Spend hours at look at a screen smartphone, tablet harm the neurological development of the child? This is what the American National Institutes of Health (NIH) are working to find out.
In a large study, American scientists have started scanning the brains of nine and ten-year-old children at 21 research centers across the United States. Objective: understand the impact of their report to the screen on their brain, their emotional development and mental health.
More than 11,000 children in total will be followed for a decade.
The first results have just filtered. They are the result of examinations carried out by MRI and interviews with a panel of 4,500 children. Verdict: It seems that children who spend the most time on a smartphone, tablet or computer screen display brain differences compared to small consumers of electronic devices.
Precisely, the children who pass two hours a day or more on screens score lower on cognitive, memory and language tests than those who spend less time on the screen.
Still premature results
Another observation is that the brains of children who stay more than 7 hours in front of a screen show a premature thinning of the cerebral cortex, the seat of neurological functions such as memory, language and consciousness.
For the moment, these observations appear premature to reach any conclusion, notes Gaya Dowling, director of the study of the NIH. “We don’t know if this is caused by the time spent on the screen. We don’t know if that’s a bad thing. ”She insisted on the importance of waiting for the results of analyzes carried out over time.
A data publication is expected in early 2019 according to the agency Bloomberg.
The use of screens in children has been the subject of research for years. Thanks to this work, scientists and child specialists are divided around the time not to be exceeded for the mental and physical health of the child. A recent San Diego State University study suggest that more than an hour of screen per day promote anxiety or depression in children.
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