Grant: Planning Grants - Priority Announcement: Ethics

Many children are not physically active enough and this is not good for their health. Children are supposed to get at least 1 hour of physical activity everyday with some of it at a vigorous intensity. Physical activity is safe for most children but a small number of children have hidden health conditions that can make intense activity dangerous. Physical activity is very good for our health so being able to encourage all children to participate in some activity is important. There are pre-exercise questionnaires for adults to help them find out if doing more physical activity is safe. A similar tool has never been developed for children. One problem with this is that parents, teachers and caregivers of children with a health condition may stop the child from participating in any physical activity for fear that something bad might happen. If those individuals had a simple screening tool, this would increase their confidence in knowing which children can safely participate. Sudden death in young people playing sports is a rare but tragic event that often results from a hidden heart problem. While it would be impossible to predict every event like this, we want to develop a way to identify some of the early signs (e.g., dizziness with exercise) that need to be investigated by a doctor. This project will start the process of developing a physical activity screening tool for children. We are going to do this by bringing together a group of experts, including: exercise specialists, organizations in the community who might use this tool, doctors and experts in law and ethics. We will write a summary of research and then bring all of the experts to a 1.5 day consensus meeting in Ottawa. The experts will also write a grant proposal so we can test the children's screening tool developed during the consensus meeting to make sure that it does what it is supposed to do: promote safe physical activity participation for most kids while finding the few children who are at risk.