Interventions for Physical Activity Promotion: Where is Brazil?

Abstract

In 2011, Hallal and Florindo argued that the evaluation of interventions to increase physical activity would be an important field within physical activity epidemiology in the following years 1 . Their argument turned out to be true. In the global context, we had a massive increase in studies on interventions in the last ten years. While writing this editorial, we searched PubMed and Web of Science, looking for systematic reviews with the words "intervention" and "physical activity" in their titles. We found 325 publications, the first of which was published in 1978 2 . However, most reviews were published after 2011 (274 publications, 84.3%), with a gradual increase from 2011 to 2016 (from 29 to 63 publications per year).However, a more recent overview showed that the majority of the interventions had medium or small effect sizes in population physical activity levels All of these studies show that "interventions based on physical activity" are a recent and emerging field in public health, and community setting, education, and primary health care are important sectors for actions. However, most types of interventions only had small effects on population physical activity levels.In the Brazilian context, policies on physical activity promotion for the whole country started in 2008, with grants coming from the Ministry of Health to cities, aiming to develop programs in primary health care settings 5 . In 2011, the "Academia da Saúde" program was implemented in primary health care settings to increase and improve health promotion actions, such as physical activity and healthy eating 6 . Now, this program reaches more than 2,500 cities in Brazil and has the potential to cover at least one million people 7 . However, in Brazil, the prevalence of important types of physical activities are low. Florindo et al. showed that the prevalence of leisure-time physical activity (at least 30 minutes per day, 5 times per week, or 20 minutes of vigorous activities at least 3 times per week) was 14.8%, and of transport-related physical activity

Adoption of an Intervention to Promote Physical Activity and Healthy Eating in Brazilian Health Care Settings

“…Our study suggests that strong collaborations between researchers and front-line public health workers can enhance the efficacy of an intervention. This finding is consistent with the conclusions of a prior study which found that joint action between researchers, managers, and professionals can be an efficient strategy in the formulation, application, evaluation, and control of public health interventions (Florindo & Guerra, 2017).…”

Intervenção com aconselhamento de atividade física para adultos sem doenças diagnosticadas - uma revisão sistemática

“…Diante desse cenário, ações que promovam a prática de AF têm sido implementadas em diversos setores, como na atenção primária à saúde, no ambiente escolar, na comunidade, nos ambientes de trabalho, transporte e planejamento urbano [5][6][7][8] . Entre as estratégias para a promoção de AF, o aconselhamento tem apresentado efeitos positivos em tornar os sujeitos mais ativos, seja prescrito em grupos ou individualmente 9 .…”