Background: Childhood obesity is a preventable global public health challenge, increasingly recognized as a complex problem, stemming from complex drivers. Obesity is characterized by multiple interdependencies and diverse influences at different societal levels. Tackling childhood obesity calls for a holistic approach that engages with complexity and recognizes that there is no single "magic bullet" intervention to prevent obesity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAims: The World Health Organization states that physical inactivity is one of the leading behavioural risk factors for disability and mortality in Europe. Social prescribing holds promise as a possible solution by connecting patients from general practice to community-based physical activity. Although research within social prescribing exists, the process of connecting general practice patients to community-based physical activity is not well investigated.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Both physical inactivity and loneliness are public health threats bringing huge costs to society and quality of life. The two health challenges often co-exist, suggesting physically inactive and lonely individuals to be a high-risk group. Health literacy as a concept is understood as a modifiable health determinant, and it has been proposed for promoting equity in future health promotion.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: The World Health Organization (WHO) highlights parous women as a key population for monitoring trends of physical activity (PA). We aimed to estimate the proportion of Danish women non-adhering to WHO PA guidelines in parous women compared with nulliparous women and to describe leisure-time PA intensity in each of these groups.
Study Design: Cross-sectional study.
Under what conditions can prefrontal cortex direct the composition of brain states, to generate coherent streams of thoughts? Using a simplified Potts model of cortical dynamics, crudely differentiated into two halves, we show that once activity levels are regulated, so as to disambiguate a single temporal sequence, whether the contents of the sequence are mainly determined by the frontal or by the posterior half, or by neither, depends on statistical parameters that describe its microcircuits. The frontal cortex tends to lead if it has more local attractors, longer lasting and stronger ones, in order of increasing importance. Its guidance is particularly effective to the extent that posterior cortices do not tend to transition from state to state on their own.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Improving childhood health is complex due to the multifactorial nature and interaction of determinants. Complex problems call for complex intervention thinking, and simple one-size-fits-all solutions do not work to improve childhood health. Early awareness is important, as behavior in childhood often is manifested across adolescence and into adulthood.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe consider a model of associative storage and retrieval of compositional memories in an extended cortical network. Our model network is comprised of Potts units, which represent patches of cortex, interacting through long-range connections. The critical assumption is that a memory, for example of a spatial view, is composed of a limited number of items, each of which has a pre-established representation: storing a new memory only involves acquiring the connections, if novel, among the participating items.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnlabelled: Physical literacy (PL) is a comprehensive concept covering motivation, confidence, physical competence, knowledge and understanding of individuals' physical activity throughout life. PL has three overlapping domains, such as: an affective, a physical and a cognitive domain. So far, PL has not been measured in the adults and no complete measurement has been developed to date.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe "11 for Health in Denmark" in-school educational football program has shown to have numerous positive physiological and psychological effects in 10- to 12-year-old schoolchildren. A key part of the successful application of the program, however, has not yet been examined, namely the motivational processes underlying participation and behavioral changes. This study examined such motivational processes (i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRefugees health status after receiving asylum in their new country is often poor, both physical and mentally. Despite that, European countries rarely offer programmes specifically targeted health and health behaviour for newly arrived refugees. This study investigated newly arrived refugees' perspective on health and in particularly physical activity (PA) upon granted asylum in Denmark.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: This study investigated the correlation between sports club activities and well-being and physical health parameters in 10-12 years old boys.
Design: Cross sectional.
Setting: Danish schools.
This study aims to identify physical inactivity-related challenges and motives, based on reviews and supplemented by expert interviews with Danish national experts on physical inactivity, providing a general discussion of the subject ultimately generating knowledge useable in a Scandinavian context. This study is framed as a narrative review of scientific review literature on physical inactivity, limited to the general population. The review is supplemented by expert interviews with Danish national experts on physical inactivity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: This study investigated the effects of the health promotion intervention "11 for Health in Denmark" program on 10- to 12-year-old ethnic minority schoolchildren's enjoyment, health knowledge, well-being, and fitness.
Methods: 1122 Danish 5th grade schoolchildren with ethnic minority background from 154 schools were randomized (5:1) to an intervention group (IG, n = 944) or a control group (CG, n = 178). The IG and CG were also divided into subgroups of children active in a sports club (IGPA: n = 644; CGPA: n = 122) and not active in a sports club (IGPI: n = 300, CGPI: n = 56).
We discuss simple models for the transient storage in short-term memory of cortical patterns of activity, all based on the notion that their recall exploits the natural tendency of the cortex to hop from state to state-latching dynamics. We show that in one such model, and in simple spatial memory tasks we have given to human subjects, short-term memory can be limited to similar low capacity by interference effects, in tasks terminated by errors, and can exhibit similar sublinear scaling, when errors are overlooked. The same mechanism can drive serial recall if combined with weak order-encoding plasticity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAims: A key issue in public health is how to approach ethnic inequities. Despite an increased focus on the health of people from ethnic minorities in the last 15 years, significant ethnic health inequities still exist in Denmark. These arise during pregnancy and are exacerbated by higher rates of exposure to health risks during the life course.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Physical inactivity is recognized as a leading global public health threat. Physical Literacy, a concept describing an individual's prerequisites to participate in and adhere to physical activities, has been suggested to be a key concept in understanding physical activity in various populations. The aim of this study was to describe the prerequisites for physical activity among inactive adults in terms of their physical literacy and previous experience with sport and exercise and how these are interrelated.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPostpartum depression (PPD) is one of the most common mental health problems among new parents. Past studies have examined PPD in women; however, the condition is less understood in men. This study aimed to explore the lived experiences of men or fathers with PPD and to understand the barriers and facilitators of help-seeking among fathers with PPD.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectivesOur large-scale cluster randomised controlled trial aimed to investigate the effects on health knowledge and enjoyment of an 11 week 'health education through football' programme for children aged 10-12 years old. 3127 Danish school children (49% girls) aged 10-12 years from a total of 154 schools located in 63% of the Danish municipalities (69 of 98) took part in the analysis. A 5:1 cluster randomisation was performed at school level for the intervention group (IG) or the control group (CG).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Understanding individual health literacy needs is crucial when designing supportive and effective health care. However, tools assessing health literacy in practice are lacking. The Conversational Health Literacy Assessment Tool (CHAT) was recently developed, but its ability to assess health literacy remains unexplored.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMadsen, M, Larsen, MN, Cyril, R, Møller, TK, Madsen, EE, Ørntoft, C, Lind, RR, Ryom, K, Christiansen, SR, Wikman, J, Elbe, AM, and Krustrup, P. Well-being, physical fitness, and health profile of 2,203 Danish girls aged 10-12 in relation to leisure-time sports club activity-with special emphasis on the five most popular sports. J Strength Cond Res 36(8): 2283-2290, 2022-This study investigated the relationship between leisure-time sports club activities and well-being as well as physical health parameters in 10-12-year-old Danish girls.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The present study investigates the well-being effects for 10- to 12-year-old children who participated in the school-based intervention "11 for Health in Denmark," which comprises physical activity (PA) and health education. Subgroup analyses were carried out for boys and girls.
Method: Three thousand sixty-one children were randomly assigned to an intervention group (IG) or a control group (CG) by 5:1 cluster randomization by school.
For health services, improving organizational health literacy responsiveness is a promising approach to enhance health and counter health inequity. A number of frameworks and tools are available to help organizations boost their health literacy responsiveness. These include the Ophelia (OPtimising HEalth LIteracy and Access) approach centered on local needs assessments, co-design methodologies, and pragmatic intervention testing.
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