Impact of sports participation on cardiovascular health markers of children and adolescents: Systematic review and meta-analysis

BACKGROUND: Cardiovascular diseases have a high prevalence in adults and their development begins in the first decades of life. On the other hand, sports participation in childhood and adolescence provides benefits which can delay the onset of these diseases. AIM: To synthesize the available literature on the impact of sports participation on cardiovascular outcomes in children and adolescents. METHODS: This systematic review was conducted on studies of children and adolescents (aged 8-18 years) who regularly practiced a sport and had reported cardiovascular outcomes (blood pressure and intima-media thickness) recorded. The Medline/PubMed, SciELO, Reference Citation Analysis (https://www.referencecitationanalysis.com/) and Bireme databases were searched. RESULTS: In total, 3314 publications for blood pressure and 122 publications for intima-media thickness were identified in the databases. After exclusions (e.g., duplicate articles, animal studies and those that did not meet the inclusion criteria), four publications for blood pressure (449 adolescents) and two publications for intima-media thickness were included (402 adolescents). For blood pressure, all publications were longitudinal in design (follow-up ranging from 12 wk to 12 mo) and involved adolescents aged from 8 years to 18 years of age. For intima-media thickness, both publications were longitudinal in design and involved adolescents aged from 11 years to 18 years of age. CONCLUSION: Sports participation seems to promote benefits to cardiovascular structure and function in adolescents. However, studies with adolescents are scarce and further research is needed to understand this phenomenon.