Association of COVID-19 Mitigation Measures With Changes in Cardiorespiratory Fitness and Body Mass Index Among Children Aged 7 to 10 Years in Austria

  1. Gerald Jarnig
  2. Johannes Jaunig
  3. Mireille N. M. van Poppel

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Abstract

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  1. Version published to 10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2021.21675
  2. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2021.04.09.21255185: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    Institutional Review Board StatementIRB: The study was registered in the German Clinical Trial Register (ID DRKS00023824) and approved by the Research Ethics Committee at the University of Graz, Styria,
    Consent: Legal guardians of 860 (85%) children provided written consent for their children’s participation (Figure 2).
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.

    Table 2: Resources

    No key resources detected.

    Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:
    Strengths and limitations: Our study population is representative of children in the whole region of Klagenfurt, representing those in both rural and the urban areas. Participation rates were high and loss-to-follow-up was very low. Therefore, our results can be generalised to the whole Austria, where identical COVID-19 measures were implemented, and possibly to other countries with similar mitigation measures. The objective, longitudinal measurements of weight, height and CRF were unique, since all previous studies assessing the impact of COVID-19 measures on health parameters of children used self-reported data. The two measurements were exactly a year apart (September 2019 and 2020), ruling out seasonal influences on CRF and BMI values. A limitation of our study is that, for obvious reasons, we did not design the study for the purpose of the analyses presented in this paper. We also did not have a control group of children unaffected by the COVID-19 mitigation measures; hence, we must be careful with causal inference. Due to the lack of a control group, and since both the results of the 6-min run test and BMI measurements in growing children change over time, we assessed whether these changes occurred in our sample, relative to several established age- and gender-specific references. Regardless of which reference values we used,12,13 the results of the decrease in CRF remained the same. Results from sensitivity analyses for BMI SDS, using national and international referen...

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

    About SciScore

    SciScore is an automated tool that is designed to assist expert reviewers by finding and presenting formulaic information scattered throughout a paper in a standard, easy to digest format. SciScore checks for the presence and correctness of RRIDs (research resource identifiers), and for rigor criteria such as sex and investigator blinding. For details on the theoretical underpinning of rigor criteria and the tools shown here, including references cited, please follow this link.

  3. Version published to 10.1101/2021.04.09.21255185v1 on medRxiv