Temporal Trends and Correlates of Physical Activity, Sedentary Behaviour, and Physical Fitness among School-Aged Children in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Systematic Review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recent physical activity (PA) and fitness transitions, identified as behavioural shifts from traditionally active lifestyles to more industralised and sedentary lifestyles, have been observed among school-aged children. There is a wealth of supporting evidence of such behavioural transitions in high income countries; however, a paucity of data on lower income countries exists. These transitions pose a particular threat to the welfare of children by accelerating the onset of chronic diseases. This systematic review investigated the evidence for a PA and fitness transition among Sub-Saharan Africa's school-aged children. Temporal trends and correlates of PA, SB, and fitness were examined. Studies were identified by searching the Medline, Embase, Africa Index Medicus, Global Health, Geobase, and EPPI-Centre electronic databases, and were included if they measured outcomes of interest in apparently healthy samples of children (5‒17 years). A total of 71 articles met the inclusion criteria (40 informed PA, 17 informed SB, and 37 informed fitness). Vast heterogeneity in study methodology complicated analysis of transitions over time and no temporal trends were immediately discernible. However, higher socioeconomic status, urban living, and female children were found to engage in lower levels of PA, higher SB, and performed worse on aerobic fitness measures compared to lower socioeconomic status, rural living, and male children. Data revealed that urbanization was associated with a trend towards decreased PA, increased SB, and decreased aerobic fitness over time. Representative, temporally sequenced data examining a PA and fitness transition are lacking in this region (PROSPERO Registration Number: CRD42013004399).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".