Lan, Fan-YunScheibler, ChristopherHershey, Maria SoledadRomero-Cabrera, Juan LuisGaviola, Gabriel CYiannakou, IoannaFernandez-Montero, AlejandroChristophi, Costas AChristiani, David CSotos-Prieto, MercedesKales, Stefanos N2023-05-032023-05-032022-06-23http://hdl.handle.net/10668/19599There are knowledge gaps regarding healthy lifestyle (HLS) interventions in fire academy settings and also concerning the impacts of the pandemic on training. We enrolled fire recruits from two fire academies (A and B) in New England in early 2019 as the historical control group, and recruits from academies in New England (B) and Florida (C), respectively, during the pandemic as the intervention group. The three academies have similar training environments and curricula. The exposures of interest were a combination of (1) an HLS intervention and (2) impacts of the pandemic on training curricula and environs (i.e. social distancing, masking, reduced class size, etc.). We examined the health/fitness changes throughout training. The follow-up rate was 78%, leaving 92 recruits in the historical control group and 55 in the intervention group. The results show an HLS intervention improved the effects of fire academy training on recruits healthy behaviors (MEDI-lifestyle score, 0.5 ± 1.4 vs. - 0.3 ± 1.7), systolic blood pressure (- 7.2 ± 10.0 vs. 2.9 ± 12.9 mmHg), and mental health (Beck Depression score, - 0.45 ± 1.14 vs. - 0.01 ± 1.05) (all P enAttribution 4.0 Internationalhttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/COVID-19CurriculumExercise TestFirefightersHealthy LifestyleHumansPhysical Fitnessresearch article35739126open access10.1038/s41598-022-10979-22045-2322PMC9226180https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-10979-2.pdfhttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9226180/pdf