Drs. Jean-Philippe Chaput and Mark Tremblay are among the authors on a paper, “Correlates of compliance with recommended levels of physical activity in children,” that was recently published in Scientific Reports. Citation details and a summary of the paper are below.

Thayse Natacha Gomes, Peter T. Katzmarzyk, Donald Hedeker, Mikael Fogelholm, Martyn Standage, Vincent Onywera, Estelle V. Lambert, Mark S. Tremblay, Jean-Philippe Chaput, Catrine Tudor-Locke, Olga Sarmiento, Victor Matsudo, Anura Kurpad, Rebecca Kuriyan, Pei Zhao, Gang Hu, Timothy Olds, Carol Maher, José Maia. Correlates of compliance with recommended levels of physical activity in children. Scientific Reports 7, Article number: 16507 (2017).

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to describe children’s daily compliance with moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) recommendations across a week in different parts of the world, and to identify individual- and school-level correlates that may explain differences in daily MVPA compliance. The sample included 6553 children aged 9–11 years from 12 countries, and multilevel statistical analyses were used, including both child- and school-level variables. Most children did not comply with the MVPA guidelines on a daily basis: Chinese children complied the least, whereas Finnish, Australian, Colombian, UK, and Kenyan children complied the most. Boys (rate ratio [RR] = 1.47) and children with higher unhealthy diet scores (RR = 1.08) complied more, but overweight/obese children (RR = 0.81), earlier maturing children (RR = 0.93), and those who spent more time in screen activities (RR = 0.98) and sleeping (RR = 0.96) had the lowest compliance. At the school level, children with access to playground or sport equipment (RR = 0.88, for both) tended to comply less, whereas those with access to a gymnasium outside the school hours complied more with the MVPA guidelines (RR = 1.14). Significant between-country differences in children’s daily MVPA compliance were observed, reflecting not only site characteristics, but also the importance of individual traits and local school contexts.

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