Publications by authors named "Joanna Blodgett"

This rapid review evaluates interventions aimed at improving life satisfaction and aids policymakers, researchers, and practitioners by identifying research strengths, gaps, and future directions for life satisfaction research. Intervention inclusion criteria were: use of a control group; delivered in high-income OECD country; randomised control trials or quasi-experimental studies; published between Jan 2011-Oct 2023; English language; uses a validated life satisfaction outcome measure. Of 9520 search results across five academic databases and grey literature sources, a total of 189 studies with 234 intervention arms met criteria for inclusion.

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Context: The Open Landing Error Scoring System (OpenLESS) is a novel development aimed at automating the LESS for assessment of lower extremity movement quality during a jump-landing task. With increasing utilization of clinical measures to monitor outcomes and limited time during clinical visits for a lengthy analysis of functional movement, there is a pressing need to extend automation efforts. Addressing these issues, OpenLESS is an open-source tool that utilizes a freely available markerless motion capture system to automate the LESS using three-dimensional kinematics.

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Background: Blood pressure (BP)-lowering effects of structured exercise are well-established. Effects of 24-hour movement behaviors captured in free-living settings have received less attention. This cross-sectional study investigated associations between a 24-hour behavior composition comprising 6 parts (sleeping, sedentary behavior, standing, slow walking, fast walking, and combined exercise-like activity [eg, running and cycling]) and systolic BP (SBP) and diastolic BP (DBP).

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Objectives: Cadence thresholds have been widely used to categorize physical activity intensity in health-related research. We examined the convergent validity of two cadence-based intensity classification approaches against a machine-learning-based intensity schema in 84,315 participants (≥40 years) with wrist-worn accelerometers.

Design: Validity study.

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Background: Physical activity (PA) is associated with a lower risk of cognitive decline and all-cause dementia in later life. Pathways underpinning this association are unclear but may involve either mediation and/or moderation by cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF).

Methods: Data on PA frequency (exposure) at 42y, non-exercise testing CRF (NETCRF, mediator/moderator) at 45y and overall cognitive function (outcome) at 50y were obtained from 9,385 participants (50.

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Article Synopsis
  • - The study examined how socioeconomic factors like education, occupation, income, and deprivation influence movement behaviors in nearly 4,900 individuals aged 46, using accelerometers to track their activity over a week.
  • - Results showed that individuals with higher education levels engaged in more exercise-like activities during the week and on weekends, while those without formal qualifications demonstrated different patterns of standing and walking on weekdays versus weekends.
  • - Overall, the research highlights significant socioeconomic disparities in daily movement habits, indicating that these differences vary between weekdays and weekends, which may contribute to health inequalities.
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Article Synopsis
  • The study aimed to understand how different types of physical activities, like walking and sitting, affect cardiometabolic health through a meta-analysis of data from over 12,000 adults.
  • Results indicated that about 64 minutes of walking and 5 minutes of stair climbing per day, along with standing for about 2.6 hours, were linked to better cardiometabolic health scores, while running showed positive associations with health, without an upper limit for benefits.
  • The analysis also found that sitting for more than 12.1 hours a day negatively impacted health scores, although this effect was less significant in people with existing cardiovascular issues or those on medication.
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Purpose: The aim of the study was to assess the influence of menstrual cycle phase on injury incidence, severity, and type in elite female professional footballers over three seasons.

Methods: Time-loss injuries and menstrual cycle data were prospectively recorded for 26 elite female football players across three seasons. The menstrual cycle was categorized into four phases using a standardized model: menstruation (phase 1; P1), remainder of follicular phase (phase 2; P2), early luteal (phase 3; P3), and premenstrual phase (phase 4; P4).

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The frailty index (FI) uses a deficit accumulation approach to derive a single, comprehensive, and replicable indicator of age-related health status. Yet, many researchers continue to seek a single "frailty biomarker" to facilitate clinical screening. We investigated the prognostic accuracy of 70 individual biomarkers in predicting mortality, comparing each with a composite FI.

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High stability of fluctuation in physiological patterns across fixed time periods suggest healthy fractal complexity, while greater randomness in fluctuation patterns may indicate underlying disease processes. The importance of fractal stability in mid-life remains unexplored. We quantified fractal regulation patterns in 24-h accelerometer data and examined associations with cognitive function in midlife.

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Background And Aims: Physical inactivity, sedentary behaviour (SB), and inadequate sleep are key behavioural risk factors of cardiometabolic diseases. Each behaviour is mainly considered in isolation, despite clear behavioural and biological interdependencies. The aim of this study was to investigate associations of five-part movement compositions with adiposity and cardiometabolic biomarkers.

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Past studies on how blood glucose levels vary across the menstrual cycle have largely shown inconsistent results based on limited blood draws. In this study, 49 individuals wore a Dexcom G6 continuous glucose monitor and a Fitbit Sense smartwatch while measuring their menstrual hormones and self-reporting characteristics of their menstrual cycles daily. The average duration of participation was 79.

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Objectives: To investigate associations between self-reported exercise training habits and amenorrhea/oligomenorrhea among physically active women.

Design: A cross-sectional survey was completed by 3705 women (median age = 40 years [quartile 1, quartile 3: 30, 45], body mass index = 22.1 kg/m [20.

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Importance: Vigorous physical activity (VPA) is a time-efficient way to achieve recommended physical activity (PA) for cancer prevention, although structured longer bouts of VPA (via traditional exercise) are unappealing or inaccessible to many individuals.

Objectives: To evaluate the dose-response association of device-measured daily vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity (VILPA) with incident cancer, and to estimate the minimal dose required for a risk reduction of 50% of the maximum reduction.

Design, Setting, And Participants: This was a prospective cohort analysis of 22 398 self-reported nonexercising adults from the UK Biobank accelerometry subsample.

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Background: Adolescence is a critical period filled with life changes. Early implementation of effective health promotion strategies could help alleviate the morbidity and mortality associated with inactivity. This study investigated whether adolescent participation in exercise and sport is associated with device-assessed physical activity (PA) levels in midlife.

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Background: Accelerometer measures of physical behaviours (physical activity, sedentary behaviour and sleep) in observational studies offer detailed insight into associations with health and disease. Maximising recruitment and accelerometer wear, and minimising data loss remain key challenges. How varying methods used to collect accelerometer data influence data collection outcomes is poorly understood.

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Introduction: The one-legged balance test is a common screening tool for fall risk. Yet, there is little empirical evidence assessing its prognostic ability. The study aims were to assess the prognostic accuracy of one-legged balance performance in predicting falls and identify optimal cut-points to classify those at greater risk.

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Background: Movement behaviours (eg, sedentary behaviour (SB), moderate and vigorous physical activity (MVPA), light intensity physical activity (LIPA) and sleep) are linked to cognition, yet the relative importance of each component is unclear, and not yet explored with compositional methodologies.

Objective: To (i) assess the associations of different components of daily movement and participant's overall cognition, memory and executive function, and (ii) understand the relative importance of each individual component for cognition.

Methods: The 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS70) is a prospective birth cohort study of UK-born adults.

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Background: Mental health and physical health are intrinsically linked, yet the mechanisms are not well understood. We investigated whether moderate-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) mediated the association between depression and physical function (PF) in midlife.

Methods: Individuals from two UK birth cohorts born within one week in 1958 (n = 7278) and 1970 (n = 6097) with data on depression (ages 33/34; Malaise Inventory), MVPA (age 42; self-reported) and PF (ages 50/56; Short Form-36 subscale).

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Introduction: The Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale (WEMWBS) is a commonly used scale of mental wellbeing focusing entirely on the positive aspect of mental health. It has been widely used in a broad range of clinical and research settings, including to evaluate if interventions, programmes or pilots improve wellbeing. We aimed to systematically review all interventions that used WEMWBS and evaluate which interventions are the most effective at improving wellbeing.

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Introduction: The one-legged balance test is widely used as a fall risk screening tool in both clinical and research settings. Despite rising fall prevalence in midlife, there is little evidence examining balance and fall risk in those aged <65 years. This study investigated the longitudinal associations between one-legged balance and the number of falls between ages 53 and 68 years.

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Background: Balance ability underlies most physical movement across life, with particular importance for older adults. No study has investigated if balance ability is established in childhood nor if associations are independent of adult factors. We investigated associations between balance performance in early (age 10) and midlife (age 46), and whether associations were independent of contributors to adult balance.

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Background: Frailty can be operationalised using the deficit accumulation approach, which considers health deficits across multiple domains. We aimed to develop, validate and compare three different frailty indices (FI) constructed from self-reported health measures (FI-Self Report), blood-based biomarkers (FI-Blood) and examination-based assessments (FI-Examination).

Methods: Up to 30,027 participants aged 45-85 years from the baseline (2011-2015) comprehensive cohort of the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging were included in the analyses.

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Several step-based daily targets have been widely circulated, but there is a lack of empirical population-based evidence to support such guidance. We examined dose-response associations between step count and classical CVD risk markers (glycated hemoglobin, high density lipoprotein cholesterol, triglycerides, and C-reactive protein) in 4665 adults (aged 46 years; 51.4% female) in a cross-sectional study.

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