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Effectiveness of interventions to promote physical activity in children and adolescents: systematic review of controlled trials
Author(s) -
Reading Richard
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
child: care, health and development
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.832
H-Index - 82
eISSN - 1365-2214
pISSN - 0305-1862
DOI - 10.1111/j.1365-2214.2008.00831_1.x
Subject(s) - psychological intervention , scopus , systematic review , intervention (counseling) , medline , medicine , meta analysis , randomized controlled trial , physical activity , psychology , clinical psychology , physical therapy , psychiatry , surgery , political science , law
Effectiveness of interventions to promote physical activity in children and adolescents: systematic review of controlled trials.
Van Sluijs E.M.F. , McMinn A.M. & Griffin S.J.(2007)British Medical Journal,335,703–707.
DOI: 10.1136/bmj.39320.843947.BE.Objective To review the published literature on the effectiveness of interventions to promote physical activity in children and adolescents. Design Systematic review. Data sources Literature search using PubMed, SCOPUS, Psychlit, Ovid Medline, Sportdiscus and Embase up to December 2006. Review methods Two independent reviewers assessed studies against the following inclusion criteria: controlled trial, comparison of intervention to promote physical activity with no intervention control condition, participants younger than 18 years, and reported statistical analyses of a physical activity outcome measure. Levels of evidence, accounting for methodological quality, were assessed for three types of intervention, five settings and three target populations. Results The literature search identified 57 studies: 33 aimed at children and 24 at adolescents. Twenty‐four studies were of high methodological quality, including 13 studies in children. Interventions that were found to be effective achieved increases ranging from an additional 2.6 min of physical education‐related physical activity to 283 min per week of overall physical activity. Among children, limited evidence for an effect was found for interventions targeting children from low‐socio‐economic populations, and environmental interventions. Strong evidence was found that school‐based interventions with involvement of the family or community and multi‐component interventions can increase physical activity in adolescents. Conclusion Some evidence was found for potentially effective strategies to increase children's levels of physical activity. For adolescents, multi‐component interventions and interventions that included both school and family or community involvement have the potential to make important differences to levels of physical activity and should be promoted. A lack of high‐quality evaluations hampers conclusions concerning effectiveness, especially among children.