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Toddlers who watch too much TV at risk of developing asthma

Researchers have handed parents a new reason to tear their kids away from the family TV set – lifelong breathing problems.

Toddlers who watch more than two hours of television each day are almost doubly at risk of developing asthma by their teen years, according to a British study.

And asthma, which afflicts more than 300 million people globally, is blamed for one in 250 deaths each year, Reuters reported.

Long story short: lay off the Barney some.  

The researchers tracked more than 3,000 non-asthmatic toddlers for eight years. They found that 3.5-year-olds who watched the most TV had an 80 percent higher risk of developing asthma by the time they were 12 than other kids.

The scientists, led by a researcher from the University of Glasgow, published their findings in the medical journal Thorax.

They were not able to pinpoint causation for the link between asthma and TV watching, and also did not account for the effects of video games or computer use, Reuters reported.
 

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