The ARCH Lab published a paper using the MY LIFE Study data, measuring youth physical activity (PA) and the correlations between children with multimorbidity (MM) versus children with chronic physical illness (PI) only. The paper, “Correlates of Moderate-to-Vigorous Physical Activity in Children With Physical Illness and Physical–Mental Multimorbidity” was published in the Journal of Health Education & Behaviour.

MM is the co-occurrence of chronic physical and mental illness in oneself. Baseline information on 263 children aged 2 to 16 with a PI from the MY LIFE Study were used in analysis. Questionnaires were used to collect demographic and psychosocial data while PA data was measured using accelerometers. Accelerometer data, collected from small devices worn around the waist of participants for 7 days, was analyzed along with activity logs.

Fifty-five children with MM and 85 with PI had valid PA data the authors could analyze. Approximately half of youth in MY LIFE met their age-respective Canadian PA guidelines, but when compared with a nationally representative sample, this number is still 5 to 13 fewer average minutes a day of moderate-vigorous PA. Therefore, these results provide insight that children with PI and MM are not sufficiently active; demographic and psychosocial factors of children are in correlation with these findings.