Active Sports May Help Children Beat Cholesterol

Being active in sports may make a kid a winner in the fight against heart disease, a study has found.

Young people who engage in bursts of intense activity have lower levels of LDL cholesterol, the type that can lead to artery-clogging deposits in adults, according to the report.

Just leading a physically active life doesn’t seem to make a difference on LDL, the study said.

“The results indicate there is some threshold that confers more benefit,” said Dr. Suzanne B. Craig of the New England Medical Center in Boston, the study’s lead author.

The report in the journal Pediatrics looked at 49 8-to-11-year-olds. All were girls, but similar findings could be expected in boys, said a colleague, Dr. William H. Dietz, also of the New England Medical Center.

The researchers checked the girls’ activity levels by measuring their metabolic rates--how much energy the girls burned. They also had the girls complete records of the time they spent in more intense activities, such as competitive sports, over a year.

Just being physically active did not indicate whether the girls had lower levels of LDL, the researchers found. But intensity did. “The more intense exercise the girls participated in, the lower their LDL score,” Dietz said. Exercise ranged from volleyball and gymnastics at the lower end of the intensity scale to soccer at the high end, Craig said.

Scientists know that LDL can lead in children to streaks of fatty material in the arteries. The same material leads to clogged arteries in adults. So, although the experts can’t reliably predict which children will grow up to have heart disease, they think it’s wise to head off the potential for trouble.

And the research indicates that simply living an active life, doing such things as taking easy walks, may not be enough to head off an LDL problem, Dietz said.

But even vigorous activity as a child can’t be counted on to ward off heart disease as an adult, both researchers say. The most that can be said, based on current research, is that many adults who have high cholesterol levels had them also as children, Dietz said.

“We know much less about children’s physical activity because they have been studied less,” said Judith Young, executive director of the National Assn. for Sport and Physical Education in Reston, Va.

Also, factors other than cholesterol and its LDL component influence risk of heart disease in adults. And regular exercise at less-than-intense levels does have a big role here. It can fight obesity, which is a risk factor.

Young people tend to be more active than adults anyway, so they should be encouraged to benefit from higher activity levels, said Michael Pratt, acting chief of physical activity and health at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

The CDC is considering new exercise guidelines for young people from first grade through high school, and the recommendations may go beyond current adult minimums of 30 minutes of moderate activity most days, Pratt said. The likely recommendation would be 30 minutes of moderate activity each day plus three sessions of vigorous activity three days a week, he said.