THURSDAY, Nov. 5 (HealthDay News) -- A program called Safe Schools/Healthy Students greatly increases the safety of students, says a U.S. government report.

Over three years, school districts participating in the program had a 15 percent decrease in the number of students involved in violent incidents, from 17,800 to 15,163, according to the report. The number of students who reported experiencing or witnessing violence fell 12 percent.

Among school staff, 84 percent said the program improved school safety, 77 percent said it reduced violence on campus and 75 percent said it reduced violence in the community, the report noted.

School districts involved in the Safe Schools/Healthy Students program initiate a comprehensive, community-wide plan that includes the following elements:

• Improving the safety of school environments and providing violence prevention activities
• Offering mental health services
• Added focus on student behavioral, social and emotional supports
• Implementing alcohol-, tobacco- and drug-prevention activities
• More access to early childhood social and emotional learning programs

The elements are provided in partnership with local police, juvenile justice systems and mental health agencies. The program is funded by the federal government.

"Every child deserves to learn in a safe and healthy environment, and now, through the results of the Safe Schools/Healthy Students Initiative, we know that we can take real steps to help them," Eric Broderick, acting administrator of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, said in an agency news release.

"The positive impact for children, families and communities is unprecedented: lower rates of school violence, more mental health services for more children, better attendance and improved academic performance," Broderick said.

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more about school safety.

TUESDAY, Nov. 3 (HealthDay News) -- Uninsured children in the United States are three times more likely to die from trauma injuries than children with private insurance, according to a new study.

Children with public insurance, such as Medicaid or the State Children's Health Insurance Program, are about twice as likely to die as those with private insurance, the study found.

"We have this idea that everyone is treated equally, yet the mortality rate after trauma among uninsured children is much higher when compared to children with commercial insurance," Dr. Heather Rosen, a research fellow in plastic surgery at Children's Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School and the study's lead researcher, said in a news release from the hospital.

The findings, published in the October issue of the Journal of Pediatric Surgery, stemmed from an analysis of National Trauma Data Bank information on 174,921 trauma patients aged 17 and younger.

The researchers suggested several possible reasons for the disparity they found:

• Trauma patients with no insurance or public insurance might be transferred from one hospital to another, causing a delay in treatment.
• Uninsured patients might be given fewer medical tests, leading to inadequate diagnoses or missed injuries.
• If uninsured patients don't speak English, if it's not their native language, or if their education level is lower overall, they might have trouble talking to health-care providers about their medical history and quality of care after they were injured.

"This study suggests that there may be a direct effect of possessing insurance," Rosen said. "We need to work harder to get to the point where every person has access to health care in this country."

She noted that the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) requires all hospitals to treat patients until they're medically stable, regardless of insurance status.

"This paper provokes more questions than it answers," she said. "Should we be more vigilant about investigating whether EMTALA laws are being violated? Is this happening more often than we care to admit?"

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention offers tips for protecting children from injuries.

MONDAY, Nov. 2 (HealthDay News) -- Yet another study has found that television viewing is linked to aggression in young children.

This research, published in the November issue of the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, found that direct TV watching by young children or exposure to indirect viewing in the household were both associated with increased aggression in small children.

After controlling the data for other factors, such as maternal depression, living in an unsafe neighborhood and being spanked, "for every hour that a child watched TV directly, aggression went up 0.16 on a scale of zero to 30. For a TV being on in the house, it was 0.09," said study author Jennifer A. Manganello, an assistant professor of health communication at the University of Albany School of Public Health, State University of New York.

And, she said, while the increase may not seem like a lot, when the researchers looked at all of the other factors, "TV was more likely than some other factors to increase aggressive behaviors."

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) is concerned enough about the media's effect on children's behavior that they recently updated their policy on media violence.

"Exposure to violence in media, including television, movies, music and video games, represents a significant risk to the health of children and adolescents. Extensive research evidence indicates that media violence can contribute to aggressive behavior, desensitization to violence, nightmares and fear of being harmed," wrote the AAP Council on Communications and Media.

For the current study, Manganello and her colleagues collected data from the home and by telephone for 3,128 children born between 1998 and 2000. The children came from 20 large U.S. cities, and their mothers completed surveys when the child was born, and again at ages 1 and 3.

Because so many factors can influence a child's behavior, the researchers tried to control for as many factors as they could, including maternal health and depression, maternal parenting attitudes and behaviors, maternal experience with violence, the safety of the neighborhood and demographic characteristics.

The researchers found that children who were spanked, lived in an unsafe neighborhood or had a mother who was depressed or stressed were more likely to exhibit aggressive behaviors.

But, after controlling for these and other factors, the study authors found that TV -- both direct and indirect viewing -- had a statistically significant effect on children's aggressive behavior.

"A take-home message from this study is that parents should think about how much TV kids are watching themselves, but also think about the overall media environment in the home," said Manganello.

"TV is not a benign influence. It does have impact," said Richard Gallagher, director of the Parenting Institute at the New York University Child Study Center in New York City. And, while content may impact children, he pointed out that children's behaviors may also be affected by the "opportunities lost."

That means that when a child is watching TV, which is a passive behavior, the child doesn't have the opportunity to interact with other people and may have reduced contact with his or her peers.

"The AAP guidelines that children under 2 shouldn't watch any TV may be fairly strict and hard to carry out, but parents should be judicious about how much TV young children are watching, and be aware that it's not likely to be appropriately stimulating," he said.

He added that parents need to act as a TV filter for their children. For example, he said, parents should point out when something is silly on TV that it's not a real-life scenario. Or, if they see something violent -- say an anvil dropping on someone's head in a cartoon -- parents need to interpret that for their children, and let them know what would happen if that were a real situation.

More information

Learn more about the effects of TV on children from the Nemours Foundation's KidsHealth  .

TUESDAY, Oct. 13 (HealthDay News) -- Children who experience frequent stomach aches can use their imagination to reduce their pain, new study findings suggest.

The study included 34 participants, aged 6 to 15 years, with functional abdominal pain, which is a persistent pain with no identifiable underlying disease. All the children received standard medical care, but 19 also received eight weeks of guided imagery therapy, which is similar to self-hypnosis.

The audio recordings for the guided imagery therapy consisted of four bi-weekly, 20-minute sessions and 10-minute daily sessions. The therapy offered the children suggestions and imagery for reducing abdominal discomfort. For example, in one session they were told to imagine a special shiny object melting in their hand. They then placed the hand on their abdomen, spreading warmth and light from the hand into the belly in order to create a protective barrier that prevents anything from irritating the belly.

The children in the guided imagery group were almost three times more likely to experience improvement in their abdominal pain than those who received standard treatment alone, the researchers found. The benefits of the guided imagery lasted for six months after the end of the sessions.

"What is especially exciting about our study is that children can clearly reduce their abdominal pain a lot on their own with guidance from audio recordings, and they get much better results that way than from medical care," study lead author Miranda van Tilburg, an assistant professor in the gastroenterology and hepatology division of the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, and a member of the UNC Center for Functional GI and Motility Disorders, said in a university news release.

"Such self-administered treatment is, of course, very inexpensive and can be used in addition to other treatments, which potentially opens the door for easily enhancing treatment outcomes for a lot of children suffering from frequent stomach aches," she added.

The study appears in the November issue of the journal Pediatrics.

More information

The Nemours Foundation has more about children and belly pain  .