NCT03893149

Attention Capacity and Before-school Physical Activity Intervention Program

A Before-school Physical Activity Intervention Program to Improve Attention in Vulnerable Children: The Active-Start Trial

• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 150 (actual)
• Sponsor: Universidad Santo Tomas · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 8 Years – 10 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

Despite the evidence and the potential of physical activity related to cognition and academic performance in children, the effects of a before-school physical activity program on these parameters remains unknown.

Detailed description

Despite public health concerns and the extensively documented health benefits of physical activity, a large proportion of Chilean children do not meet the physical activity recommendations (Aguilar-Farias et al., 2018). Since most children spend a majority of their waking hours at school, this environment is appropriate for the implementation of preventive interventions, particularly those that include activities promoting physical activity (Naylor \& McKay, 2009). With the absence of opportunities for physical activity during the school day, before-school programs have become a popular option to help children increasing their physical activity levels (Stylianou, van der Mars, et al., 2016). Although several recent studies support a positive effect of before school-based physical activity on health (Westcott, Puhala, Colligan, Loud, \& Cobbett, 2015), less literature has evaluate the cognitive outcomes (Stylianou, Kulinna, et al., 2016) such as attention capacity.

Conditions

• Physical Activity
• Behavior
• Child Behavior
• Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
BEHAVIORAL	Active-Start intervention	Supervised exercise training. The intervention is a physical activity intervention that consist of 5 times per week before starting the first school-class (8:00-8:30 a.m.), 5 times per week. Each session was previously planned and described in a manual dedicated to the study. These sessions were designed by the research team and delivered by a graduate in Sport The intervention program included sports games adapted to the age of the participants, playground games, dance and other recreational activities. The intensity of the main part of the sessions was moderate-to-vigorous according to a previous study and this intensity was confirmed by accelerometry. Also, different activities favoring social interactions were designed to facilitate the interactions between the participants at the end of the sessions (cold-down).
BEHAVIORAL	No Intervention	No-exercise

Timeline

• Start date: 2018-03-03
• Primary completion: 2018-12-01
• Completion: 2019-03-05
• First posted: 2019-03-28
• Last updated: 2019-03-28

Locations

1 site across 1 country: Chile