Abstract:

Background: Social media has become an integral part of everyday life; however, prolonged social media use (SMU) can inversely affect mental health. This study aimed to examine the associations of intense and problematic SMU with psychological complaints in adolescent boys and girls who are overweight.  

Methods: We analysed data from 32,998 overweight adolescents aged 11-15 years (60.1% boys) from 40 European and North American countries that participated in the 2017/2018 Health Behaviour in School-aged Children survey. Intense SMU was assessed by using the time spent on social media, whereas problematic SMU was defined by symptoms of addiction to social media. Psychological health was assessed using four complaints and dichotomised as high or low.

Results: High psychological complaints were more common among girls than boys (38.8% vs 24.2%), when girls reported more problematic and intense SMU than boys. Multilevel modelling showed that adolescents with problematic SMU had 3.31 times higher odds in girls (OR 3.31; 95% CI 2.86-3.82) and 2.31 times higher odds in boys (OR 2.31; 2.02-2.64) of reporting high psychological complaints. Association between intense SMU and high psychological complaints was comparable across gender (Girls: OR 1.36, 1.24-1.48; Boys: OR 1.25, 1.15-1.35). Additional modelling showed that exposure to both problematic and intense SMU had higher detrimental effects than exposure to either intense or problematic SMU across gender.

Conclusions: Our multi-country analysis showed gender differences in psychological complaints and SMU with adverse effects being higher for problematic than intense SMU. Prospective research is needed to understand causal mechanism of these relationships.

Speaker's Biography:

Dr Asad Khan is an Associate Professor in Biostatistics and Epidemiology at The University of Queensland, Australia. He has a global reputation as a public health researcher and has been leading an international team to conduct multi-country studies. His current research focuses on physical activity, sedentary behaviour, and their inter-relationships with health and wellbeing, and developing interventions to improve active lifestyle and wellbeing, with a special focus on children and adolescents. He has supervised 13 PhD/MPhil student projects to completion. He has published over 200

scientific articles in reputed journals and delivered numerous invited talks at international conferences. He is an editorial board member for a number of high-impact journals and a regular reviewer for funding agencies in Australia and abroad. Dr Khan is the founder Chair of the Active Health Kids Bangladesh (AHKBD), which aims to promote active lifestyle of children and young people in Bangladesh.