Exercise in Child Health

Summary

This study is a cooperative investigation funded by the NIH. The project is a collaboration among three major NIH Clinical Translational Science Awardees: 1) UCI (lead site with its affiliate CHOC), 2) Northwestern University (with its affiliate Lurie Children's Hospital), and 3) USC (with its affiliate Children's Hospital of Los Angeles).

There is an increasing number of children who, through medical advances, now survive diseases and conditions that were once fatal, but which remain chronic and debilitating. A major challenge to improve both the immediate and long term care and health of such children has been the gap in our understanding of how to assess the biological effects of exercise. Like otherwise healthy children, children with chronic diseases and disabilities want to be physically active. The challenge is to determine what constitutes safe and beneficial level of physical activity when the underlying disease or condition \[e.g., cystic fibrosis (CF) or sickle cell disease (SCD)\] imposes physiological constraints on exercise that are not present in otherwise healthy children. Current exercise testing protocols were based on studies of athletes and high performing healthy individuals and were designed to test limits of performance at very high-intensity, unphysiological, maximal effort. These approaches are not optimal for children and adolescents with disease and disability. This project (REACH-Revamping Exercise Assessment in Child Health) is designed to address this gap. Cohorts of children will be identified with two major genetic diseases (CF and SCD) and measure exercise responses annually as they progress from early puberty to mid or late puberty over a 3-4year period. In addition, in the light of the pandemic, a group of children will be added who were affected by SARS-CoV-2 and investigate their responses to exercise. SARS-CoV-2 has similar long-term symptoms than CF and SCD have. Novel approaches to assessing physiological responses to exercise using advanced data analytics will be examined in relation to metrics of habitual physical activity, circulating biomarkers of inflammation and growth, leukocyte gene expression, and the impact of the underlying CF, SCD or SARS-CoV-2 condition. The data from this study will help to develop a toolkit of innovative metrics for exercise testing that will be made available to the research and clinical community.

Conditions

• Cystic Fibrosis
• Sickle Cell Disease
• SARS CoV 2 Infection

Interventions

OTHER

Exercise

Cardiopulmonary Exercise Testing (CPET) will be used with Multiple Brief Exercise Bouts (MBEB) in order to obtain the necessary data to yield information on the study outcome variables

Sponsors & Collaborators

• Children's Hospital of Orange County

  collaborator OTHER

• Children's Hospital Los Angeles

  collaborator OTHER

• Ann & Robert H Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago

  collaborator OTHER

• University of California, Irvine

  lead OTHER

Study Design

Allocation

NON_RANDOMIZED

Purpose

BASIC_SCIENCE

Masking

NONE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age

10 Years

Max Age

17 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2020-11-12

Primary Completion

2026-06-30

Completion

2026-06-30

Countries

• United States

Study Locations