Pedometer determined physical activity and obesity prevalence of Greek children aged 4–6 years

Abstract

Background: Pre-school age is important for developing healthy attitudes towards physical activity (PA). However, research on pre-schoolers’ pedometer-determined PA is limited.

Aim: To describe pre-schoolers’ ambulatory activity; investigate step count differences in respect to Body Mass Index (BMI) categories and examine the prevalence of obesity.

Subjects and methods: Pre-school aged children (n = 250; 5.5 ± 0.4 years) from Komotini (Greece) wore Omron HJ-720IT-E2 pedometers for 10 consecutive days. Height and weight were measured and BMI was calculated.

Results: Three-way repeated measures ANOVAs revealed that children performed more steps on weekdays than during weekends (p < 0.001) and during leisure time than school (p < 0.001). Significant differences appeared between normal and obese children’s counts on weekdays (p < 0.001), weekend days (p < 0.05), during school (p < 0.001), after school (p < 0.005) and in weekly steps (p < 0.005). No gender differences were detected. Moreover, according to a sample t-test analysis, children’s daily steps were significantly different from the 10 000 steps/day guideline, while obesity prevalence was 15.6%.

Conclusion: School-based ambulatory activity is lower than after school ambulatory activity, independent of BMI-category and gender, although obese children demonstrated fewer steps. Taking into account the high rate of both the obesity prevalence and children not meeting the 10 000 steps/day guideline, the need for preventive policies becomes obvious.

• Leisure-time
• obesity
• Omron HJ-720IT-E2
• preschoolers
• school-time

Declaration of interest

This work was supported by the European Union (European Social Fund – ESF) and Greek national funds through the Operational Program “Education and Lifelong Learning” of the National Strategic Reference Framework (NSRF) – Research Funding Program: Heracleitus II Investing in knowledge society through the European Social Fund. The authors report no conflicts of interest.