that if you don't do anything all day, you may need less sleep."

"It is not clear that if you don't do the exercise and don't get to sleep, or get less sleep, [that] is itself a bad thing," Rapoport said.

Is less sleep, then, something to worry about?

"Far from it," he said. "I see this as something which we were designed by nature to do. The purpose of sleep is to recover from activity, and what this is showing is that that link is quite tight in the child. If the child exercises, they need more sleep and they get it more easily."

For sedentary children, Rapoport said, the study indicates that they may be going to bed too early, when they are not ready to sleep.

"I don't know if there is a problem, but there is a simple cure," he said. "See to it that the kid gets enough exercise during the day because then they will fall asleep more rapidly."

More information

The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry has more on children's sleep problems  .