Federal government websites often end in. The site is secure. Preview improvements coming to the PMC website in October Learn More or Try it out now. French national government plans were launched in , , and to improve the participation levels of citizens. These plans should be monitored. To date, information on temporal trends in sports has come from the national population.
However, no data are available to measure temporal trends in different territories across the country. Logistic regressions adjusted for age were used to determine the impact of socioeconomic status SES on sports participation and to measure the changes in sport participation rates.
Participation declined among all subgroups of adolescents: from We observed that SES inequalities in access to sport increased among the girls, whilst they reduced among the boys. National government plans seem to have had limited success in this territory. Next to national studies, there is a need to develop territory specific studies which could show important disparities across the national territory.
Sports help to attain daily recommended levels of PA [ 5 ] and have an impact on psychological and social health [ 6 ]. Promoting sports participation among citizens and supporting local sports organizations are recommended by the World Health Organization [ 7 ].
Moreover, PA and sports participation during adolescence are predictors of PA and sport participation in adulthood [ 8 , 9 , 10 ], where a physically active lifestyle helps to prevent cancer, type II diabetes, osteoporosis [ 11 ], and cardiovascular diseases [ 12 , 13 ]. Adherence to sports by the largest possible number of adolescents thus constitutes, in the short and long term, a major public health issue.
