An evidence-update on the prospective relationship between childhood sedentary behaviour and biomedical health indicators: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Abstract

This systematic review and meta-analysis summarizes the evidence on the prospective relationship between childhood sedentary behaviour and biomedical health indicators, overall and stratified by type of sedentary behaviour (TV viewing, computer use/games, screen time and objective sedentary time). PubMed, EMBASE, PsycINFO and Cochrane were systematically searched till January 2015. Methodological quality of all included studies was scored and a best evidence synthesis was applied. We included 109 studies of which 19 were of high quality. We found moderate-to-strong evidence for a relationship of overall sedentary time with some anthropometrics (overweight/obesity, weight-for-height), one cardiometabolic biomarker (HDL-cholesterol) and some fitness indicators (fitness, being unfit). For other health indicators, we found no convincing evidence due to inconsistent or non-significant findings. The evidence varied by type of sedentary behaviour. The metaanalysis indicated that each additional baseline hour of TV viewing (β = 0.01; 95%-CI: -0.002-0.02) or computer use (β = 0.00; 95%-CI: -0.004-0.01) per day was not significantly related with BMI at followup. We conclude that the evidence for a prospective relationship between childhood sedentary behaviour and biomedical health is in general unconvincing.