Malik Muhammad Ali Awan, Sidra Qureshi, Hina Tariq, Furqan Ahmed Siddiqi.
Effects of cardiopulmonary conditioning on body mass index, physical activity and general psychological health of young adults.
Pak Heart J Jan ;52(3):258-61.

Objective: To determine the effects of cardiopulmonary conditioning on body mass index (BMI), physical activity (PA), and general psychological health of healthy young adults and their interrelationship. Methodology: A quasi-interventional study was conducted in Pakistan Railway Hospital, Rawalpindi from February to July 2017. A total of 97 healthy young adults who sustained moderate physical exertion were selected through nonprobability convenient sampling to perform cardiopulmonary conditioning exercises for 12 weeks at moderate intensity. Individuals with any systemic disease were excluded. The pre and post levels of PA, general psychological health and BMI were assessed through International Physical Activity Questionnaire (IPAQ), General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-12) and BMI formula respectively and performed statistical analysis on SPSS 20 software.Results: We recruited 97 participants; mean age was 23.40 +- 2.29 years. Majority, around 74% of the participants were females. The descriptive analysis showed that 73.2 % participants were minimally active before the intervention that improved to 0.0 % after the intervention. No participant was HEPA active before intervention that significantly improved to 38.1 %. In the pre-intervention,87.6 % participants were overweight and 12.4 % participants were obese whereas in post-intervention, 85.6 % participants had normal weight and 14.4 %participants were overweight. The Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test revealed significant improvement in all outcome measures (p= 0.001). The Spearman's Correlations of PA and general psychological health and PA and BMI was demonstrated as -0.262 (p=0.01) and -0.081 (p=0.431) respectively. Conclusion: Cardiopulmonary conditioning is an effective approach for improving BMI, general psychological health and physical activity. With higher levels of PA general psychological health improves unlike BMI that does not have any significant relation with PA.

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