Abstract
The purpose of this study was to develop and evaluate a new physical activity questionnaire (PA-questionnaire) for the assessment of daily energy expenditure (DEE) in Japanese workers. The study subjects were workers and college students of 38 males and 14 females in the age range of 18-69 years.
The values of DEE estimated from the PA-questionnaire were statistically analyzed with those of DEE calculated by the calorie counter method (CC-method) and the activity records method (AR-method) . The DEE mean of PA-questionnaire in males and females was significantly larger than those of CC-method, 25.2 (p < 0.001) and 12.5% (p < 0.05), respectively. A similar relationship was also recognized between the DEE mean of PA-questionnaire and AR-method, with a larger extents in males of 6.4 (p < 0.001), but there was no significant difference in females (3.3%) . Additionally, the values of DEE by PA-questionnaire strongly correlated with those of CC-method (r = 0.711 in males and 0.921 in females) and AR-method (r = 0.893 in males and 0.918 in females) .
Furthermore, the comparison was also made with the working energy expenditure (WEE) of PA-questionnaire and AR-method. A strong correlation (r = 0.876) was found between the values of two methods and no significant difference was recognized between the WEE means of two methods. From these findings, we concluded that the new proposal method of PA-questionnaire was adequate for the estimation of the DEE in Japanese workers.
