Publications by authors named "A del Valle Zapico"
Overweight prevalence in Spain reached critical levels before the COVID-19 pandemic, which likely exacerbated this issue. The PESCA (Programa Escolar de Salud Cardio-vascular) program is a multicomponent school-based intervention, launched in 2018 with the aim of tackling this health problem and reducing overweight rates in youth. (1) To analyze the efficacy of the PESCA program intervention on body composition, overweight prevalence, physical activity (PA)/sport practice, resting time, and screentime before COVID-19 and (2) to evaluate the impact of COVID-19 and the associated lockdown measures on these parameters in the studied sample.
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- Identifying children and adolescents with cardiometabolic risk early is essential for effective treatment, and measuring abdominal obesity is a straightforward method for assessment.
- A study analyzed waist circumference trends among Spanish youth aged 8 to 16 years across two surveys from 1998-2000 and 2019-2020, involving nearly 5,000 participants.
- Results showed a significant rise in abdominal obesity rates, with increases from 40.7% to 56.1% in those with overweight, highlighting a troubling trend in cardiometabolic risk among youth over the past two decades.
Article Synopsis
- A study investigated how fiber and probiotic supplements can help protect against colon damage and gut microbiota changes caused by harmful substances (PhIP and DSS) in male Fischer-344 rats.* -
- The results showed that while PhIP and DSS caused significant inflammation and damage to the colon, fiber reduced this damage and inflammation, and probiotics increased colon length.* -
- Additionally, fiber shifted the gut microbiota toward less inflammation, contrasting with the negative changes seen after exposure to PhIP and DSS without supplements.*
Diet is one of the main exogenous sources of potentially carcinogenic nitrosamines (NAs) along with tobacco and cosmetics. Several factors can affect endogenous N-nitroso compounds (NOCs) formation and therefore the potential damage of the intestinal mucosa at initial colorectal cancer stages. To address this issue, 49 volunteers were recruited and classified according to histopathological analyses.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: Physical activity (PA) provides multiple health-related benefits in children and adolescents, however, at present, the majority of young people are insufficiently physically active. The aim of this study was to evaluate if neighborhood walkability and/or socio-economic status (SES) could affect the practice of walking, play outdoors and sports practice in a representative sample of Spanish children and adolescents.
Methods: A sample of 4092 youth (aged 8-16 years old) from 245 primary and secondary schools in 121 localities from each of the 17 Spanish autonomous communities participated in the study.