Improving physical activity assessment in prepubertal children with high-frequency accelerometry monitoring: A methodological issue
Introduction
There is increasing evidence that physical activity (PA) during childhood and adolescence has an important impact on short- and long-term health and behavior outcomes (Strong et al., 2005). In a review on interrelationships between PA and health, Biddle et al. (2004) emphasized the need to develop a greater understanding of PA in youth. To establish the links between PA, health and disease, they stated that an accurate assessment of PA is necessary to objectively highlight the “real” patterns of children's PA over time. From a video observation, Bailey et al. (1995) reported that the nature of children's HPA pattern is intermittent and characterized by rapid changes from rest to PA of vigorous intensities, which makes these activities even more difficult to recall and quantify, especially in terms of intensity and duration. However, if video observation is a standard in PA assessment, this methodology is time consuming, needs trained staff and every event must be observable and quantifiable. Assessment of human body movement with activity monitors based on accelerometry is also a direct objective way of measuring PA (Sirard and Pate, 2001). These devices convert recorded accelerations to a quantifiable signal referred to as “counts” and sum these counts over a selected time interval called “epoch”. However, in most of the studies involving children, the epoch has been set at 1 min (Trost et al., 2002, Riddoch et al., 2004). Using such epoch can hardly reflect children's PA patterns in free-living conditions. Nilsson et al. (2002) demonstrated that there was a significant discrepancy between the recorded times spent at different levels of PA (from low to high-intensity) according to the epoch settings, particularly for high and very high intensities. Henceforth, to describe more accurately children's daily PA patterns, it appears necessary to monitor the children with a more consistent sampling interval related to their PA, which can be done using accelerometry. This study aimed to analyze the patterns of children's physical activity intensity and duration (temporal patterning) over time, using a high-frequency activity monitoring.
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Subjects
Thirty-four 8- to 10-year-old children (16 boys and 18 girls) participated in the study. The children were randomly taken from two elementary classes in the North of France. Full advice about possible risks and discomfort with the protocol was given to the subjects and their parents, and all signed a written informed consent. The study was designed in accordance with the ethical standards of the Helsinki Declaration of 1975 and received the approval of the local “Consultative Committee for the
Results
Although investigators and parents reminded children of the importance to wear their device during the experimental period, eight children (3 boys and 5 girls) were rejected for an incomplete 7-day PA data set. Twenty-six children were finally retained for the experimental study. The Student's t-test revealed no sex difference, for any anthropometric data between boys and girls. Age and anthropometric data are presented for boys and girls and for the whole population in Table 1.
Discussion
The purpose of this study was to improve PA assessment in prepubertal children by means of the Actigraph monitor, using a 2-s short duration epoch. The main result of the present study is that, according to sampling frequency, significant differences in children's PA patterns could be highlighted. This result is linked to the nature of the children's PA that is highly intermittent and transitory. In this way, our results confirm that reported by Bailey et al. (1995) who observed that children's
Conclusion
The high-frequency sampling method used in this investigation has generated valid data commensurate with children's natural physical activity behavior of high intensity and short duration. It could be applied in other larger studies to improve the assessment of children's physical activity.
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