Effects and dose-response relationships of exercise intervention on weight loss in overweight and obese children: a meta-regression and system review

Abstract The aim of this study was to determine the effect of different exercise doses on weight loss in obese/overweight children. PubMed, Embase, SPORTDiscus, and the Cochrane library were searched from inception to November 2020 for randomized controlled trials. Fourty six trials involving 2,599 obese/overweight children were finally included. Different exercise dose interventions had different impacts. Exercise intervention reduce body weight (BW) by 1.46 kg (95% CI, −2.35 to −0.56, p=0.001), body fat percentage (BF%) by 2.24 (95% CI, −2.63 to −1.84, p<0.001) and body mass index (BMI) by 1.09 kg/m 2 (95% CI, −1.45 to −0.73, p<0.001). Each MET-h/week was association with 0.147 kg (95% CI, −0.287 to −0.007, p=0.039) decrease in BW, 0.060 (95% CI, −0.118 to −0.002, p=0.042) decrease in BF%, and 0.069 kg/m 2 (95% CI, −0.125 to −0.014, p=0.015) decrease in BMI. The findings suggest that there is a positive liner between exercise dose and weight loss, each MET-h/week associated with 0.147 kg, 0.060 and 0.069 kg/m 2 decrease in body weight, BF%, BMI, respectively.