Snoring in overweight kids reduced by exercise

Exercise can reduce snoring among overweight children, even if it doesn't result in weight loss, a new study shows.

Snoring is associated with poor sleep quality, which can lead to learning and behavioral problems that are often mistaken for disorders such as ADHD, Dr. Catherine L. Davis of the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta noted in an interview with Reuters Health.

Furthermore, prescribing stimulant ADHD drugs, like Ritalin, to kids who aren't sleeping well will only make matters worse, she added. What's more, while obesity is known to make snoring more likely, she added, there's growing evidence that sleep disorders can contribute to a greater risk of being overweight.

To investigate whether exercise might reduce sleep-disordered breathing among overweight kids, Davis and her team randomly assigned 100 overweight children between 7 and 11 years old to 13 weeks of "high-dose" exercise (40 minutes every school day), "low-dose" exercise (20 minutes), or to a control group that did not perform any additional exercise.

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Silicone implants to overtake saline

Plastic surgeons expect breast implants filled with silicone gel to supplant those containing salt water as the most popular choice of the nearly 300,000 U.S. women a year who have their breasts surgically enlarged.

In this country, silicone-gel implants now account for only an estimated 10 percent to 15 percent of the breast augmentation market, with saline implants making up the rest.

A 14-year virtual ban on silicone-gel breast implants — now ended — had restricted their use to women taking part in research studies. With the Food and Drug Administration's lifting of that ban, surgeons expect the saline-to-silicone ratio to reverse slowly and eventually match the overwhelming edge silicone has elsewhere in the world where the two types of devices are sold side by side.

"I don't know how rapidly it will flip, but it definitely will," said Dr. Scott Spear, chairman of plastic surgery at Georgetown University Hospital and a consultant to manufacturer Allergan Inc.

Fight against obesity, Fight against Junk Foods

European and Central Asian ministers agreed on Thursday to try to make healthy food cheaper and curb junk food adverts aimed at children in a bid to reverse a galloping obesity trend.

Ministers attending a U.N. World Health Organisation (WHO) obesity conference in Istanbul also agreed to reduce fat and sugar in manufactured food and improve urban planning to make cycling and walking easier.

The U.N. health body estimates obesity will affect one in five adults and one in 10 children by 2010 unless action is taken.

Already about 20 percent of children in the WHO's European region, which stretches to Central Asia, are overweight, of which a third are obese. Obesity has tripled in the past two decades, and six percent of health costs in the European region are due to adult obesity, the organization estimates.