Obesity Article/Presentation

Objectively Measured Physical Activity and Fat Mass in a Large Cohort of Children

Background: Obesity is a serious risk factor for many health problems such as heart attack, stroke, diabetes, and cancer.
- Obesity is becoming more common
- It is an energy imbalance, which means that a person consumes more than they burn off in physical activity.

Purpose: The researchers wanted to use new techniques to help them record physical activity and measure fat mass. They did this to see if there was a difference in obese and non-obese people based on their various levels of activity.

Methods: Actigraph: Electronic motion sensor compising a single plane accelerometer. It records all vertical movement and the intensity of that movement. ( with the exception of swimming, biking and sleeping which were recorded by the individual children)
- BMI: Body Mass Index: Weight/height squared

Results: Found the greater the fat mass the lower the level of physical activity.
-It was found to be greater in boys than in girls.
- Association between obesity and physical activity appeared to be from moderate to viscorous physical activity.
Graph: x-axis; Used quintiles, which are sections that were broken up into 20% increments. In Model one that measured just the moderate viscorous activity and what your chances of becoming obese were. In model 2: the took into account the activity level as well as the mothers education level, social class, birthweight, etc..
- Y-axis: Told the chances of being obese.
They found a strong correlation with moderate and more viscorous activity and obesity and it was stronger in boys compared with girls.

Unless otherwise stated, the content of this page is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License