Too much TV, lack of exercise cause less brain power in young adults

As it turned out, watching too much TV and having a sedentary lifestyle could lead to more than just problems related to obesity and cardiovascular diseases.Young adults who spend a good chunk of their time staring at their TV sets and set aside very little of their daily schedules in doing exercise activities could be losing their mental power as they grow older.

A recent study in the U.S. looked into the lifestyle of more than 3,000 people with an average age of 25 years old. The researchers monitored them until after 25 years later, which is when the researchers also asked them to take some cognitive tests. The results of the test showed that who watched the most TV and engaged in the least physical activity were more likely to perform poorly in the exam.

This is a disturbing indication and should be a cause of concern according to the researchers considering that most people today have created a lifestyle that involves more sitting and less physical activity. The USA Today wrote.

"There are so many more opportunities for sitting now that it's even more of a concern," than when the study started, in the 1980s, said Tina Hoang, a researcher at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center, San Francisco. The study was led by Kristine Yaffe of the University of California, San Francisco, while Hoang is also a co-author.

This 25-year study, which revealed that watching too much TV coupled with a sedentary lifestyle among young adults can have an impact on their mental ability when they reach their late 40s or early 50s, asked the 3,247 participants who are all Americans to fill out questionnaires about their TV viewing habits and physical activity levels.

The questionnaires were designed so that the participants' levels of activity were measured as units based on time and intensity while a high level of TV viewing means it is more than 3 hours a day, according to WebMD Boots.

After 25 years, the performance of the participants was assessed using parameters like processing speed, verbal reasoning, problem-solving and verbal memory. A little over 10 percent of the participants scored poorly and these were the same people who were categorized as those watching a lot of TV.

Yaffe added that while the result of the study is significant, it also shows that the decline in the cognitive ability of the participants was not huge. The new study was published in the JAMA Psychiatry journal, the NPR reported.