The Impact of the COVID-19 Lockdown Restrictions on Physical Activity Levels in European Adolescents: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Aim: To evaluate how the COVID-19 public health lockdown restrictions impacted the physical activity levels of European adolescents aged 10-19. Methodology: Databases searched included CINAHL Complete, Medline, APA PsycInfo, AMED, EMBASE, SPORTDiscus, Web of Science, and Cochrane Library. Search terms comprised database-specific synonyms of “Physical Activity” AND “COVID-19” AND “Adolescents”. Included studies compared continuous, quantitative pre-COVID and during-COVID physical activity measurements of healthy adolescents aged 10-19 living in the European Union. The references of relevant systematic reviews were hand-searched for pertinent studies. Included studies were independently appraised using the Newcastle Ottawa Scale for Cohort Studies followed by meta-analysis. Findings: Database search retrieved 1397 studies, with three further studies discovered through hand searches. After removing duplicates, 898 articles were independently screened in Covidence by two reviewers, resulting in five included studies. Quality Assessment ratings were ‘poor’ (4/5) or ‘fair’ (1/5). Random effects meta-analysis demonstrated a significant decline in European adolescent physical activity levels, with a Standard Mean Difference of 0.44 (95% CI, 0.03, 0.84; P=0.005, 4 studies, n=2286). When analyzed by gender, a non-significant trend of decreased physical activity was found in both boys (0.43, 95% CI, -0.07, 0.93; P=0.09, 3 studies, n=1030) and girls (0.25, 95% CI, -0.33, 0.84; P=0.40, 3 studies, n=1017). Conclusion: Though overall study quality was poor due to pandemic restrictions, these results indicate that the COVID-19 lockdowns may have significantly negatively impacted already-poor adolescent physical activity levels. This research demonstrates the importance of interventions to encourage physical activity participation in this demographic.
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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 | 0.010 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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".