Dissemin is shutting down on January 1st, 2025

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Frontiers Media, Frontiers in Public Health, (9), 2022

DOI: 10.3389/fpubh.2021.736424

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Association Between Ideal Cardiovascular Health and Executive Function in Chinese Primary School Children

Journal article published in 2022 by Zhaohuan Gui, Li Cai, Yajie Lv, Lijuan Lai, Xia Zeng, Yajun Chen ORCID
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

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Abstract

Aims: Little information exists on the associations of cardiovascular health, a new metric proposed by the American Heart Association, and executive function, particularly in children. We aimed to explore this topic.Methods: We studied 3,798 children aged 6–12 years from 5 schools in Guangzhou, China. The executive function of children was evaluated using parent reports of the Behavioral Rating Inventory of Executive Function, which included 2 composite indexes and 8 subscale scores. We calculated the number of ideal cardiovascular health (range: 0–7) based on smoking, body mass index, physical activity (PA), diet, blood pressure, cholesterol, and glucose. A generalized linear mixed model was used to assess the association of the number of ideal cardiovascular health metrics and executive function.Results: Compared with children exhibiting 1–3 ideal cardiovascular health metrics, decreases of 1.37–2.63 points (indicating better performance) in metacognition index and its 5 subscale indexes (initiate, working memory, plan/organize, organization of materials, and monitor) were observed in children who attained 5 or 6–7 ideal metrics (all p for trend <0.001). Ideal diet and ideal PA were independently associated with lower indexes of behavioral regulation and metacognition.Conclusions: The number of ideal cardiovascular health was positively associated with performance of executive function in children.