WEDNESDAY, Nov. 11 (HealthDay News) -- When it comes to teaching healthy behaviors, boys' high school team sports might be doing more harm than thought.

New research suggests that for teenage boys, participation in team sports may encourage unruly behavior such as fighting and binge drinking.

Girls, on the other hand, seem to behave better in organized sports, said the lead researcher, Susan Connor, manager of the injury prevention program at Rainbow Babies & Children's Hospital in Cleveland.

"The research raises more questions than it answers," said Connor, who was to present her findings at the American Public Health Association's annual meeting, in Philadelphia, which concludes Wednesday. "We were looking at a broad database, so we do not know why team sports may affect boys differently or how they affect them. That's a topic for further research."

Connor and her team studied the responses of more than 13,000 U.S. high school students who took part in the 2007 Youth Risk Behavioral Study, an assessment of adolescent high-risk behaviors conducted by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

According to Connor's findings, roughly 60 percent of the male respondents said they had played in at least one team sport in the past year. For girls, the participation rate was 48 percent.

The data did not specify which sports the teenagers participated in, although the top high school sports in the 2000 U.S. Census included basketball, football, baseball, soccer, track and field, and cross-country running.

For boys, the study found that participation in team sports correlated with an increased likelihood of fighting, drinking and binge drinking. Rates of depression and smoking, however, seemed to decline.

The findings were different for girls. White girls who were active in team sports reported lower levels of fighting, depression, smoking, marijuana use and unhealthy weight-loss practices, Connor and her colleagues found. Black high school girls reported increased levels of binge drinking.

"I think the issue is more socio-economic than race," said Connor, who added that more research is needed to explore the slight behavior differences between black and white female high school athletes.

Connor stopped short of offering explanations for the apparent negative aspects of boys' team sports. One possibility, she said, is that there is a culture in male sports that creates a climate of poor behavior.

"There are certainly health benefits in playing team sports," said Connor. "But there is also this misconception, which is very widespread, that sports are all good. As a parent, you can't assume your kid is protected. Sports are what you and your child make of it."

Robert Regal, a psychologist in private practice in Valhalla, N.Y., agreed with Connor's findings. Part of the problem, he said, is that boys' teams may inherently attract athletes who are aggressive and highly competitive, leading to unruly behavior once they join a team.

"There are pre-existing expectations for both male and female athletes," he said. "To be a female athlete means not having the same kind of hyper-aggressive, big-man-on-campus image. For guys, team sports are played with a great deal of expectation for success. It's written into the team ethic.

"I'd be curious to see the behaviors of the top girls' teams, the ones that win the state championships. I suspect they mirror the behaviors of the boys," Regal added.

More information

The American Psychological Association   has more on the benefits of regular exercise.

THURSDAY, Nov. 5 (HealthDay News) -- Babies who are deprived of oxygen at birth often go on to have lifetime disabilities, but research has shown that cooling infants can help prevent problems.

Now, a new study reports that the cooling actually reduces the number of brain lesions in the babies.

Oxygen starvation at birth can cause a condition called hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy, which can be fatal. Oxygen starvation also accounts for about 20 percent of cerebral palsy cases.

An earlier study found that chilling infants who suffer from oxygen deprivation can help reduce rates of cerebral palsy and improve their motor skills later in life. In the new study, reported online Nov. 5 and in the January issue of The Lancet Neurology, researchers investigated whether MRI scans would reveal fewer cerebral lesions in infants who were cooled.

That turned out to be the case. After reviewing MRI brain scans of 131 infants, they found 30 to 40 percent fewer lesions in areas of the brain where neurological development occurs. The infants who underwent cooling were three times more likely than those who didn't to have normal scans.

The scans also allowed doctors to predict with more than an 80 percent degree of certainty whether the infants would die or be disabled by the time they were 18 months old. The accuracy rate was 84 percent for the infants who were cooled and 81 percent for those who were not.

More information

The March of Dimes has more about cerebral palsy  .

MONDAY, Oct. 19 (HealthDay News) -- Children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are more likely than other children to engage in criminal activity when they grow older, a U.S. study has found.

The study included more than 10,000 adolescents who were later surveyed in adulthood. It found that youngsters with ADHD were twice as likely to commit theft later in life and were 50 percent more likely to sell drugs.

The findings, believed to be the first evidence of a link between ADHD and criminal activity, were published online Sept. 30 in the Journal of Mental Health Policy and Economics.

"While much research has shown links between ADHD and short-term educational outcomes, this research suggests significant longer-term consequences in other domains, such as criminal activities," study lead author Jason M. Fletcher, an assistant professor at the Yale School of Public Health, said in a university news release.

"We also found important differences in the association between adult crime and the type of childhood ADHD symptoms -- whether hyperactive or inattentive or both," he said.

Crimes where ADHD is a factor may cost the nation $2 billion to $4 billion a year, estimates have indicated.

Fletcher and colleagues plan to investigate whether drug treatments may reduce the illegal activities associated with ADHD in adulthood. The researchers also plan to study the associations between childhood ADHD symptoms and later employment and earnings.

ADHD, which affects between 2 percent to 10 percent of U.S. schoolchildren, is far more common in males than females. It's also more prevalent in people who have close relatives with the condition, suggesting a genetic origin, the study authors noted in the news release.

More information

The U.S. National Institute of Mental Health has more about ADHD.

SATURDAY, Oct. 17 (HealthDay News) -- Kids who play video games for more than an hour a day increase their chances of having wrist and finger pain, a new study has found.

The lead author of the study knows this all too well. Deniz Ince, who's 11 years old, got the idea to study joint pain among his classmates at Rossman Elementary in St. Louis, Mo., after noticing that his fingers ached while squeezing oranges. Deniz, an avid Wii player, wondered if his video game habit was the culprit.

With the help of his rheumatologist dad and researchers from New York University, the fifth-grader handed out questionnaires to 171 of his schoolmates who were 7 to 12 years old.

About 80 percent of them reported playing with game consoles (Xbox, PlayStation, Wii and the like) or hand-held devices (including iTouch, iPhone and PlayStation Portable). Roughly half of them said they used them less than an hour a day, about a third said they played one to two hours daily, 7 percent reported playing two to three hours a day and 6 percent reported playing more than three hours daily.

Each additional hour of use increased the likelihood of experiencing pain by 50 percent, according to the study. Younger children were also more likely to have wrist pain than older children.

"The younger the kids, the more significant the pain," said the study's senior author, Dr. Yasuf Yazici, an assistant professor of medicine at the NYU Hospital for Joint Diseases in New York City. "The 7-year-old playing for two hours had more pain than the 10-year-old playing for two hours," he said.

The study was to be presented Oct. 19 at the American College of Rheumatology's annual meeting in Philadelphia.

The researchers said they weren't sure why younger children were more prone to joint pain, though it could be because their muscles and tendons are still developing. Similar motions might put more pressure on a younger child's hand and wrist, compared with an older child's, Yazici said.

Almost 12 percent of the kids surveyed said their finger pain was bad enough to limit how much they played, and nearly 10 percent reported wrist pain that limited their playing time. The pain experienced was generally mild.

However, playing a Wii exclusively resulted in more self-reported pain, independent of age or hours played, according to the research.

Dr. Eric Ruderman, an associate professor of medicine at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine, said the findings suggest that video game playing may not be good for children's developing muscles and tendons. But because the children weren't examined, he added, the cause of the pain, the potential for long-term damage and how much playing time is safe for a child remain unknown.

"Parents need to monitor what their children are doing," Ruderman said. "Two or three hours a day, irrespective of pain in their hands, is too much time for a 7- or 8-year-old to be playing video games."

Young children also might not be able to recognize the warning signs of overuse and know when to stop playing, Ruderman added.

The findings add to a growing body of research showing that video games, PDAs, cell phones and the assorted other electronic gadgets that have become part of daily life can lead to painful repetitive stress and nerve compression injuries.

Too much texting can bring on "BlackBerry thumb," a repetitive stress injury brought on by overtaxing a single digit. Cell phone elbow, otherwise known as cubital tunnel syndrome, is a tingling or numbness in the hands caused by a compression of the ulnar nerve, which can be brought on by flexing the elbow for too long while talking. "Guitar Hero wrist" is tendinitis of the wrist brought on by efforts to mimic Jimi Hendrix.

For his part, Deniz, who wants to be an orthopedic surgeon, has cut back on his video game playing, though he did plan to celebrate the completion of his study by buying a new Wii game.

And his advice to his fellow students is to turn off their video games, even if it's not easy. "I would tell them they shouldn't play for more than one hour a day," Deniz said. "And if I were younger, I wouldn't play before the age of 7."

More information

The Nemours Foundation has tips for parents   on limiting video game and computer use by their children.