Gregor Jurak
Biographic Data
| ID | 159649 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Gregor Jurak |
| GIVEN NAMES | Gregor |
| FAMILY NAME | Jurak |
| SIGNATURE | JURAK G |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Ljubljana |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4269-0970 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 0 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 0 |
The ACDSi 2023–24 study protocol: Tracking 50 years of physical fitness trends and their determinants in Slovenian children and youth
The Analysis of Children's Development in Slovenia (ACDSi) is a unique decennial national study that has been monitoring somatic and motor development in Slovenian children and adolescents for more than five decades. It offers unparalleled insight into long-term secular trends in physical fitness and related correlates and determinants. This paper presents the study design and updated methodology of the ACDSi 2023/24 edition, ensuring continuity …
Developing an Instrument to Assess Physical Education Teachers’ Competencies in Using Fitness Monitoring to Promote Physical Literacy
Background: Physical education teachers (PETs) play a vital role in fostering students’ physical literacy (PL). To leverage fitness monitoring as an efficient educational tool for students’ holistic development and lifelong physical activity, PETs must be proficient and competent in its implementation. This study aimed to create an instrument to evaluate teachers’ competencies essential for promoting PL through fitness monitoring. Methods: A Delp…
Compatibility of physical education curricula with physical literacy across 40 European countries
Although the student-centred concept of physical literacy (PL) has been emphasized by UNESCO, knowledge about its adoption/implementation into PE remains scant. Therefore, the goal of this study was to evaluate and compare the compatibility of PE curricula with PL in Europe. We collaboratively gathered a panel of experts encompassing 40 European countries. In the first step, the experts were invited to freely specify the compatibility of country’…
From furry friends to fit teens: Unveiling the role of active dog breeds in shaping adolescent physical activity and screen time behaviors
These novel findings provide us with valuable information that could be an additional tool to improve the lifestyle of this vulnerable group of adolescent girls
Worldwide trends in underweight and obesity from 1990 to 2022: A pooled analysis of 3663 population-representative studies with 222 million children, adolescents, and adults
BACKGROUND: Underweight and obesity are associated with adverse health outcomes throughout the life course. We estimated the individual and combined prevalence of underweight or thinness and obesity, and their changes, from 1990 to 2022 for adults and school-aged children and adolescents in 200 countries and territories. METHODS: ). For school-aged children and adolescents, we report thinness (BMI 2 SD above the median). FINDINGS: From 1990 to 20…
Occupational health disorders among physical education teachers compared to classroom and subject specialist teachers
During the course of their work, teachers may be subjected to conditions that cause different health problems. This study examines occupational health disorders in a representative sample of 858 teachers (528 female; age 44.0 ± 9.67 years) divided into three groups of teachers with specific occupational requirements: specialist physical education teachers (specialist PETs), classroom teachers, and specialist teachers. The number of health disorde…
Temporal trends in weight-based disparities in physical fitness of children: 30-Years of continuous surveillance through Slovenian national system
Despite recent improvements in population fitness levels, children with excess weight seem to be left behind, which adds to existing health inequalities. Our results should encourage policymakers to redesign policies aimed at promoting physical activity and enhancing physical fitness to make them more equitable and ultimately lead to reducing inequalities in fitness
SLOfit Lifelong: A model for leveraging citizen science to promote and maintain physical fitness and physical literacy across the lifespan
SLOfit Lifelong is a public health initiative which was created to upgrade a well-established, national physical fitness surveillance system for Slovenian schoolchildren that has been collecting annual fitness and health data for over three decades. The ultimate objective of creating SLOfit Lifelong was to build a modern societal infrastructure with the capacity and ability to detect future causal associations between childhood physical fitness t…
Do Fitter Children Better Assess Their Physical Activity with Questionnaire Than Less Fit Children
Most physical activity (PA) questionnaires assess moderate to vigorous PA (MVPA) describing the physical exertion of individuals that might be influenced by their physical fitness. Therefore, the aim of this study was to determine whether fitter children could better assess their PA with the questionnaire than less fit children. The cross-sectional validation study was conducted with 108 children (60 girls) aged 11 to 14 years, who were divided i…
Worldwide trends in hypertension prevalence and progress in treatment and control from 1990 to 2019: A pooled analysis of 1201 population-representative studies with 104 million participants
BACKGROUND: Hypertension can be detected at the primary health-care level and low-cost treatments can effectively control hypertension. We aimed to measure the prevalence of hypertension and progress in its detection, treatment, and control from 1990 to 2019 for 200 countries and territories. METHODS: We used data from 1990 to 2019 on people aged 30-79 years from population-representative studies with measurement of blood pressure and data on blo…
A Covid-19 Crisis in Child Physical Fitness: Creating a Barometric Tool of Public Health Engagement for the Republic of Slovenia
The Republic of Slovenia implements the largest longitudinal database of child physical fitness in the world–SLOfit. Slovenia has some of the most physically active children globally, and it has responded rapidly to incorporate national physical activity (PA) interventions throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite aggressive campaigns to maintain PA at home, the country has seen a tremendous decrease in child physical fitness over the past severa…
The Effect of Pandemic Movement Restriction Policies on Children's Physical Fitness, Activity, Screen Time, and Sleep
Background: The negative impact of isolation, confinement, and physical (in)activity due to pandemic movement restriction has been well-documented over the past year, but less is known on the impact of these policies on children's physical fitness. This study was designed to determine the effects of pandemic movement restriction policies on the 24-hour movement behavior (24-HMB) of children, and whether any alterations are reflected in worsening …
The Self-Perceived Subject-Specific Professional Competencies of Slovenian Physical Education Teachers in Different Working Environments
This cross-sectional study was designed to analyse the differences in the subject-specific competencies of Slovenian Physical Education (PE) teachers according to their physical working environment. The participants, 681 Slovenian PE teachers, evaluated their professional subject-specific competencies (n=40) on a four-level Likert scale and two factors of their physical working environment (size of sports facilities and their equipment) with a se…
The Quality of Practical Pedagogical Training During the Epidemic Through the Eyes of the Slovenian Physical Education Student Teachers
In 2020, physical education teacher education (PETE) students of the Faculty of Sport of the University of Ljubljana (N = 46) had to complete a large part of the practical pedagogical training online. Using an online questionnaire, we investigated how they delivered distance learning in physical education (PE) at Primary Schools, the extent to which they achieved their objectives, encouraged students to move, delivered content, and assessed. The …
Reliability and Validity of Slovenian Versions of Ipaq-SF, GPAQ, and Ehis-PAQ for Assessing Physical Activity and Sedentarism of Adults
Health policies rely on physical activity (PA) and sedentary behavior data collected through PA questionnaires (PAQs). Validity of international PAQs varies among countries. Therefore, it is important to know the validity of the national versions of the PAQs to properly evaluate the results. We conducted a validation study of the Slovenian versions of the International PAQ Short Form (IPAQ-SF), the Global PAQ (GPAQ), and the PAQ used in the Europ…
Associations of mode and distance of commuting to school with cardiorespiratory fitness in Slovenian schoolchildren: A nationwide cross-sectional study
Background It is unclear whether active commuting has the potential to improve children’s health. This study examined the association of commuting mode and distance with children’s cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF). Methods We conducted a cross-sectional study, including 713 Slovenian schoolchildren aged 12 to 15 years. Commuting modes were self-reported, and four commuting groups were constructed, while CRF was determined with a 20-m shuttle run t…
An inventory of national surveillance systems assessing physical activity, sedentary behaviour and sport participation of adults in the European Union
Systematic surveillance of PA is lacking among 11/27 EU countries, with even few monitoring SB and SP. Besides, existing surveillance systems typically fail to assess all dimensions and domains of PA/SB/SP with only three countries maintaining monitoring systems that encompass all three behaviours while covering most of the domains and dimensions of PA/SB/SP. Hence, additional efforts in advocacy of systematic PA surveillance in the EU are called…
Height and body-mass index trajectories of school-aged children and adolescents from 1985 to 2019 in 200 countries and territories: A pooled analysis of 2181 population-based studies with 65 million p…
BACKGROUND: Comparable global data on health and nutrition of school-aged children and adolescents are scarce. We aimed to estimate age trajectories and time trends in mean height and mean body-mass index (BMI), which measures weight gain beyond what is expected from height gain, for school-aged children and adolescents. METHODS: For this pooled analysis, we used a database of cardiometabolic risk factors collated by the Non-Communicable Disease …
Secular Trends of Physical Fitness in Twenty-Five Birth Cohorts of Slovenian Children: A Population-Based Study
In Slovenia, the national SLOfit surveillance system of the somatic and motor development of children and youth has been enabling researchers to observe the developmental trends of the entire population of school-aged children since 1987. The national database currently incorporates over 7.2 million sets of measurements of eight fitness tests and three anthropometric measurements. Since 1991, as in the rest of the world, in Slovenia, there is a c…
Children's Physical Activity, Academic Performance, and Cognitive Functioning: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis
Rising rural body-mass index is the main driver of the global obesity epidemic in adults
Body-mass index (BMI) has increased steadily in most countries in parallel with a rise in the proportion of the population who live in cities 1,2 . This has led to a widely reported view that urbanization is one of the most important drivers of the global rise in obesity 3–6 . Here we use 2,009 population-based studies, with measurements of height and weight in more than 112 million adults, to report national, regional and global trends in mean B…
Worldwide trends in blood pressure from 1975 to 2015: A pooled analysis of 1479 population-based measurement studies with 19·1 million participants
BACKGROUND: Raised blood pressure is an important risk factor for cardiovascular diseases and chronic kidney disease. We estimated worldwide trends in mean systolic and mean diastolic blood pressure, and the prevalence of, and number of people with, raised blood pressure, defined as systolic blood pressure of 140 mm Hg or higher or diastolic blood pressure of 90 mm Hg or higher. METHODS: For this analysis, we pooled national, subnational, or comm…
Worldwide trends in body-mass index, underweight, overweight, and obesity from 1975 to 2016: A pooled analysis of 2416 population-based measurement studies in 128·9 million children, adolescents, and …
BACKGROUND: Underweight, overweight, and obesity in childhood and adolescence are associated with adverse health consequences throughout the life-course. Our aim was to estimate worldwide trends in mean body-mass index (BMI) and a comprehensive set of BMI categories that cover underweight to obesity in children and adolescents, and to compare trends with those of adults. METHODS: We pooled 2416 population-based studies with measurements of height…
Acoustics in School Sport Halls and Its Implications for Physical Education/Akustika u školskim dvoranama i njezine implikacije na nastavu tjelesnoga odgoja
Due to the demanding acoustic conditions in physical education lessons and the related problems with health and academic success, the aim of this study was to examine the acoustic conditions of teaching in sport halls in Slovenia. Thirty-five sport halls were selected, reflecting four types of school sport halls grouped according to the period of their construction. The reverberation time was measured, and speech intelligibility was calculated by…
School day and weekend patterns of physical activity in urban 11‐year‐olds: A cross‐cultural comparison
OBJECTIVES: This multi-center study was conducted to objectively evaluate energy expenditure and physical activity (PA) patterns on school days and weekends in urban 11-year-olds. METHODS: The sample consisted of 241 children from three cities: Zagreb, Ljubljana (both in Central Europe) and Ann Arbor (United States). Energy expenditure and PA were assessed during two school days and two weekend days using a multiple-sensor body monitor. RESULTS: …
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Influence of the Enhanced Physical Education Curriculum on the Physical Fitness of Children / Utjecaj Kineziološke Intervencije Na Fizičku Formu Djece
This study was designed as a cluster-randomised quasi-experiment to assess the effect of the implementation of school-based kinesiological intervention, through which some schools in Slovenia offer an enhanced physical education curriculum, on children's physical fitness in the first four years of schooling. A total of 328 children from nine Slovenian primary schools were assigned to kinesiological intervention (n=157) and control groups (n=171).…
Physical Activity, Physical Fitness Levels, Daily Energy Intake and Some Eating Habits of 11-Year-Old Children / Fizička aktivnost, razine fizičke kondicije, dnevni unos energije i neke prehrambene na…
The aim of this study was to analyse the relationships between energy intake, energy expenditure (physical activity), physical fitness, body mass index and certain eating habits (breakfast and snacks after 8 p.m.) of 11-year-old children. A cluster sample of 72 children (35 boys and 37 girls), aged 11.8 (±0.3) years was used for this purpose. The measurements took place during two weekdays and two weekend days. Physical activity (energy expenditu…
Associations of objectively assessed sleep and physical activity in 11-year old children
This study found no evidence for a link between short sleep and low or reduced physical activity
Acoustics in School Sport Halls and Its Implications for Physical Education/Akustika u školskim dvoranama i njezine implikacije na nastavu tjelesnoga odgoja
Due to the demanding acoustic conditions in physical education lessons and the related problems with health and academic success, the aim of this study was to examine the acoustic conditions of teaching in sport halls in Slovenia. Thirty-five sport halls were selected, reflecting four types of school sport halls grouped according to the period of their construction. The reverberation time was measured, and speech intelligibility was calculated by…
School day and weekend patterns of physical activity in urban 11‐year‐olds: A cross‐cultural comparison
OBJECTIVES: This multi-center study was conducted to objectively evaluate energy expenditure and physical activity (PA) patterns on school days and weekends in urban 11-year-olds. METHODS: The sample consisted of 241 children from three cities: Zagreb, Ljubljana (both in Central Europe) and Ann Arbor (United States). Energy expenditure and PA were assessed during two school days and two weekend days using a multiple-sensor body monitor. RESULTS: …
Worldwide trends in blood pressure from 1975 to 2015: A pooled analysis of 1479 population-based measurement studies with 19·1 million participants
BACKGROUND: Raised blood pressure is an important risk factor for cardiovascular diseases and chronic kidney disease. We estimated worldwide trends in mean systolic and mean diastolic blood pressure, and the prevalence of, and number of people with, raised blood pressure, defined as systolic blood pressure of 140 mm Hg or higher or diastolic blood pressure of 90 mm Hg or higher. METHODS: For this analysis, we pooled national, subnational, or comm…
Worldwide trends in body-mass index, underweight, overweight, and obesity from 1975 to 2016: A pooled analysis of 2416 population-based measurement studies in 128·9 million children, adolescents, and …
BACKGROUND: Underweight, overweight, and obesity in childhood and adolescence are associated with adverse health consequences throughout the life-course. Our aim was to estimate worldwide trends in mean body-mass index (BMI) and a comprehensive set of BMI categories that cover underweight to obesity in children and adolescents, and to compare trends with those of adults. METHODS: We pooled 2416 population-based studies with measurements of height…
Rising rural body-mass index is the main driver of the global obesity epidemic in adults
Body-mass index (BMI) has increased steadily in most countries in parallel with a rise in the proportion of the population who live in cities 1,2 . This has led to a widely reported view that urbanization is one of the most important drivers of the global rise in obesity 3–6 . Here we use 2,009 population-based studies, with measurements of height and weight in more than 112 million adults, to report national, regional and global trends in mean B…
Height and body-mass index trajectories of school-aged children and adolescents from 1985 to 2019 in 200 countries and territories: A pooled analysis of 2181 population-based studies with 65 million p…
BACKGROUND: Comparable global data on health and nutrition of school-aged children and adolescents are scarce. We aimed to estimate age trajectories and time trends in mean height and mean body-mass index (BMI), which measures weight gain beyond what is expected from height gain, for school-aged children and adolescents. METHODS: For this pooled analysis, we used a database of cardiometabolic risk factors collated by the Non-Communicable Disease …
Secular Trends of Physical Fitness in Twenty-Five Birth Cohorts of Slovenian Children: A Population-Based Study
In Slovenia, the national SLOfit surveillance system of the somatic and motor development of children and youth has been enabling researchers to observe the developmental trends of the entire population of school-aged children since 1987. The national database currently incorporates over 7.2 million sets of measurements of eight fitness tests and three anthropometric measurements. Since 1991, as in the rest of the world, in Slovenia, there is a c…
Children's Physical Activity, Academic Performance, and Cognitive Functioning: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis
Worldwide trends in hypertension prevalence and progress in treatment and control from 1990 to 2019: A pooled analysis of 1201 population-representative studies with 104 million participants
BACKGROUND: Hypertension can be detected at the primary health-care level and low-cost treatments can effectively control hypertension. We aimed to measure the prevalence of hypertension and progress in its detection, treatment, and control from 1990 to 2019 for 200 countries and territories. METHODS: We used data from 1990 to 2019 on people aged 30-79 years from population-representative studies with measurement of blood pressure and data on blo…
A Covid-19 Crisis in Child Physical Fitness: Creating a Barometric Tool of Public Health Engagement for the Republic of Slovenia
The Republic of Slovenia implements the largest longitudinal database of child physical fitness in the world–SLOfit. Slovenia has some of the most physically active children globally, and it has responded rapidly to incorporate national physical activity (PA) interventions throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite aggressive campaigns to maintain PA at home, the country has seen a tremendous decrease in child physical fitness over the past severa…
The Effect of Pandemic Movement Restriction Policies on Children's Physical Fitness, Activity, Screen Time, and Sleep
Background: The negative impact of isolation, confinement, and physical (in)activity due to pandemic movement restriction has been well-documented over the past year, but less is known on the impact of these policies on children's physical fitness. This study was designed to determine the effects of pandemic movement restriction policies on the 24-hour movement behavior (24-HMB) of children, and whether any alterations are reflected in worsening …
The Self-Perceived Subject-Specific Professional Competencies of Slovenian Physical Education Teachers in Different Working Environments
This cross-sectional study was designed to analyse the differences in the subject-specific competencies of Slovenian Physical Education (PE) teachers according to their physical working environment. The participants, 681 Slovenian PE teachers, evaluated their professional subject-specific competencies (n=40) on a four-level Likert scale and two factors of their physical working environment (size of sports facilities and their equipment) with a se…
The Quality of Practical Pedagogical Training During the Epidemic Through the Eyes of the Slovenian Physical Education Student Teachers
In 2020, physical education teacher education (PETE) students of the Faculty of Sport of the University of Ljubljana (N = 46) had to complete a large part of the practical pedagogical training online. Using an online questionnaire, we investigated how they delivered distance learning in physical education (PE) at Primary Schools, the extent to which they achieved their objectives, encouraged students to move, delivered content, and assessed. The …
Reliability and Validity of Slovenian Versions of Ipaq-SF, GPAQ, and Ehis-PAQ for Assessing Physical Activity and Sedentarism of Adults
Health policies rely on physical activity (PA) and sedentary behavior data collected through PA questionnaires (PAQs). Validity of international PAQs varies among countries. Therefore, it is important to know the validity of the national versions of the PAQs to properly evaluate the results. We conducted a validation study of the Slovenian versions of the International PAQ Short Form (IPAQ-SF), the Global PAQ (GPAQ), and the PAQ used in the Europ…
Associations of mode and distance of commuting to school with cardiorespiratory fitness in Slovenian schoolchildren: A nationwide cross-sectional study
Background It is unclear whether active commuting has the potential to improve children’s health. This study examined the association of commuting mode and distance with children’s cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF). Methods We conducted a cross-sectional study, including 713 Slovenian schoolchildren aged 12 to 15 years. Commuting modes were self-reported, and four commuting groups were constructed, while CRF was determined with a 20-m shuttle run t…
An inventory of national surveillance systems assessing physical activity, sedentary behaviour and sport participation of adults in the European Union
Systematic surveillance of PA is lacking among 11/27 EU countries, with even few monitoring SB and SP. Besides, existing surveillance systems typically fail to assess all dimensions and domains of PA/SB/SP with only three countries maintaining monitoring systems that encompass all three behaviours while covering most of the domains and dimensions of PA/SB/SP. Hence, additional efforts in advocacy of systematic PA surveillance in the EU are called…
SLOfit Lifelong: A model for leveraging citizen science to promote and maintain physical fitness and physical literacy across the lifespan
SLOfit Lifelong is a public health initiative which was created to upgrade a well-established, national physical fitness surveillance system for Slovenian schoolchildren that has been collecting annual fitness and health data for over three decades. The ultimate objective of creating SLOfit Lifelong was to build a modern societal infrastructure with the capacity and ability to detect future causal associations between childhood physical fitness t…
Do Fitter Children Better Assess Their Physical Activity with Questionnaire Than Less Fit Children
Most physical activity (PA) questionnaires assess moderate to vigorous PA (MVPA) describing the physical exertion of individuals that might be influenced by their physical fitness. Therefore, the aim of this study was to determine whether fitter children could better assess their PA with the questionnaire than less fit children. The cross-sectional validation study was conducted with 108 children (60 girls) aged 11 to 14 years, who were divided i…
Worldwide trends in underweight and obesity from 1990 to 2022: A pooled analysis of 3663 population-representative studies with 222 million children, adolescents, and adults
BACKGROUND: Underweight and obesity are associated with adverse health outcomes throughout the life course. We estimated the individual and combined prevalence of underweight or thinness and obesity, and their changes, from 1990 to 2022 for adults and school-aged children and adolescents in 200 countries and territories. METHODS: ). For school-aged children and adolescents, we report thinness (BMI 2 SD above the median). FINDINGS: From 1990 to 20…
Occupational health disorders among physical education teachers compared to classroom and subject specialist teachers
During the course of their work, teachers may be subjected to conditions that cause different health problems. This study examines occupational health disorders in a representative sample of 858 teachers (528 female; age 44.0 ± 9.67 years) divided into three groups of teachers with specific occupational requirements: specialist physical education teachers (specialist PETs), classroom teachers, and specialist teachers. The number of health disorde…
Temporal trends in weight-based disparities in physical fitness of children: 30-Years of continuous surveillance through Slovenian national system
Despite recent improvements in population fitness levels, children with excess weight seem to be left behind, which adds to existing health inequalities. Our results should encourage policymakers to redesign policies aimed at promoting physical activity and enhancing physical fitness to make them more equitable and ultimately lead to reducing inequalities in fitness
Developing an Instrument to Assess Physical Education Teachers’ Competencies in Using Fitness Monitoring to Promote Physical Literacy
Background: Physical education teachers (PETs) play a vital role in fostering students’ physical literacy (PL). To leverage fitness monitoring as an efficient educational tool for students’ holistic development and lifelong physical activity, PETs must be proficient and competent in its implementation. This study aimed to create an instrument to evaluate teachers’ competencies essential for promoting PL through fitness monitoring. Methods: A Delp…
Medicine (21 works) · Obesity, Physical Activity, Diet (15 works) · Psychology (13 works) · Children's Physical and Motor Development (11 works) · Demography (11 works) · Physical therapy (11 works) · Population (9 works) · Physical activity (8 works) · Environmental health (7 works) · Medical education (6 works)