Saudi Cultural Missions Theses & Dissertations
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Item Restricted Does Physical Activity Lower the Risk of Developing Asthma for Children?(Saudi Digital Library, 2016) Aldaadi, Abdullah; Russell, Melissa; Cassim, Raisa; Lowe, AdrianBackground: Asthma is the leading cause of chronic diseases in children, and its prevalence has been increasing in many countries especially for children. It is the one of the leading factors contributing to school absenteeism and has a sizable impact on health care expenditure. Physical activity was suggested as a protective factor against asthma incidence, with a recent review finding a marginally significant odds ratio supporting this claim for adults. However, there is only one study of this association for children that did not find a significant association. We aim to perform our own analysis of this association on Australian children. Methods: We used two waves of data from the longitudinal study of Australian children, a study that is representative of all Australian children with some exceptions. This study used a double staged clustered design, choosing postcodes before choosing children from those postcodes and they collected data in a cross sectional manner every two years. Children with asthma at baseline were excluded since we are looking at incidence, with the remaining children with complete data entering a multivariable logistic regression. Results: The unadjusted and adjusted analyses found no effect of physical activity on asthma incidence in this study sample of Australian children with an odds ratio of about one and a 95% confidence interval that crosses the null value. There is a possibility that the remaining sample size did not have enough power to detect an effect size of this association, and that there was a misclassification of exposure and outcome. Conclusion: The results of this study do not provide us with enough evidence to support the hypothesis that physical activity is protective against asthma incidence. Further research specific to this association is needed preferably with a larger sample size and objective measures of physical activity and asthma.15 0Item Restricted The Association between Levels of Physical Activity and Asthma Incidence: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis(Saudi Digital Library, 2016) Aldaadi, Abdullah; Russell, Melissa; Cassim, RaisaBackground: The prevalence of global asthma is high especially in high-income countries, leading to increased efforts to find easily modified risk factors that can lower the risk of developing this disease. Physical activity has been suggested to be one of those factors but the prevalence of inactivity has also increased recently. A number of cohort studies have investigated the influence of physical activity on asthma incidence with inconsistent results. Objective: Perform a systematic review and meta-analysis to quantify the effects of high levels of physical activity on the risk of developing asthma. Data sources: Pubmed, Scopus and checking the reference lists of all included studies. Study selection: English language longitudinal (cohort) studies looking at leisure time physical activity as the exposure and asthma incidence as the outcome. Excluding studies using other designs or looking at lab measured physical fitness or specific disease populations. Results: The search retrieved 1103 articles, of which 61 were read in full text and eight of those articles were included in this review. The crude and adjusted meta-analyses showed no association overall between physical activity and asthma incidence, while a crude subgroup analysis of studies with only adult participants showed that high physical activity lowers the risk of developing asthma (OR=0.86, 95% CI: 0.77-0.96) with low heterogeneity (I2=3.6%). Conclusion: There was a crude association showing high physical activity lowers the risk of developing asthma for adults but it disappeared in the adjusted analysis. The overall result of no association between physical activity and asthma incidence might be inaccurate due to studies adjusting for different confounders or not adjusting for all the potential confounders of this association. Additionally, studies have mostly used non population-based participants among other reasons. Further representative longitudinal studies of this association are needed especially for children.12 0