Prediction of cardiovascular disease risk factors later in life by physical activity and physical fitness in youth: introduction.

Abstract

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is one the greatest causes of death in Western societies, and it probably will be also in the future in developing countries. Programs aiming at the prevention of CVD mostly focus on the development of a “healthy” lifestyle. Physical activity is considered to be an important component of such “healthy” lifestyle. Besides physical inactivity, also low physical fitness is found to be related to many chronic diseases, but probably the best evidence has been found for CVD [5] [11] [15]. The importance of habitual physical activity and physical fitness is not only reflected by the relative risk of physical inactivity and low physical fitness for CVD, but also by the high prevalence of physical inactivity and low physical fitness in Western society. For instance, the population attributable risk (PAR) of physical inactivity for CVD mortality is 35 % [18]. This means that 35 % of the deaths caused by cardiovascular disease could theoretically be prevented if everyone were sufficiently physically active. Based on recent population data in the Netherlands, PARs of different lifestyle related parameters were calculated for cardiovascular disease mortality [19] [20]. The PAR for a sedentary lifestyle was of the same magnitude as the PAR for smoking (± 40 %) and much higher than the PAR for obesity (± 14 %).