Features

PARIS — Messing with the natural rhythm of one’s internal clock may boost the risk of developing mood problems ranging from garden-variety loneliness to severe depression and bipolar disorder, researchers said on Wednesday.

The largest study of its kind, involving more than 91,000 people, also linked interference with the body’s “circadian rhythm” to a decline in cognitive functions such as memory and attention span. 

The brain’s hard-wired circadian timekeeper governs day-night cycles, influencing sleep patterns, the release of hormones and even body temperature.

Earlier research had suggested that disrupting these rhythms can adversely affect mental health, but was inconclusive: most data was self-reported, participant groups were small and potentially data-skewing factors were not ruled out. 

For the new study, an international team led by University of Glasgow psychologist Laura Lyall analysed data — taken from the UK Biobank, one of the most complete long-term health surveys ever done — on 91,105 people aged 37 to 73.

The volunteers wore accelerometers that measured patterns of rest and activity and had this record compared to their mental history, also taken from the UK Biobank.

Individuals with a history of disrupting their body’s natural rhythm — working night shifts, for example, or suffering repeated jetlag — also tended to have a higher lifetime risk of mood disorders, feelings of unhappiness, and cognitive problems, the researchers found.

‘Owls’ and ‘Larks’

The results held true even when the potential impact of factors such as old age, unhealthy lifestyle, obesity and childhood trauma were taken into account, they reported in The Lancet Psychiatry, a medical journal.

The study cannot say conclusively that body clock disturbances are what caused the mental risk, instead of the other way round. 

But the findings “reinforce the idea that mood disorders are associated with disturbed circadian rhythms”, said Lyall.

Measurements of people’s rest-work cycles could be a useful tool for flagging and treating people at risk of major depression or bipolar disorders, the researchers concluded.

One limitation of the study was the average age of the trial participants — 62.

“Seventy-five per cent of [mental] disorders start before the age of 24 years,” said University of Oxford researcher Aiden Doherty, commenting on the paper.

“The circadian system undergoes developmental changes during adolescence, which is also a common time for the onset of mood disorders,” he added.

Humans have been shown to be either “owls” or “larks”, corresponding to so-called genetic “chronotypes” that determine whether we function better at night or during the day. 

Last year, the Nobel Prize for medicine was awarded to three US scientists who pioneered our understanding of how the circadian clock ticks.

Alexa, hold your horses.

Amazon Dot Echo Kids Edition started shipping this week, but children’s advocates and others are asking parents to hold off on buying the $79 version of the company’s market-leading smart home speaker. Like the Echo, the Dot Echo Kids Edition is voice-activated and powered by Alexa, the Amazon virtual assistant at the beck and call of millions of Echo users. Some uses: Kids can ask the devices to play music for them, and parents can use the devices as intercoms to call the kids for dinner.

But some groups are worried about how the brightly coloured devices — which come with a subscription for access to FreeTime, whose offerings include children’s content such as books (Alexa can read to them) and apps — will affect children’s well-being and privacy.

“Amazon wants kids to be dependent on its data-gathering device from the moment they wake up until they go to bed at night,” said Josh Golin, executive director for Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC), in a statement on Friday.

“Echo Dot Kids is designed to encourage children to give up their personal information so it can drive even more revenues for the e-commerce colossus,” said Jeff Chester, executive director for the Centre for Digital Democracy, in a statement.

Lawmakers also sent a letter to Amazon echoing similar concerns. Senator Ed Markey, D-Massachusetts, and Republican. Joe Barton, R-Texas, addressed questions to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and asked for a response by June 1.

An Amazon spokeswoman said on Friday the company has received the legislators’ letter and will address each of their questions — some of which she answered in an email to this news organisation.

For example, Markey and Barton asked whether the Echo Dot Kids Edition records children and whether parents can delete those recordings.

Yes and yes.

“Parents can access all their children’s voice recordings in the Alexa app, and delete them individually or all at once, which also deletes them from the Amazon server,” the Amazon spokeswoman said.

She also addressed the congressmen’s and child advocacy groups’ concerns about marketing to kids: “FreeTime on Alexa voice recordings are only used for delivering and improving the Alexa voice service and FreeTime service — they are not used for advertising or Amazon.com product recommendations.”

Amazon said the Echo Dot Kids Edition and FreeTime service comply with COPPA, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. Amazon’s privacy policies about its Alexa and its Alexa-powered devices can be found here.

Amid widespread concerns about tech addiction, some experts voiced questions about child-development issues.

“I worry about the unintended consequences of the world of an always-on, artificial device being marketed specifically for parents to ensconce their child within,” said Dipesh Navsaria, a paediatrician who’s a board member at CCFC.

Amazon said the Echo Dot Kids Edition can only be activated with the “wake” word, and has a mute button that disconnects the microphone: “This is by hardware design: no power equals no audio in.”

Schoolbag use does not appear to increase the risk of back pain in children and adolescents, according to an Australian review of previous studies.

Guidelines published by different organisations recommend limits on backpack weight for children, ranging from 5 per cent to 20 per cent of their body weight. However, there have been no reviews summarising the scientific literature, say the authors.

“According to popular opinion, schoolbags are a problem for kids. Many parents and even health professionals believe that schoolbags can be harmful for children, being the cause of their back pain,” study leader Tie Parma Yamato of the University of Sydney in New South Wales told Reuters Health in an e-mail. 

The main factors said to cause back pain in kids are the weight of the schoolbag, the way kids wear them and the design of the bag, but the lack of review evidence is concerning, said Parma Yamato. 

“Because of this, we decided to investigate the research in this area to better understand the relationship between schoolbags and back pain,” she said.

As reported in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, Parma Yamato and colleagues reviewed 69 studies related to schoolbag use and back pain. The studies involved a total of more than 72,000 children.

Five of the studies looked at schoolbag use and the development of back pain over time. One of the studies reported that children who said they have difficulty carrying their schoolbags had a higher risk of persistent back pain and another found that the perceived weight of schoolbags was associated with high back pain risk.

However, when the investigators reviewed the studies, they did not find evidence that schoolbag characteristics such as weight, design and carriage method increased the risk of developing back pain in children and adolescents.

Evidence from the other 64 studies, which did not follow kids over time, did not show any consistent pattern of association between schoolbag use and back pain.

The analysis has some limitations given that so few studies followed the children over time, and those that did were at moderate to high risk of bias.

Still, the take-home message for parents is that they should not be overly worried about schoolbags as a cause of back pain for their children, said Parma Yamato.

“People mistakenly think back pain in kids is an injury and so look for a cause of the back injury and the schoolbag is an easy target to lay blame at,” she said.

In fact, she said, “Physical activity and load are actually good for the spine, so we want kids to be physically active and to carry loads.”

People still believe in the outdated view that poor posture causes back pain and so when they see a child carrying a backpack on one shoulder they mistakenly think the posture adopted will harm them, said Parma Yamato. 

“If a child is experiencing an episode of back pain it may make sense to temporarily reduce the load if this relieves the pain, but once they recover it is fine to return to a normal load in the schoolbag,” she said. 

In an effort to save half a million lives each year, the World Health Organisation (WHO) on Monday urged developing nations to follow the lead of affluent countries and eliminate man-made trans fatty acids from their food supplies.

By taking six specific steps, officials from the United Nations’ health agency said countries could reduce a tidal wave of heart disease and strokes that results in more than 500,000 deaths annually.

“Trans fat is an unnecessary toxic chemical that kills, and there’s no reason people around the world should continue to be exposed” to it, said Tom Frieden, the former director of the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention who now leads an initiative called Resolve to Save Lives.

For the WHO to throw its weight behind a worldwide trans fat ban “is very helpful”, and countries that follow its advice will see a substantial payoff in improved public health, said Walter Willett, a professor of epidemiology and nutrition at Harvard University.

“The cost of transitioning to healthier fats is very small and the cost of treating cardiovascular disease is very high,” said Willett, who was among the first researchers to call out trans fats’ dangers and led the effort to ban them.

Some trans fats occur naturally in dairy foods and meat from ruminant animals. These do not raise major health concerns.

Industrially produced trans fats, on the other hand, have helped fuel an epidemic of cardiovascular disease since they were broadly introduced to the food supply in the 1950s.

These fats are made by adding hydrogen to vegetable oil, converting liquid fats to a solid at room temperature. These “partially hydrogenated” oils made processed foods cheaper to produce while extending their shelf life, and they quickly became an ingredient in bakery and snack foods devoured across the world.

By the mid-1990s, scientists began to turn up evidence that consuming trans fatty acids throws blood cholesterol out of whack, raising levels of LDL (the bad kind) and reducing levels of HDL (the good kind). Once public health researchers linked the growing use of industrial trans fats to rising US rates of heart disease, they spearheaded an effort to expunge the fats from the American diet.

By next month, food manufacturers supplying US consumers are expected to have reformulated their products to drive down trans fats to negligible levels. That process has taken five years, and has met with only muted resistance from large food manufacturers.

The US Food and Drug Administration has estimated that reducing trans fat in the US diet could prevent as many as 20,000 heart attacks and 7,000 deaths from heart disease each year. That is in line with studies that measured the impact of trans fat limits in Denmark and the United States. A 2016 study of New York City’s ban found that restricting the industrially produced fats drove down cardiovascular deaths by 4.5 per cent and produced annual savings of $3.9 million per 100,000 people.

But as wealthy countries have acted to expunge trans fats from their citizens’ diets, the ill effects have shifted to countries that relied heavily on trans fats to deliver inexpensive processed foods to their growing middle classes.

The WHO initiative launched on Monday, dubbed Replace, outlines a sequence of actions that countries should take to reduce trans fatty acids in their food supplies. It calls on governments to work with legislatures, nongovernmental organisations, oil and food manufacturers, and their citizens to enact measures that mandate the replacement of industrially produced trans fats with healthier fats and oils.

New York University food scientist Marion Nestle praised the initiative as one that will help consumers make healthier decisions without taxing their willpower.

“It’s a change in the food environment that’s likely to have a significant impact on public health and does not require significant behaviour change,” Nestle said. “That is what you want, because behaviour change is difficult.”

The fact that developed countries have been able to reduce trans fat shows that it is technically and politically possible, added William J. McCarthy, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles’ Fielding School of Public Health.

“The problem in poorer countries is that there isn’t as much surveillance and government oversight of the food supply, and in their absence you find the small-time vendors much prefer the use of these particular hydrogenated fats,” McCarthy said. “The profit motive is going to favour their use until there’s enough political will to intervene. Just as with control of tobacco products, it takes money, resources and political will to enforce regulations that a lot of food vendors would prefer not to have.”

The WHO has held up two countries — Iran and South Africa — as models for other low- and middle-income nations to follow.

In 2008, South Africa became the first developing country to enact legislation against trans fatty acids, setting a limit on the trans fat content of oils and fats for human consumption of 2 grams per 100 grammes. Experts said it worked because it did not target big food companies, but the manufacturers of industrial fats, a consolidated industry with few players.

Another success story is Iran, a country with the highest recorded intake of trans fats in the world.

Starting in 2005, Iran’s government collaborated with oil manufacturers, oil importers and nongovernmental organisations to reduce trans fats. The government first mandated that the cap on trans fats in corn oil, palm oil, frying oil and mixed liquid oils be cut in half, from 20 per cent to 10 per cent. In 2011, the government continued reducing allowable trans fat content, and has now met its 2018 goal of no more than 1 per cent trans fat content in those oils.

Reducing trans fat in bakery products, still allowed at 5 per cent, remains a challenge for the country to tackle.

BRUSSELS — In Belgium, where hot, salty chips smeared with mayonnaise are a national institution, tampering with traditional “frites” sounds like a recipe for trouble.

But the capital Brussels is giving a futuristic makeover to some of the official stalls where the famous potato delicacies are sold to eager locals and tourists.

Eight nondescript “fritkots” owned by city authorities will be decked out with dazzling mirrored facades and special lighting.

City planners and operators alike say the upgrade will make the stalls — which are due to reopen in late 2019 — as memorably Belgian as the food they sell.

“Without frites Belgium doesn’t exist,” said fritkot operator Vuistema Kemal, whose stall in central Brussels is one of those being upgraded.

He said that chips “represent Belgium around the world”.

Brussels planners launched a competition last year to find a new design for what they call the “Fritkots of the Future”.

“We thought ‘and what if we give a model?’ — a model that is identifiable just like the telephone booths of London,” said Marion Lemesre, a senior economic affairs official for the city of Brussels.

‘Part of Belgian culture’

The issue is a serious one in Belgium, whose claim of inventing “frites” is disputed by its bigger neighbour France.

Belgium’s “fritkots” even hit the international headlines when German Chancellor Angela Merkel nipped out to one in the middle of an EU summit in Brussels after Brexit talks went on for too long.

The competition was won in January by Studio Moto, an architecture firm based in Ghent, a city in the northern Dutch-speaking part of Belgium.

Studio Moto co-owners Mo Vandenberghe and Thomas Hick said their main goal during the design process was to maintain the identity of each individual chip shop.

“People are a bit particular about their fritkots,” Hick told AFP.

He said that the fritkot is “part of Belgian culture, Brussels culture, and replacing them is something sensitive, so we really had [to keep] in mind we couldn’t put something standardised”.

While all the stands will have the mirrored facade and lighting effect, each revamped fritkot is to have two colours unique to the location. One colour will be used for the sign on top of the fritkot, and the other will be for the interior tiling.

Brussels has dozens of privately owned and operated fritkots too, but only locations owned by the city of Brussels are set for remodelling, including the fritkot outside the Atomium museum, a key tourist draw, as well as Place de la Chapelle, near the city’s famed antiques market.

The city will also finance the creation of two new fritkot locations, one of which will be placed at another popular historic landmark, Mont des Arts, in the city centre.

Beer, chocolate, chips

Along with beer and chocolate, “frites” are a rare unifying factor in a young country, founded only in 1830, that has throughout its short history been deeply divided between French- and Dutch-speaking communities.

They also play into Belgium’s inferiority complex about France. 

Belgium claims frites were invented in the southern French-speaking city of Namur. But France of course lays a rival claim to the invention of what has become known in the United States in particular as the French fry.

Kemal, who has operated his stall at Place de la Chapelle for 34 years, said the newly designed stalls will help put Belgium’s frites on the map.

“What is good I think, is to unify all the designs of Belgium, of all fritkots in Brussels,” Kemal said. “So the tourists, the foreigners who come, they can discover it easily.”

The designers said they were working with the individual operators to make sure they work as well in practice as in theory.

“We are not trying to reinvent anything in particular,” Hick said. “We are trying to go back to the basics as much as possible.”

They will include special low-flammability timber and solar panels on the roof to reduce their environmental footprint.

“I see this as a positive sign of renewal for the city.”

Women who breathe polluted air during pregnancy may be more likely to have children who develop high blood pressure, a US study suggests.

Researchers focused on what is known as fine particulate matter, or PM 2.5, a mixture of solid particles and liquid droplets smaller than 2.5 micrometres in diameter that is found in traffic exhaust and can include dust, dirt, soot and smoke. 

They examined data on 1,293 mother-child pairs and assessed kids’ blood pressure at checkups from ages three to nine years. When they sorted children into three groups from highest to lowest levels of exposure to PM 2.5 in the womb, children in the highest-exposure group were 61 per cent more likely to have high blood pressure than kids with the lowest exposure. 

“We believe that when pregnant women breathe air with high levels of fine particulate matter, it causes an inflammatory response that alters genetic expression and foetal growth and development, on the pathway to high blood pressure in childhood,” said study co-author Noel Mueller of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore. 

“I think the take home message for pregnant women is not that you should change your residence, but rather that you might consider avoiding highly polluted areas during pregnancy, particularly during heavy bouts of physical activity, which is important to keep up during pregnancy,” Mueller said by e-mail. 

High blood pressure is a major risk factor for cardiovascular disease and a leading cause of disability contributes to an estimated 7.5 million deaths worldwide each year, researchers note in the journal Hypertension. 

Previous research has linked air pollution exposure in the womb to an increased risk of birth defects including abdominal malformations and what is known as hypospadias, an abnormality in boys that occurs when the opening of the urethra does not develop on the tip of the penis and instead forms on the shaft or on the scrotum. 

In the current study, children appeared to have an increased risk of high blood pressure when they were exposed to average PM 2.5 levels of at least 13 microgrammes per cubic metre of air (ug/m3) during the final three months of pregnancy. That is slightly higher than the limit set by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) of 12 ug/m3. 

Children in the group with the highest exposure to air pollution in the womb experienced PM 2.5 levels of 11.80 to 28.81 ug/m3 during the third trimester of pregnancy, the study found. 

Kids with the lowest exposure had third trimester PM 2.5 levels of 3.79 to 9.57 ug/m3, well within the range permitted by the EPA. 

Each 5 ug/m3 increase in PM 2.5 exposure in the womb was associated with a 3.39 per centile increase in what is known as systolic blood pressure, the “top number” that represents the pressure blood exerts against artery walls when the heart beats. 

Children were identified as having high blood pressure if their systolic blood pressure was in the highest 10 per cent for kids the same age. 

The study was not a controlled experiment designed to prove whether or how air pollution exposure in the womb might directly cause high blood pressure. Researchers also lacked data on how much time women spent breathing polluted air outdoors or any exposure to PM 2.5 at work. 

Still, the current study offers fresh evidence linking air pollution to high blood pressure in kids, particularly because the connection appeared for kids at all birth weights in the current study. Previous research found this connection for overweight babies. 

“If maternal and early life pollution exposures increase the long-term risk of high blood pressure, then reducing early-life pollution exposure through regulation and through local and regional efforts may help protect children from having higher blood pressure in childhood, and may improve long term cardiovascular and cerebrovascular health,” Diane Gold, author of an accompanying editorial and a professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, said by e-mail. 

Adolescents may develop new or worsening mental health problems after weight-loss surgery, particularly those who already had symptoms at the time of the procedure, according to a small US study.

Researchers followed the psychological health of 139 severely obese adolescents undergoing weight-loss surgery and 83 similar teens treated without surgery, and found that after two years, roughly one in three kids had some mental health problem, such as depression, anxiety or behavioural disorders.

About 9 per cent of the surgical patients had worsening of their psychological symptoms from the start of the study period compared with about 6 per cent of nonsurgical patients. However, for nearly 19 per cent of surgery patients and 25 per cent of non-surgical patients, mental health symptoms were reduced after two years.

Sanita L. Hunsaker of the Cincinnati Children’s Medical Centre in Ohio and colleagues emphasize in their report in the Journal of Adolescent Health that the majority of kids did not begin or end the study with mental health problems.

The results suggest that a “notable minority” of adolescents do have mental health issues and, like any condition that does not go into remission after weight-loss surgery, such as high blood pressure or blood fats, continued monitoring and treatment is “warranted”, they write.

“Bariatric surgery leads to many improvements in health outcomes, but it is not a panacea for teens with severe obesity,” said Aaron Kelly, co-director of the centre for paediatric obesity at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, who wasn’t involved in the study. “Based on this data it is important to manage the expectations of these patients. Bariatric surgery may not improve their mental health,” he said in a telephone interview. 

The study team analysed data from a long-term study of adolescents who underwent bariatric surgery at five medical centres in the US from 2007 to 20012. 

All of the study participants were severely obese at the beginning of the study period, meaning they had a body mass index — a ratio of weight relative to height — that was 120 per cent or more of the 95th per centile for their age. At the outset, participants ranged from 13 to 18 years old. 

The researchers found that 24 months after their procedure, nearly 17 per cent of surgery patients had new psychological symptoms, compared to just over 13 per cent of the nonsurgical group. 

The surgery group averaged significant weight loss, with half losing 30 per cent or more of their body mass, while the nonsurgical group averaged a 7 per cent weight gain. Researchers found, however, that in the surgery group, weight loss was not associated with an individual’s odds for having persistent or new mental health symptoms. 

Having symptoms at the start of the study, as well as loss-of-control eating and alcohol abuse were each tied to the odds of mental health symptoms at 24 months. 

The study’s corresponding author was unable to comment by press time. 

While bariatric surgery is safe and effective for adults, adolescence is normally a tumultuous time, said John Morton, chief of bariatric and minimally invasive surgery at Stanford University Medical Centre in California, who was not involved in the study. 

“We’re very careful about the adolescent patients we pick and are careful with their follow up. They have to be mature enough to give consent and have to have a very stable and supportive home situation. If not, it makes things more difficult,” he said in a telephone interview.

When adolescents lose weight, they might have adjustment problems because they have not been socially accepted by their peers before, Morton noted. “When someone is obese they’re ostracised and don’t fit in.”

They’ll need resiliency and coping skills to eat well and socialise “otherwise these kids may fall into bad habits”, he added.

“Calling attention to this is going to help improve care and underscore the importance of good psychological support and an investment in the psychological aftercare of these patients,” Lee Kaplan, director of the Obesity, Metabolism and Nutrition Institute at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston who was not involved in the study, said in a telephone interview.

STOCKHOLM — It’s the size of a grain of rice but could hold the key to many aspects of your life. 

A tiny microchip inserted under the skin can replace the need to carry keys, credit cards and train tickets.

That might sound like an Orwellian nightmare to some, but in Sweden it is a welcome reality for a growing number who favours convenience over concerns of potential personal data violations. 

The small implants were first used in 2015 in Sweden — initially confidentially — and several other countries.

Swedes have gone on to be very active in microchipping, with scant debate about issues surrounding its use, in a country keen on new technology and where the sharing of personal information is held up as a sign of a transparent society.

Twenty-eight year-old Ulrika Celsing is one of 3,000 Swedes to have injected a microchip into her hand to try out a new way of life. 

To enter her workplace, the media agency Mindshare, she simply waves her hand on a small box and types in a code before the doors open. 

“It was fun to try something new and to see what one could use it for to make life easier in the future,” she told AFP.

In the past year, the chip has turned into a kind of electronic handbag and has even replaced her gym card, she said.

If she wanted to, she could also use it to book train tickets.

Sweden’s SJ national railway company has won over some 130 users to its microchip reservation service in a year.

Conductors scan passengers’ hands after they book tickets online and register them on their chip.

Information sharing

Sweden has a track record on the sharing of personal information, which may have helped ease the microchip’s acceptance among the Nordic country’s 10 million-strong population.

Citizens have long accepted the sharing of their personal details, registered by the social security system, with other administrative bodies, while people can find out each others’ salaries through a quick phone call to the tax authority. 

The implants use Near Field Communication (NFC) technology, also used in credit cards, and are “passive”, which means they hold data that can be read by other devices but cannot read information themselves.

Although still small, they have the capacity to hold train tickets, entry pass codes as well and access certain vending machines and printers, promoters say.

‘Might need to re-think’

When Celsing’s innovatively minded media company organised an event where employees could get the implants, she followed the crowd.

She said she felt nothing but a slight sting when the syringe inserted the chip into her left hand, which she now uses on an almost daily basis and does not fear hacking or possible surveillance. 

“I don’t think our current technology is enough to get chip hacked,” she says.

“But I may think about this again in the future. I could always take it out then,” she adds. 

However, for Ben Libberton, a microbiologist working for MAX IV Laboratory in the southern city of Lund which provides X-rays for research, the danger is real. 

The chip implants could cause “infections or reactions of the immune system”, he warned.

But the biggest risk, he added, was around the data contained in the chip. 

“At the moment, the data collected and shared by implants is small, but it’s likely that this will increase,” the researcher said. 

The real question, he added, is what data is collected and who shares it. “If a chip can one day detect a medical problem, who finds out and when?” he asked. 

Libberton worried that “the more data is stored in a single place as could happen with a chip, the more risk it could be used against us”. 

‘Comfortable 

with technology’

But Jowan Osterlund, a piercings specialist and self-proclaimed champion of chip implantation, brushes off fears of data misuse and conspiracy theories. 

He advocates the opposite view, arguing that if we carried all our personal data on us, we would have better control of their use. 

Despite unanswered questions, however, about how the technology will progress, the appeal of being part of a futuristic experience is a strong draw for some users.

“In Sweden, people are very comfortable with technology and I would say there is less resistance to new technology here than in most other places,” Libberton said. 

At an “implant party” organised by Osterlund in Stockholm, 59-year-old Anders Brannfors stands out with his salt-and-pepper hair among the curious 30-something hipsters. 

Delighted to have become a 2.0 version of himself, he has yet however to find a use for his chip several weeks after the implant.