A latent transition analysis of activity-related behaviours from childhood to late adolescence

Background: Childhood and adolescence are critical years for the formation of lifetime habits. Understanding how activity-related behaviours cluster and change in youth can help to time specific lifestyle interventions.

Purpose: We aimed to identify typologies of activity-related behaviours in children and adolescents and to explore transitions between them.

Methods: The present study utilised data from the ELSPAC cohort. Data were collected at 11, 15 and 18 years of age. Activity-related behaviours included time spent outdoors, in organised physical activity (PA), sleeping, and watching TV and playing PC games. Latent transition analysis was employed to identify distinct typologies at each timepoint and transitions between them.
Results: Four distinct typologies were identified and labelled as Actives (high outdoor time and time in organised PA, low screen time; 12.8% of the sample at 11years; 23.6% at 15years; 20.4% at 18years), Active screeners (moderate outdoor time and high screen time; 21.0% at 11years; 24.3% at 15years; 10.4% at 18years), Poor sleepers (low proportion of meeting sleep recommendations; 1.1% at 11years; 8.1% at 15years, 50.8% at 18years), Averages (median levels of all activity-related behaviours; 65.1% at 11years; 44.0% at 15years; 18.4% at 18years). Most typologies remained relatively stable during the transition from 11 to 15 years, except Averages (53.2% stability). During the transition from 15 to 18 years, only Poor sleepers remained stable (99.5%), while other typologies had lower stability.

Conclusions: The most common typology, Averages, was the least stable from 11-15 years, suggesting that this period is one of change. Despite being relatively uncommon at earlier ages, the poor sleeper typology was the most common at age 18years.

Practical implications: Lifestyle interventions are required to be implemented throughout adolescence to stop the Averages from transitioning to Poor sleepers typology.

Funding: DJ was supported by the OP RDE project (DSGC-2021-0022, Reg. No.: CZ.02.2.69/0.0/0.0/19_073/0016713).