Health related, daily life activity and sports domain characteristics of swimmers with Down syndrome

Abstract

Down syndrome is the most common genetic cause of developmental disability being associated with abnormalities in chromosome 21 and always accompanied with intellectual disability. Information regarding physical activity and sport participation for persons with Down syndrome is scarce. The general objective of this Thesis was to characterize the physical fitness and body composition profile as well as the daily life physical activity of swimmers with Down syndrome. Furthermore, a biomechanical approach was developed to characterize swimmers with this condition, and compare them to swimmers with intellectual disability and swimmers without disability from the literature. The experiments were conducted with the application of several protocols: the Eurofit Special, a physical fitness test for persons with intellectual disability; video analysis, for the race analysis and the biomechanical approach; the pacer, for the pacing analysis; the WalkinSense, for the daily life activity analysis; and the Qualisys for the kinematical analysis. Results indicated that (i) persons with Down syndrome have less power, less cardiovascular fitness and higher body mass index in comparison to persons with intellectual disability and non disabled; (ii) swimmers with Down syndrome have healthier body composition profiles and present higher levels of physical fitness than untrained peers with the same impairment; (iii) a classification system from the International Paralympic Committee should include the evaluation of the physical fitness profile and the body composition of swimmers with Down syndrome and swimmers with intellectual disability; (iv) Swimming training seems to improve BMI, Fat % and lean body mass, as well as physical fitness condition (especially upper and lower strength) of swimmers with Down syndrome; (v) male swimmers with Down syndrome are faster than female counterparts but both are considerably slower that swimmers without disability and swimmers with intellectual disability; (vi) swimmers with Down syndrome seem to have problems with pacing, both on training and in competition and are not able to take advantage of short term visual feedback to maintain a pacing strategy; (vii) swimmers with Down syndrome present coordinative and efficiency problems on the water. (viii) swimmers with Down syndrome swim at slower maximum speeds and present lower anthropometric characteristics than intellectual disabled swimmers. This analysis allowed providing new insights on training for persons with Down syndrome and on the current classification system for these swimmers.