Promotion of physical activity in primary health care settings: evaluation of the Saúde Ativa Rio Claro program

Resumen

To evaluate the association between participation in the Saúde Ativa Rio Claro (SARC) program and physical activity (PA) levels among adult women. A case control study was conducted in seven primary health care settings in Rio Claro, São Paulo, Brazil. The sample included 111 women participating in the intervention (mean age: 58±13 years). For each participant, we selected a non participant, matched to the intervention participant by age (± 5 years) and neighborhood. e program provides 1-hour multimodal exercise twice a week as well as general advice about health self-care. PA was measured using the International Physical Activity Questionnaire (IPAQ) long version. While 18.0% of the non participants reported practicing 150 min/wk of leisure-time PA (LTPA) or more, 61.3% of the participants achieved such threshold (OR= 7.2; IC95%: 3.8-13.3). Participants performed more minutes compared to non-participants, even omitting the 100 min/wk of PA pro- vided by the intervention (p<0.001). In addition to providing 100 min/wk of PA, SARC, an exercise promotion intervention in primary health care settings in Brazil, stimulates participants to increase PA levels in other settings.