Girls Benefit from Participating in Sports

Girls who actively participate in school sports activities in middle childhood show enhanced behavior and attentiveness in early adolescence, reveals a new Canadian study published in Preventative Medicine. "Girls who do regular //extracurricular sports between ages 6 and 10 show fewer symptoms of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) at age 12, compared to girls who seldom do," said Linda Pagani, a professor at Université de Montréal's School of Psychoeducation.

“Surprisingly, however, boys do not appear to gain any behavioral benefit from sustained involvement in sports during middle childhood," said Pagani, who led the study co-authored by her students Marie-Josée Harbec and Geneviève Fortin and McGill University associate medical professor Tracie Barnett.

Attention deficit hyperactivity syndrome (ADHD) declines children's ability to process information and learn at school. Sport helps youth in developing life skills and supportive relationships with their peers and adults. It provides a chance to get organized under some form of adult influence or supervision.

In this study, they examined whether participating in sports would reduce ADHD symptoms over the long term.

Pagani and her team came to their conclusions after examining data from a Quebec cohort of children born in 1997 and 1998, part of the Quebec Longitudinal Study of Child Development coordinated by the Institut de la statistique du Québec.

Parents of the 991 girls and 1,006 boys in the study stated whether their sons and daughters participated in an extracurricular physical activity that required a coach between 6 and 10 years of age. At 12 years of age, teachers rated the children's behavior compared to their classmates.

Pagani's team then examined the data to identify any significant relation between sustained participation and later ADHD symptoms, discarding many possible confounding factors.

Why do only girls with ADHD benefit from sports, but not boys?

"In childhood, boys with ADHD are more impulsive and more motor-skilled than girls -- as a result, boys are more likely to receive medication for their ADHD, so faster diagnosis and treatment for boys in middle childhood could diminish the detectable benefits of sport," Pagani said.

In girls, by contrast, ADHD is more likely to go undetected and girls' difficulties may be even more tolerated at home and in school. Parents of boys, on the other hand, might be more prone to volunteer them in sports and other physical activities to help them.

That is the reason why structured extracurricular activities that call for physical skill and effort under the supervision of a coach or instructor could be valuable to any official policy directed at promoting behavioral development, the UdeM researchers continue.



Source-Medindia