Anders Husøy is a doctorate student at the Department of Sports Medicine. On October 9, 2024, 10:15 AM—4:00 PM he will defend his dissertation Physical activity, cardiorespiratory fitness and cardiometabolic risk factors from childhood to young adulthood at the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences, Auditorium Innsikt.
In the UngKan (Youth can do it) follow-up study Anders Husøy sought to examine the trends, levels, and associations of physical activity, cardiorespiratory fitness, and cardiometabolic risk factors from childhood (age 9 years) to adolescence (15 years) and further into young adulthood (age 24 years).
In the first study, he found that sedentary time increases from childhood to adolescence. A decrease from childhood to adolescence was seen for time spent in light, moderate, and vigorous physical activity.
Contrary to expectations, little change in these variables was observed between adolescence and young adulthood. Furthermore, variables collected at both age 9 and 15 years were poor predictors of total physical activity at age 24 years – which may indicate that the transitional phase between adolescence and young adulthood could be formative of physical activity behaviour in young adulthood.
However, the least active 9-years-olds were at higher odds for ending up as the least active adults and may be targeted for early intervention.
In the second study, he found that higher levels of sedentary time in adolescence was associated with lower levels of maximal oxygen uptake in young adulthood – an important independent predictor of cardiovascular diseases.
Higher levels of time spent in both moderate-to-vigorous physical activity and vigorous physical activity were associated with higher levels of maximal oxygen uptake in young adulthood. Additionally, time spent in vigorous physical activity was associated with beneficial changes in visceral fat mass, insulin levels, and a clustered cardiometabolic risk score.
These findings underline the importance of the current recommendation of an average of 60 minutes/day of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity for adolescents while reducing time spent sedentary, and further emphasise the importance of spending time in physical activity of vigorous intensity for maximum cardiometabolic health benfit.
He also found the greatest health benefit of physical activity among those in the highest BMI tertile at age 9 years, as compared to those belonging to the lower tertiles. This corroborates finding from a systematic review included in the dissertation, where the cardiometabolic health benefits of physical activity was most pronounced among youth with low levels of cardiorespiratory fitness.
These findings may indicate greatest health benefit from physical activity among “at risk”-youth, e.g., obese and low-fit children.
Finally, he found that several cardiometabolic risk factors demonstrated moderate to strong tracking, or stability, from childhood to young adulthood, i.e., children with an unfavourable cardiometabolic risk profile were more likely to still have an unfavourable risk profile in young adulthood. The variables demonstrating the most pronounced stability included BMI, waist circumference, LDL-cholesterol, maximal oxygen uptake, and a clustered cardiometabolic risk score.
This may indicate that early intervention is necessary to prevent further development of cardiometabolic risk factors. However, sedentary time demonstrated low tracking over this time span, and may be a more modifiable risk factor than those showing greater stability over time.
Read the thesis here
Committee
- First opponent: Principal Researcher, Dr. Tuija Tammelin, JAMK University of Applied Sciences, Jyväskylä, Finland
- Second opponent: Professor, Dr. Jos Twisk, Amsterdam University Medical Centers, Netherlands
- Committee chair: Associate Professor, Julie Sørbø Stang, Department of Sports Medicine, NIH
Supervisors
- Main supervisor: Sigmund Alfred Anderssen, professor, Department of Sports Medicine, NIH
- Co-supervisor: Ulf Ekelund, professor, Department of Sports Medicine, NIH
Program
- 10.15–11.00: Trial lecture: How to decrease sedentary behavior among older adults?
- 13.00–16.00: Public defence of the thesis: Physical activity, cardiorespiratory fitness and cardiometabolic risk factors from childhood to young adulthood
Practical info
The public defence is open to the public and will be streamed on the NIH’s YouTube channel.
