Month: September 2012

Active video games can increase heart rate and energy use for kids, a small study suggests. The study included 18 children, ages 11 to 15. They were asked to play a traditional seated video game, a dance game and a boxing sports game for 15 minutes each. The dance and boxing games used the Kinect system for Xbox 360. Kinect does not use a controller, so the kids had to move while playing. Researchers measured the children’s heart rate, oxygen use and overall energy use during each game. All three increased. The children used twice as much energy for the dancing game as for the seated game. They used three times as much energy for the boxing game. The journal Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine published the study. HealthDay News and Reuters Health news service wrote about it September 26.

Older adults in the South take antibiotics more often than those in other regions, a new study shows. And it’s not because they get more infections. The results suggest that some of the prescriptions may not be needed, the authors said. Antibiotics are used to treat infections caused by bacteria. Excess use of antibiotics can help bacteria to develop resistance to the drugs. Then the drugs won’t work when needed. This is a growing problem around the world. The new study looked at 3 years of Medicare data on prescriptions and infection rates. About 21% of Medicare patients in the South used an antibiotic in an average 3-month period. The West had the lowest average, about 17%. Regions with more prescriptions did not have higher rates of infections that needed antibiotics. For example, the Northeast had the highest rates of bacterial pneumonia.

Knee replacement operations on older adults have risen 162% in the last 20 years, a new study finds. Many had to be repeated. Second operations such as these doubled. Medicare spends about $15,000 on each knee replacement. All of these numbers will only go up as baby boomers get older. Researchers used Medicare data for their study. Medicare patients had 243,802 knee replacements in 2010. There were 93,230 in 1991. Some people needed “revisions,” or second surgeries. The number of these procedures doubled, from 9,650 to 19,871. The average hospital stay for knee replacement was cut in half during these two decades. But there were more problems afterward for people who had revision surgeries. They were twice as likely to need a second hospital stay after surgery as patients in 1991. The Journal of the American Medical Association published the study September 26.

Three new studies strengthen links between sugar-sweetened drinks and excess weight. The New England Journal of Medicine published them online September 21. Two studies involved children. One included 224 overweight and obese teenagers. They were randomly divided into 2 groups. One group received water and diet drinks delivered to their homes for a year. They were urged to avoid sugar-sweetened drinks and got regular pep talks. The other group got no drinks or advice. After a year, teens who got the free drinks had gained less weight than those in the other group. But a year after the program ended the difference had disappeared. A second study involved younger children who drank sugar-sweetened beverages regularly. Researchers gave each child a canned drink daily. One group got sugar-sweetened drinks.