Impacto do videogame ativo na qualidade de vida de adolescentes com sobrepeso ou obesidade: Ensaio clínico randomizado

Abstract

Obesity is considered one of the major problems of global public health due to its rapid growth and multi-causality, causing physical and mental damages, especially in the children's and youth public. In addition, studies have shown a relation between the reduction of the practice of physical activity with the weight gain and, consequent, decreased quality of life. Therefore, the effect of the active videogame on the quality of life and nutritional status of adolescents with excess weight was evaluated. This is a randomized clinical trial conducted in the second half of 2018. The final sample consisted of 84 adolescents, between 10 and 17 years old, of daytime running public schools in the city of Campina Grande-PB, distributed in 40 adolescents in the experimental group and 44 in the control group. Randomization was done by school and attended all eligible adolescents belonging the two selected schools. Demographic (sex, age and skin color), economic characteristics (economic classification), level of physical activity, nutritional status and health-related quality of life (Kidscreen-52) were evaluated, and these last three variables evaluated before and after the intervention. The adolescents were divided into groups of four to carry out the intervention which included the execution of physical activity through the XBOX 360® platform and Just Dance games, for 50 minutes, three times a week for eight weeks. The chi-square test was applied to perform a comparative analysis of the variables studied between the control and experimental groups, before the intervention, in order to evaluate the randomization procedure. The effect of the intervention was analyzed through the McNemar test, being later stratified by sex, nutritional status and physical activity level in the variables that presented significance in the initial evaluation. For the statistical analysis was used SPSS version 22.0 and a significance level of 5% was adopted. The study was approved by the Research Ethics Committee, CAAE: 84019518.3.0000.5187, registered in Clinical Trials (NCT03532659) e REBEC (RBR 2xn3g6). It was observed that girls presented worse quality of life in general and in several domains. The non-white skin color was associated with teasing/bullying (p = 0.002). Overweight and irregularly active/sedentary adolescents presented higher frequencies of low quality of life for the family environment (p = 0.039) and health and physical activity domains (p = 0.012), respectively. After the intervention, the quality of life related to the emotional domain (p = 0.012) and nutritional status (p = 0.031), in the experimental group, showed a significant improvement. However, when stratified by sex, the change in the emotional domain persisted only in males (p = 0.031), with a loss of significance in females (p = 0.375). This fact was not observed in relation to nutritional status (p> 0.05) and physical activity level (p> 0.05). The results suggest that the active video game promoted positive effects on quality of life, referring to the emotional domain, mainly male, and nutritional status of obese adolescents.