World Obesity Day

Together, we can address the far reaching personal, societal and economic impacts of obesity. Become a force for change this #WorldObesityDay.

Today is World Obesity Day. Across the globe, millions of children are affected by the obesity and overweight crisis – in 2018, 40 million children under the age of 5 were overweight or obese. The numerous risks that arise as a result of overweight and obesity can persist throughout a child’s life to adulthood, and have a significant impact on their health and wellbeing.

The roots of child obesity are complex, and further research, health systems monitoring and surveillance are needed to successfully address this issue. Given that obesity is a preventable disease, we want to understand more about the precautionary measures we can take to help combat this epidemic and target interventions early.

Professor John Frank from the University of Edinburgh is leading our project using Growing Up in Scotland (GUS) data to try and tackle this question. We spoke with him about the importance of the project given the current child obesity health crisis. See what he had to say below:

"Growing Up in Scotland Obesity Prediction Project"

Throughout the developed world, and increasingly the poorer world, children as well as adults are slowly becoming heavier for their heights than ever before. While the precise causes of this "slow epidemic" over the last forty years are still not clear, most countries are seeking cost-effective ways to monitor the weight-for-height of their populations in order to combat the epidemic. This is especially true for children, in whom rising rates of obesity are now threatening the lifelong health of an entire future generation across the globe. 

To help countries design relatively inexpensive data-collection ("surveillance" in the public health sense of the word) systems for this purpose, The Data for Children Collaborative with UNICEF are funding a novel data-analysis project to identify risk factors able to predict persistent child obesity at ages 10 and 12 - when it is very likely to continue far into those children's futures, affecting their health and well-being significantly. The emphasis will be on those risk factors which are often routinely collected in entire national populations of children - e.g. in the health care or educational systems. This will enable the results of the study to be used to build national surveillance systems, for obesity in children, utilising routinely collected data where possible.

In addition, such systems for monitoring the epidemic should have the all-important capacity to detect -- before full-blown obesity has developed -- those children in whom early dietary and physical-activity interventions may be able to successfully prevent obesity from developing.  This is critical because, in most settings internationally, the success rates for treating fully-developed child obesity are not promising: "an ounce of prevention would be worth much more than a pound of cure." 

To do this, the project will analyse the already pre-consented and anonymised data on over 3000 Scottish children born in 2004-5, and enrolled, with their families' full consent, in the Growing Up in Scotland (GUS) study funded by the Scottish Government - the largest longitudinal study of Scottish children established in the last two decades.

A team of epidemiological and statistical experts, including four Scottish Early Career Researchers, led by Professor John Frank of the University of Edinburgh's Usher Institute, will commence the project in April. Over the following six months the project will examine the predictive power of all the known - and potentially new - risk factors, before age 10, for predicting obesity at both ages 10 and 12. Among the risk factors to be investigated will be markers of the families' socio-economic status, as well as those markers of both Positive and Adverse Childhood Experiences which are typically available in national administrative datasets that could be linked together to build a national obesity surveillance system.

If you would like to find out more about the project, or have any questions, please contact Professor John Frank, the project’s Principle Investigator, at:
john.frank@ed.ac.uk

Related News:
https://www.unicef.org/stories/what-are-we-waiting-for-obesity-mexico