New Delhi: Poor physical fitness coupled with rising global temperatures is likely to make children more vulnerable to health-related problems, warns a new comprehensive review of studies.
Record levels of obesity and physical inactivity among children mean they are set to bear the brunt of poorer health effects from rising global temperatures.
While physical fitness is key to tolerating higher temperatures, children are more obese and less fit than ever before, says Dr Shawnda Morrison, an environmental exercise physiologist, from Slovenia’s University of Ljubljana. This could put them at greater risk of suffering heat-related health problems, such as dehydration, heat cramps, heat exhaustion or heat stroke.
The current climate change policies fail to adequately address child health needs. Encouraging children to make exercise part of their everyday lives must be prioritised if they are to cope with living in a hotter world, IANS quoted her as saying.
In the peer-reviewed journal Temperature, her team assessed a comprehensive review of over 150 medical and scientific studies into how children maintain physical activity, exercise, cope with the heat, and how this might change as global temperatures rise.
The research, she highlights includes a study of 457 primary school 5-12-year-old boys in Thailand, which found that overweight youngsters were more than twice as likely to have difficulty regulating their body temperature as those of normal weight when exercising outdoors.
In another study, data from emergency departments at children’s hospitals in the US found attendance was higher during hotter days. Younger children were particularly likely to need emergency care.
Fact file
- Children’s aerobic fitness is 30 per cent lower than that of their parents at the same age.
- There is a rapid decline in children’s physical activity globally, especially over the last 30 years.
- Most children are not meeting the World Health Organisation’s guideline of performing an average of at least 60 minutes of physical activity each day.
- Physical inactivity was accelerated, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic when schools and other societal infrastructures were closed.
- Higher temperatures and changes in weather patterns are projected to also lead to the outbreak of new diseases entering the human population.
- If there are more movement restrictions put in place to contain the novel diseases, this will have potentially devastating consequences to children’s physical fitness and mental and physical health.