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Prevalence of drop-out from organised extracurricular sports and associations with body fat percentage during childhood and adolescence
  1. Stewart A Vella1,
  2. Matthew J Schweickle2,
  3. Jordan T Sutcliffe2
  1. 1Early Start Research Institute. Global Alliance for Mental Health in Sport, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia
  2. 2School of Psychology. Global Alliance for Mental Health in Sport, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia
  1. Correspondence to Dr Stewart A Vella; stvella{at}uow.edu.au

Abstract

Objectives This paper aimed to report the prevalence of drop-out from organised sports between the ages of 10 and 14 years, and to examine potential associated detriments to levels of body fat.

Methods All data were drawn from waves 4–6 of the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children. Participants’ sport participation was parent reported and body fat percentage was measured using bioelectrical impedance analysis. A total of 4159 participants had sports participation data at age 10 years (M=10.32 years, SD=4.68).

Results From 3013 sport participants at age 10 years, 29.7% (n=894) had dropped out of sports at age 12 years. Of 2016 sport participants at age 12 years, 33.3% (n=705) had dropped out of sports by the age of 14 years. There were no differences in body fat percentage at any age according to differences in sport participation behaviours.

Conclusions Based on a high prevalence, drop-out from organised extracurricular sports during childhood and adolescence may be an important public health behaviour to consider. A solution-oriented approach to dropout from organised sports is recommended, but more evidence as to potential health detriments is needed using high-quality research designs.

  • youth sports
  • adolescence
  • body fat
  • public health
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.

https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjsem-2020-000751

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    Footnotes

    • Contributors SAV: conceptualisation, formal analysis, writing and supervision. MJS: Conceptualisation, formal analysis and writing. JS: formal analysis and writing.

    • Funding The first author is supported by a National Heart Foundation of Australia Postdoctoral Fellowship (100974).

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Patient consent for publication Not required.

    • Ethics approval This study was approved by the Australian Institute of Family Studies Ethics Committee.

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

    • Data availability statement Data may be obtained from a third party and are not publicly available.