Six-year-olds who spent the most time watching television, using a computer or playing video games had narrower arteries in the back of their eyes, a marker of future cardiovascular risk, in a first-of-its-kind study reported in Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis and Vascular Biology: Journal of the American Heart Association.
Australian researchers found that more sedentary behavior such as "screen time" was associated with an average narrowing of 2.3 microns in the retinal arteriolar caliber. A micron is one thousandth of a millimeter or one-25th of a thousandth of an inch.
"We found that children with a high level of physical activity had a more beneficial microvascular profile compared to those with the lowest levels of physical activity," said Bamini Gopinath, Ph.D., lead author and senior research fellow at the Center for Vision Research at the University of Sydney. "This suggests that unhealthy lifestyle factors may influence microcirculation early in life and increase the risk of cardiovascular disease and hypertension later in life."
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