Systematic review of the prevalence of active transportation to school among children and adolescents: update of the Report Card Brazil

The objective of this study was to update previous systematic reviews, based on publications carried out in the period from 2020 to 2024, revealing the use of active transportation in Brazil and presenting differences according to sex. The studies were extracted from LILACS, SCIELO and MEDLINE. The searches were carried out between January 2020 and December 2024 and conducted by means of the advanced search tools of each database, using description chains in Portuguese, English and Spanish. These included original studies that validated the active transport and explicitly describe the measurement method used, including Brazilian participants between the ages of 0 and 19, of both sexes, without specific clinical conditions, without diagnosis of diseases and who were not athletes. The review included 5 articles, covering different regions of the country and contemplating most samples between 12 and 20 years old. Active transportation was predominantly measured by self-reported questionnaires. The prevalence of active transportation varied from 37% to 53% for local samples and reached 44.4% in the national analysis. A trend of greater participation in boys was identified, with prevalences of 53% to 55.8%, while girls varied between 44% and 47%. Differently from what was observed in previous reviews, active transportation was less prevalent in relation to passive transportation, which makes it fundamental the implementation of public policies aimed at creating safer and more favorable environments to favor this behavior.