TUESDAY, March 2 (HealthDay News) -- Fit bodies may bring kids better test scores in school, a new study finds.

''Children's physical fitness is associated with their academic performance," said study author Lesley Cottrell, an associate professor of pediatrics at West Virginia University, in Morgantown.

She is due to present the findings this week at the American Heart Association's 2010 Conference on Nutrition, Physical Activity and Metabolism in San Francisco.

In general, the fitter the student, the better the test scores, Cottrell's team found.

The researchers evaluated almost 1,200 students, assessing their fitness in the fifth grade and then again in the seventh grade. They tested them in four subjects in seventh grade -- reading, math, science and social studies -- using standardized tests.

The researchers hypothesized that those children who maintained fitness over the two-year span would have the best test scores, and they were right.

The fitness evaluation was done by the commonly used Fitness Gram, which tests fitness by such measures as the time it take to run a mile, then rates the student as in the healthy fitness zone or not.

Across each of the four academic areas, a child who was fit in fifth grade and maintained it at seventh grade had the highest scores, on average, in the standardized tests.

For example, those who were unhealthy in fifth grade and remained so were the worst at reading, with an average reading score of 2.91 points (of a possible 5). Those who were fit as fifth-graders but weren't fit by the seventh grade did only a little better academically, getting a 3.03 reading score.

In contrast, those who weren't fit in the fifth grade but got fit by seventh grade got an average reading score of 3.14, the team found.

And those who were in the "healthy" fitness zone in both the fifth and seventh grades did the very best of all - an average reading score of 3.31. "Mastery" at reading begins at a score of 3 or greater.

The emphasis was on fitness, not body weight, Cottrell said, which is good news for those children carrying a few extra pounds. "It's really their level of fitness [that is associated with the better test scores], not their body mass index," she said, citing previous research that agreed with that finding.

The study results came as no surprise to Todd Galati, an exercise physiologist and spokesman for the American Council on Exercise in San Diego. ''These findings are in line with other studies that show similar correlations with increased fitness and higher test scores," he said.

Why the link? "I believe it's showing the mind-body connection," Galati said. "We have a body that is meant to move." Regular physical activity, he said, can result in positive mood, healthy blood sugar levels and increased ability to focus and pay attention.

According to Galati and Cottrell, the data point to the need for schools and parents to pay more attention to the value of physical activity.

Yet another study due to be presented at the same meeting points to the value of physical activity, too. In that effort, researchers at the University of Maryland, College Park, followed nearly 2,400 girls for 10 years, assessing their body fat levels.

Those who engaged in moderate weekly activity had lower body fat at the study's end than did the sedentary girls, the study found.

More information

There's more on boosting physical activity in school at the American Heart Association  .

MONDAY, March 1 (HealthDay News) -- Although most American parents vaccinate their children, many are concerned about the safety of vaccines and some choose not to have their children protected from potentially deadly diseases, a new study found.

Researchers at the University of Michigan found that while 90 percent of parents say vaccines are a good way to protect their kids, and 88 percent follow their doctor's vaccination recommendations, 54 percent are worried about serious side effects.

"Parents' hesitation about vaccines has, in some cases, led them to postpone vaccinations for their children," said lead researcher Dr. Gary L. Freed, director of the Child Health Evaluation and Research Unit at the University of Michigan Health System. "The study found that 12 percent of parents have refused at least one vaccine that their children's doctor recommended."

"When parents refuse vaccines, they place their child at risk for potentially life-threatening vaccine-preventable diseases," Freed added.

The study findings were published in the March 1 online edition of Pediatrics.

For the study, Freed's team collected information from 1,552 parents on their attitudes about vaccines. The survey was part of the CS Mott Children's Hospital National Poll on Children's Health.

It found that almost 12 percent of parents have refused to have a child vaccinated with at least one vaccine recommended by their doctor. The vaccines most often shunned were newer ones, including those for varicella (chickenpox), which 32 percent refused, and meningococcal conjugate, which prevents diseases caused by meningococcal bacteria and was declined by 32 percent of parents. Meningococcal bacteria can infect the blood, spinal cord and brain and can be fatal.

In addition, almost 57 percent of parents rejected the HPV (human papillomavirus) vaccine, which is typically given to females before they become sexually active to help protect them from cervical cancer.

Freed's group also found that one in five parents still believes vaccines cause autism, even though this notion has been repeatedly discredited by scientific research. Women are more likely than men to believe that vaccines cause autism, the study found.

The theory that vaccines cause autism is particularly high among Hispanic parents, although they are more likely not to refuse vaccinations for their children.

Parents' concern that some vaccines may cause autism is particularly disturbing, Freed said. "All reputable evidence on this issue fails to show a link between vaccines and autism, but it appears current public health education efforts on this issue have not yet satisfied many parents' concerns," he said.

Last month, the original article that purported to show a link between autism and the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine was retracted by The Lancet the journal that published it in 1998, because it was based on false data, Freed noted.

Dr. Paul A. Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center and chief of infectious diseases at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, said the growing number of people concerned about vaccine safety was predictable.

Before the introduction of vaccines, disease rates were high, Offit said. "Vaccines weren't available -- people were scared of diseases, and the minute vaccines came on the market they were quick to give them. And the major killers of children were brought low," he said.

But today's parents didn't grow up with these diseases, Offit pointed out. "If you believe, as I do, that people are compelled by their fears, [then] as diseases rates diminish, the fear of disease decreases and the concern about vaccine side effects, real or imagined, increases," he said.

However, Offit pointed out that outbreaks of diseases such as measles can occur in communities where vaccination rates are lower. "The fear of vaccines is not a theoretical problem any more. It's a real problem," he said.

If that fear persists, vaccine rates could drop to the point where serious diseases would make a comeback, and then vaccine rates would go back up, Offit said.

Another vaccine expert, Dr. Marc Siegel, an associate professor of medicine at New York University, said one problem might be that children are getting too many vaccines now, 32 in all.

"If we are having this problem, maybe we need to evaluate which are the most important vaccines and those are the ones we better push for," he said.

All the vaccines are essential, Siegel said, "but we need to justify every vaccine."

More information

To learn more about vaccines, visit the U.S. National Library of Medicine.

MONDAY, March 1 (HealthDay News) -- Well-intentioned parents who prop their infants in front of supposedly brain-enhancing DVDs in the hopes they will learn more words might actually be accomplishing nothing, new research shows.

What's more, the study found that children who started viewing the DVDs at an earlier age actually had lower levels of overall language achievement.

"Kids this age are basically little scientists exploring the world, figuring out how it works," said Dr. Jeffrey Brosco, a pediatrics professor at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. "They walk around stuff to see what it looks like on the other side. They drop something to see what happens. They're active learners so you would think that a video that doesn't really promote active learning or social engagement would probably not promote language acquisition."

Rahil Briggs, director of Healthy Steps at Children's Hospital at Montefiore and an assistant professor of pediatrics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, added that, with such DVDs, "there might be a little bit of science and a whole lot of marketing."

Lack of social interaction while watching a TV screen might be the main explanation for the lack of progress that the researchers found.

"We've known for a long time that live social interaction is very important for how children learn -- things like interacting with parents, a teacher or even an older sibling," said Rebekah A. Richert, lead author of the study, which is scheduled to be published in the May print issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine. "Our study suggests that a TV screen and people on a TV screen can't replace that live interaction."

Dozens of so-called educational DVDs and videos are marketed to parents. According to the study, infants start watching this type of programming at, on average, 5 months old.

More than one study, however, has reported that this type of media can hamper vocabulary development. After research from the University of Washington found that the DVDs did, indeed, hinder new-word acquisition, one of the creators of the Baby Einstein series filed suit against the university, alleging that it had failed to respond to requests for public records.

The new study involved 96 infants, between 12 and 25 months old. Half were assigned to watch the Baby Wordsworth DVD (one of the Baby Einstein series) at home five times in every two-week period over a total of six weeks.

Children were tested in a lab every other week to see if they were learning the words highlighted in the DVD. Parents or caregivers also reported on the children's progress.

The researchers found that the video did not enhance language acquisition, nor did it hamper it. But the earlier a toddler started watching the videos, the lower the child's overall language development, the researchers found, though they added that this could have been related to other characteristics in the child's home.

"This doesn't tell you very much because the sort of family that turns on a video player for a 1-month-old may not talk much to their kids anyway," Brosco said.

"There are lots of reasons why that could be," added Richert, who is an assistant professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside. "We ask that parents think about why they're showing children DVDs at young ages."

Overall, though, interaction with actual human beings seems to be the key learning tool for young kids.

"Social interaction seems to be most important to kids in the first few years of life," explained Brosco, who is a father of four. And Briggs agreed.

"We know that from the first days of infancy through the toddler and early childhood years, social interaction is absolutely the ideal mode for learning," Briggs said. Rather than spending 30 minutes or so going to the store to buy a video, parents should just take that time to "talk to their kids about what they see outside," she said. "I tell parents to pretend to be sportscasters, narrating action on the field, so to speak."

Efforts by HealthDay to reach the owner of the Baby Einstein series, the Disney Co., for comment were unsuccessful.

More information

Learn more about children's language and speech development   from the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association.

FRIDAY, Feb. 19 (HealthDay News) -- Finger and thumb amputations accounted for almost two-thirds of all pediatric amputations due to trauma in the United States in 2003, a new study shows.

In total, the researchers found that there were more than 950 cases of traumatic amputations among children aged 17 and younger that year. In children aged 4 and younger, amputations due to being caught in or between objects were most common. More than 80 percent of those amputations involved a finger or thumb.

A previous study, which looked at 2005 statistics, found that kids up to age 2 had the highest rate of finger amputations among the childhood age groups. Many of those amputations were caused by injuries related to doors.

"Doors are easily accessible to the exploring fingers of young children, who are unaware of the potential dangers," study co-author Dr. Gary Smith, director of the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children's Hospital, said in a hospital news release. "Prevention strategies, such as doorstops and other door design modifications, can help to reduce the number of door-related amputation injuries."

The new study also reports that the inpatient costs of these amputation injuries added up to more than $21 million nationally, for an estimated 3,900 days of hospitalization.

"It is imperative that more effective interventions to prevent these costly injuries among children be developed, implemented and evaluated," Smith said in the news release.

The findings were published in the January issue of the Journal of Trauma.

More information

A British Web site has details on protecting kids from door-related injuries  .