Physical Activity, Screen Time, and Sleep Duration of Children Aged 6-9 Years in 25 Countries: An Analysis within the WHO European Childhood Obesity Surveillance Initiative (COSI) 2015-2017.

BACKGROUND: Children are becoming less physically active as opportunities for safe active play, recreational activities, and active transport decrease. At the same time, sedentary screen-based activities both during school and leisure time are increasing. OBJECTIVES: This study aimed to evaluate physical activity (PA), screen time, and sleep duration of girls and boys aged 6-9 years in Europe using data from the WHO European Childhood Obesity Surveillance Initiative (COSI). METHOD: The fourth COSI data collection round was conducted in 2015-2017, using a standardized protocol that included a family form completed by parents with specific questions about their children's PA, screen time, and sleep duration. RESULTS: Nationally representative data from 25 countries was included and information on the PA behaviour, screen time, and sleep duration of 150,651 children was analysed. Pooled analysis showed that: 79.4% were actively playing for >1 h each day, 53.9% were not members of a sport or dancing club, 50.0% walked or cycled to school each day, 60.2% engaged in screen time for <2 h/day, and 84.9% slept for 9-11 h/night. Country-specific analyses of these behaviours showed pronounced differences, with national prevalences in the range of 61.7-98.3% actively playing for >1 h/day, 8.2-85.6% were not members of a sport or dancing club, 17.7-94.0% walked or cycled to school each day, 32.3-80.0% engaged in screen time for <2 h/day, and 50.0-95.8% slept for 9-11 h/night. CONCLUSIONS: The prevalence of engagement in PA and the achievement of healthy screen time and sleep duration are heterogenous across the region. Policymakers and other stakeholders, including school administrators and parents, should increase opportunities for young people to participate in daily PA as well as explore solutions to address excessive screen time and short sleep duration to improve the overall physical and mental health and well-being of children.

Chronic disease prevention research in Central Asia, the Urals, Siberia and Mongolia - past, present and future.

Central Asia, the Urals, Siberia and Mongolia cover an immense section of Asia and although relatively sparsely populated the total inhabitants number well in excess of 100 million. Furthermore, there is an increasing tendency for urbanization of the populations, which in many cases are growing. The ethnic make-up is diverse, with various degrees of admixture of Russians to the Turkish, Mongolian and other indigenous peoples of the region, and there is evidence of major variation in the burden of different cancers among the groups, although oesophageal and gastric neoplasias are relatively prevalent in common. Clearly there is a need for cooperation for cancer and other chronic disease prevention and the presence of Russian as a shared language of science, commerce and industry means that there should be no major communication difficulties. However, collaborative efforts at present are limited and the research output is low, even in the non-English literature. Here we focus on published work from the individual countries, as assessed by PubMed searches using the country name with cancer, cardiovascular, metabolic syndrome and diabetes as search terms, with an especial focus on epidemiology, environmental carcinogenicity and screening. One major aim is to identify active groups with an interest in participation in a regional meeting and collaborative research, so that a coordinated approach to granting agencies can be made to fund such a collective endeavour.