Neuroscience Letters 440 (2008) 72–75 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Neuroscience Letters journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/neulet Childhood obesity affects fine motor skill performance under different postural constraints Eva D’Hondt ∗ , Benedicte Deforche, Ilse De Bourdeaudhuij, Matthieu Lenoir Department of Movement and Sports Sciences, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, Ghent University, Belgium article info Article history: Received 11 March 2008 Received in revised form 22 April 2008 Accepted 15 May 2008 Keywords: Children Obesity Postural balance Fine motor skill abstract The main purpose of this study was to investigate fine motor control in obese and overweight chil- dren compared to normal-weight peers under different postural constraints. Peg placing performance of normal-weight (n = 273), overweight (n = 202) and obese (n =65) children (aged 5.0–12.8 years) was evaluated in two different postural conditions: sitting and standing in tandem stance on a balance beam (BB). Being overweight or obese was detrimental for fine motor skill performance in the standing on BB condition, which confirms the postural control difficulties observed in overweight and obese children. Remarkably, obese participants also produced lower scores in the sitting condition, i.e. when the complex- ity of postural organization was restricted to a minimum. Although this could result from the mechanical demands related to the movement of the arm itself, it also leads to the tentative suggestion that obese children might suffer from underlying perceptual-motor coordination difficulties. © 2008 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved. More and more individuals are overweight or obese nowadays. Especially among children and adolescents, prevalence levels are rising at an alarming rate. About 20% of all children and adolescents in countries of the World Health Organization (WHO) European Region are overweight, including one third affected by obesity [3]. Next to a number of negative outcomes concerning health and psychosocial well-being [5], an increased body weight is also asso- ciated with important changes in body geometry and posture [8]. Several studies have examined to what extent overweight and obesity influence postural balance control. In laboratory settings as well as in standardized field tests, Deforche et al. [7] reported impaired performances in overweight prepubertal boys on several static and dynamic postural skills. Because of the inverse rela- tionship found between body weight and a clinical balance score (Bruininks-Oseretsky), Goulding et al. [10] concluded that also ado- lescent boys who are overweight have poorer balance than those of healthy weight. In adult males, assessment of balance stabil- ity using a force plate showed that an increased body weight is significantly associated with a decrease in postural stability [15]. Otherwise, it has been demonstrated that in obese men weight loss is strongly linearly related to an improvement in balance con- trol [20]. Altogether, these studies suggest that overweight and ∗ Corresponding author at: Ghent University, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sci- ences, Department of Movement and Sports Sciences, Watersportlaan 2, B-9000 Gent, Belgium. Tel.: +32 9 264 91 37; fax: +32 9 264 64 84. E-mail address: eva.dhondt@ugent.be (E. D’Hondt). especially obesity impose significant constraints on balance con- trol. In normal populations, it has been shown that maintaining a stable postural orientation is a requisite for many daily activities, including accurate upper limb movements. Recent studies of Davids et al. [6] and Savelsbergh et al. [19] demonstrated that increasing postural requirements lead to a significant decrease in children’s catching performance, especially in those who are less skilled. A reduction in motor system degrees of freedom to be regulated when seated enabled poor catchers to significantly improve their number of successful catches. Both authors suggest that children’s ability to adapt properly to postural demands is the key factor in upper limb movement performance rather than the control of the limb itself. Given that childhood overweight and obesity are associated with a reduced control of postural stability, they could also impose constraints on other motor skills founded on it. When walking, for example, obese children display extended periods of double sup- port compared to normal-weight peers at different walking speeds [13,14,16]. Their different gait pattern is supposed to be indicative of underlying postural instability, which in turn is generally asso- ciated with more noncontributory mass added to the system [16]. Concerning upper limb movement, Berrigan et al. [2] investigated the influence of obesity when performing from a standing posture. In their study obese participants displayed difficulties in accurately pointing to a small target, reflected by an increase in hand move- ment time. Because a stable posture is essential to perform upper limb movement from a standing position, the difficulty of obese people to control balance interfered with the aiming limb control. 0304-3940/$ – see front matter © 2008 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.neulet.2008.05.056