February 4, 2009
Study links TV and depressio
The amount of time teenagers watch television increases their risk of becoming depressed as adults, researchers find, reports The LA Times.
Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh and Harvard Medical School looked at the media habits of 4,142 healthy adolescents and calculated that each additional hour of TV watched per day boosted the odds of becoming depressed by 8%.
Other forms of media, such as playing computer games and watching videos, didn't affect the risk of depression, according to the study published today in the Archives of General Psychology, titled "Association Between Media Use in Adolescence and Depression in Young Adulthood".
The results don't prove that TV viewing itself causes depression, said Dr. Brian Primack of the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Research on Health Care, who led the study. "It could be argued that people with the predilection for later development of depression also happen to have a predilection for watching lots of TV," he said.
But the circumstantial evidence pointing to TV as the culprit is strong, the study found.
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