Predicting cognitive performance from physical activity and fitness in adolescents and young adults in Botswana relative to HIV status

Abstract

Little is known about whether physical activity and fitness could enhance cognition in adolescents and young adults living with HIV. The purpose of this study was to examine this relationship in a group of 250 HIV+ (n = 88) and HIV negative (n = 162) participants from Botswana, aged 12–23 years (Mean = 17.87, SD = 2.24). Fitness was operationalized as muscular strength (push-ups) and aerobic endurance (PACER). PA was assessed using items from the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance Survey. Cognition was measured using the Corsi Test, Berg Card Sorting Task (BCST), and Stroop Color Word Task (Stroop). Multiple regression analyses indicated that the HIV x push-ups interaction was a significant predictor of Corsi performance, and HIV status was a significant predictor of BCST performance (p < 0.05). For the Stroop portions, HIV status and HIV x push-ups were significant predictors (p < 0.01). HIV status is predictive of cognition and interacts with muscular fitness to predict cognition.

Health-Related Physical Fitness Evaluation in HIV-Diagnosed Children and Adolescents: A Scoping Review

“…In addition to that, studies that aimed to investigate the relationship between HIV infection/ART use and the health-related physical fitness components showed changes in the body fat distribution [91,104,194,264], reduction in the bone mass [15,84,108,124,209,262] and fat-free mass [8,102]. However, only 12.2% (n = 30) of the studies investigated more than one the health-related physical fitness component [21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31]33,34,41,47,50,52,106,110,112,116,192,196,[221][222][223]226,230,233,238] and no study that investigated the relationship between the health-related physical fitness components was found. Muscular strength/endurance is directly associated with the amount of muscle fibers-that is, related to the amount of fat-free mass, specifically muscle tissue, as well as cardiorespiratory fitness-is directly associated with the amount of type I (oxidative) muscle fibers …”

“…Physical activity was investigated through different aims such as to investigate differences between HIV-diagnosed group compared to non-diagnosed groups [19,21,25,29,31,40,51,87,88,95,[98][99][100]106,108,109,112,115,143,198,204,234], to investigate the association between health-related physical fitness and physical activity level [18,29,33,42,95,99,100,124,197,210,227,238] and to adjust models through physical activity [18,36,37,42,230,231,233,238]. In addition to the assumption that improvements in physical activity level can result in improvements in health-related physical fitness components [48,49,53], it follows that physical activity can moderate the relationship between HIV infection/ART use and the health-related physical...…”