Physical Activity and Health

Dr Catherine Kerr

The Physical Activity and Health Group incorporates a number of staff interests relating in particular to the relationship between physical activity and cardiovascular and metabolic health in both adults and children.

Testing the validity and reliability of objective physical activity monitoring techniques e.g. tri-axial accelerometry, is an underlying feature of many current research projects in various community and school-based settings.

Thereafter the effectiveness of interventions on increasing physical activity levels, physical fitness, cardiovascular, metabolic, and psycho-social health is explored, often in a multidimensional sense employing the expertise of exercise physiologists, educationalists, and health psychologists.

There are a number of additional related foci within this theme, and they include investigating the effect of physical activity intervention on cardiac structure and function using echocardiography, the role of physical activity (and nutrition) in the management of disease e.g. the metabolic syndrome (pre-diabetic state), type 2 diabetes, obesity, neurological conditions, and the ageing process.

The research group has numerous links with clinicians, schools, external academics and those within the University, Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire Postgraduate Medical School, and the Primary Health Care Providers.

Current Sport and Exercise Sciences staff who members of the Physical Activity and Health group are:

Dr Catherine Kerr
Dr Nick Sculthorpe
Dr Paul Castle
Professor Mark Lewis
Dr Steve Kozub
Dr Louise Brown

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Physical Activity and Health