Cent Eur J Public Health 2020, 28(2):120-123 | DOI: 10.21101/cejph.a5912

Is population's cardiorespiratory fitness really declining?

Markéta Sovová¹, Eliška Sovová¹, Amjad Ghazal Asswad², Milan Sova³

¹ Department of Sports Medicine, Cardiovascular Rehabilitation, Palacký University Olomouc, Olomouc, Czech Republic

² Emergency Department, West Middlesex University Hospital, London, United Kingdom of Great Britain, Northern Ireland

³ Department of Respiratory Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry, Palacký University Olomouc, Olomouc, Czech Republic

Objective: Cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF) is defined as the capacity of the cardiovascular and pulmonary systems to meet the oxygen demands of the body during physical work. Poor CRF is connected with a higher risk for the development of various noninfectious diseases such as cardiovascular disease or malignancies. The standard test for the assessment of CRF is exercise testing with the measurement of maximal oxygen consumption (VO₂ max). Standard VO₂ max values for adult men and women in the Czech Republic have been available since the 1970s without being updated. According to experts, these standard values are now unusable for contemporary CRF measurements of the population in the Czech Republic. The Fitness Registry and the Importance of Exercise: a National Database (FRIEND) - 4,494 patients (1,717 men) defined new standard values for bicycle ergometry CRF for the population in the United States of America. The aim of the study was the statistical comparison of VO₂ max values (reference standards) in the 1970s population in the Czech Republic with the new reference standards of the FRIEND registry.

Methods: All analyses were performed using IBM SPSS statistics and all tests with a p-value of less than 0.05 were considered statistically significant.

Results: VO₂ max norms for women in the Czech population were higher in all age categories with statistically significant differences in the categories 30-39, 40-49 and 50-59 (p < 0.001). In the male population aged 20-29 years, VO₂ max was significantly higher in the FRIEND registry (p < 0.001) in contrast to the other age categories, 30-39, 40-49 and 50-59, which were significantly higher in the Czech population (p < 0.001).

Conclusions: Czech VO₂ max population norms from the 1970s are (with the exception of age category 20-29 years) higher than values from the recent FRIEND registry.

Keywords: cardiorespiratory fitness, Czech population, reference standards, maximal oxygen consumption

Received: August 3, 2019; Revised: April 9, 2020; Accepted: April 9, 2020; Published: June 27, 2020  Show citation