Eight months of daily, afterschool physical activity in previously inactive 8- to 11-year-olds with obesity and overweight improved key measures of their cardiovascular health like good cholesterol levels, aerobic fitness and percent body fat, but didn’t improve others like arterial stiffness, an early indicator of cardiovascular risk, investigators report.
The exercise group experienced twice the improvement in measures like fitness and adiposity, or body fat, levels compared to the control group, they report in the International Journal of Obesity.
“They could do more, breathe better, their heart rates were lower when they were pushing themselves,” says Dr. Catherine “Katie” Davis, clinical health psychologist at the Georgia Prevention Institute in the Medical College of Georgia Department of Medicine and corresponding author.
The active children also experienced a surprising increase in the protective HDL cholesterol — a full five milligrams per deciliter — that likely resulted from sustained months of physical activity, the investigators say.
Read more at Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University
Image: Dr. Catherine "Katie" Davis and Jacob Looney, senior research associate at the Georgia Prevention Institute at the Medical College of Georgia, PI and a study coauthor. (Credit: Phil Jones, Senior Photographer, Augusta University)