On this West Virginia Morning, the holidays are an important time for everyone to rest and relax. But as Chris Schulz reports, students off from school can still benefit from mental and physical activities.
On this West Virginia Morning, the holidays are an important time for everyone to rest and relax. But as Chris Schulz reports, students off from school can still benefit from mental and physical activities.
Also, in this show, as we come to the end of the year, Us & Them host Trey Kay has been reflecting on 2023, and a theme that’s been consistent. Trust, or more importantly, our lack of trust in each other and our institutions. In the latest episode, we explore how that reality could shape the year to come and its social and political landscape. Here’s an excerpt.
West Virginia Morning is a production of West Virginia Public Broadcasting which is solely responsible for its content.
Support for our news bureaus comes from Shepherd University.
Our Appalachia Health News project is made possible with support from CAMC and Marshall Health.
West Virginia Morning is produced with help from Bill Lynch, Briana Heaney, Caroline MacGregor, Chris Schulz, Curtis Tate, Emily Rice, Eric Douglas, Liz McCormick, and Randy Yohe.
Eric Douglas is our news director. Caroline MacGregor is our assistant news director and producer.
Listen to West Virginia Morning weekdays at 7:43 a.m. on WVPB Radio or subscribe to the podcast and never miss an episode. #WVMorning
A new study has found that women with high physical fitness at middle age were nearly 90 percent less likely to develop dementia decades later, compared to women who were moderately fit.
The study measured women’s cardiovascular fitness based on an exercise test. When the highly fit women did develop dementia, they developed it an average of 11 years later than women who were moderately fit, or at age 90 rather than 79.
Researchers say the findings demonstrate that improving women’s cardiovascular fitness in middle age could delay or even prevent them from developing dementia.
Researchers point out that the report did not show a cause and effect between cardiovascular fitness and dementia, but rather an association. It’s also not clear whether a lifetime of high fitness level is important or only starting in middle age.
West Virginia is tied with Oklahoma for the 9th most inactive state in the country.
The study was conducted in Sweden over a 44-year time period. Researchers say more work is needed to verify the findings in other demographics and parts of the world. The study was published this week in the online issue of Neurology.
Appalachia Health News is a project of West Virginia Public Broadcasting, with support from the Marshall Health, Charleston Area Medical Center and WVU Medicine.
A number of studies have been published in recent years looking at the connection between sitting too much and poor health outcomes. But a new study published today found that adults who sit for one to two hours at a time without moving may have a higher mortality rate than adults who sit for the same total amount of time, but in shorter segments.
Study participants who sat more than 13 hours a day usually in bouts of 60 to 90 minutes at a time were twice as likely to die earlier than those who sat for the same amount of time, but got up and moved more frequently.
Almost 8,000 adults over the age of 45 participated in the study. The authors used hip-mounted activity trackers over a period of seven days to objectively track inactivity with a median follow-up period of four years.
Those who sat for an average of 30 minutes or less at a time had the lowest mortality risk.
The study was published online in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
Appalachia Health News is a project of West Virginia Public Broadcasting, with support from the Benedum Foundation, Charleston Area Medical Center and WVU Medicine.
Researchers at Stanford University have tracked physical activity by country in the largest study on human movement to date. The study used step data from anonymous smart phone users in more than 100 countries.
The study, which was funded by the National Institutes of Health, followed a 2012 estimate published in the Lancet that more than 5 million people die each year from causes related to inactivity.
The study found that globally, the average user recorded about 5,000 steps a day, which is also about what the average American recorded. Although no specific state by state step data is available, West Virginia ranks as 7th “least active state,” according to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
The study also tracked whether a country had high rates of “activity inequality,” which means the range from most to least active within a given country. The US has high rates of activity inequality while countries like Mexico had more uniform activity patterns. They found that people in the five countries with the greatest activity inequality are nearly 200 percent more likely to be obese than individuals from the five countries with the lowest activity inequality.
In the US, 69 cities were studied. Those with higher walkability scores were associated with lower activity inequality. Even in cities with higher walkability, though, women were less active than men.
The study was advanced published this week in the online version of the magazine Nature.
Appalachia Health News is a project of West Virginia Public Broadcasting, with support from the Benedum Foundation, Charleston Area Medical Center and WVU Medicine.
An increasing body of research is showing that students who have time for physical activity in their school day tend to perform better on tests and have an easier time concentrating.
“The U.S. has lagged behind a lot of other countries in the world, like Finland, Japan, other nations that have excelled in mathematics and English,” said West Virginia University professor James Hannon. “At the same time we’ve cut physical activities back in schools.”
Hannon has overseen several studies in the last couple years around physical activity and academic performance. In one study, his group had students take a mathematics test after 20 minutes of vigorous physical activity. Meanwhile another group of classmates watched a 20- minute video on women’s soccer.
“And they performed significantly better after engaging in the aerobic exercise – it was anywhere from 11-22 percent improvement on the math test actual test score – after engaging in the aerobic exercise,” he said.
Credit Jesse Wright / West Virginia Public Broadcasting
/
West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Doctoral students Annie Machamer and Hannah Kipfer demonstrate some activities students might do during the course of a school day.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that children participate in at least an hour of physical activity daily. According to a 2013 study, only a quarter of US students reported actually achieving that goal.
But in order to incorporate physical activity into the school day in a more comprehensive way, schools need policies that support those initiatives.
In 2014, West Virginia passed a bill that said, among other things, West Virginia elementary school students were required to have at least 30 minutes of physical education three days a week and 30 minutes of recess daily.
“So what that means is it challenges administrators – it challenges classroom teachers, staff – to be more cognizant of how important physical activity is throughout the school day,” said Emily Jones, a colleague of Hannon’s at WVU.
“So that might be classroom activity breaks or energizers, or after a certain period of time kids can actually get up out of their chair, whether it’s before testing, after testing, throughout the school day,” she said. Other measures include “not eliminating or reducing recess, so not taking away recess for poor behavior, or not this low value of physical activity, throughout the school day.”
Doctoral students Hannah Kipfer and Annie Machamer said teachers can incorporate more physical activity into their day in two easy ways. First, take a brain break, which is basically just a minute or two when kids can get up and move through silly activities, like doing jumping jacks while reciting the alphabet.
The next is by actually incorporating physical activity into lessons. For instance, learning the mean, median and mode by doing pushups and counting the results.
The kids love it, but for teachers it isn’t always as easy.
“And some of the barriers were accessibility of time. That’s a big thing we see… scheduling throughout the school day – they have to change their lesson plan essentially, and that takes time out of their school day,” said Machamer.
Machamer said even though there were some barriers to incorporating what they called “active lessons” into classes, participating teachers did report their students were able to concentrate more at the end.
Researchers are now looking to find out which types of exercise are most effective at improving academic performance. In the meantime, simply incorporating some kind, any kind of, physical activity into the school day seems to help.
Appalachia Health News is a project of West Virginia Public Broadcasting, with support from the Benedum Foundation.
