Effects of cardiopulmonary conditioning on body mass index, physical activity and general psychological health of young adults.

Abstract

Objective: To determine the effects of cardiopulmonary conditioning on bodymass index (BMI), physical activity (PA), and general psychological health ofhealthy young adults and their interrelationship. Methodology: A quasi-interventional study was conducted in Pakistan RailwayHospital, Rawalpindi from February to July 2017. A total of 97 healthy youngadults who sustained moderate physical exertion were selected through nonprobabilityconvenient sampling to perform cardiopulmonary conditioningexercises for 12 weeks at moderate intensity. Individuals with any systemicdisease were excluded. The pre and post levels of PA, general psychologicalhealth and BMI were assessed through International Physical ActivityQuestionnaire (IPAQ), General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-12) and BMI formularespectively and performed statistical analysis on SPSS 20 software.Results: We recruited 97 participants; mean age was 23.40 ± 2.29years.Majority, around 74% of the participants were females. The descriptive analysisshowed that 73.2 % participants were minimally active before the interventionthat improved to 0.0 % after the intervention. No participant was HEPA activebefore intervention that significantly improved to 38.1 %. In the pre-intervention,87.6 % participants were overweight and 12.4 % participants were obese whereas in post-intervention, 85.6 % participants had normal weight and 14.4 %participants were overweight. The Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test revealedsignificant improvement in all outcome measures (p= 0.001). The Spearman'sCorrelations of PA and general psychological health and PA and BMI wasdemonstrated as -0.262 (p=0.01) and -0.081 (p=0.431) respectively. Conclusion: Cardiopulmonary conditioning is an effective approach forimproving BMI, general psychological health and physical activity. With higherlevels of PA general psychological health improves unlike BMI that does not haveany significant relation with PA.