TITLE: How close and how much? Linking health outcomes to spatial distributions of built environment features
ABSTRACT: Built environment features (BEFs) refer to aspects of the human constructed environment, which may in turn support or restrict health related behaviors and thus impact health. In this talk we will present two approaches to understand whether the spatial distribution and quantity of fast food restaurants (FFRs) influence BMI and the risk of obesity in schoolchildren. The first method is focused on determining the “radius of influence” of BEFs on children’s BMI values and extends the class of Distributed Lag Models to the spatial context. The second method is a two-stage Bayesian hierarchical modeling framework that examines how the spatial pattern and quantity of FFRs affect the risk of obesity. The first stage model aims to identify representative spatial patterns of exposure to FFRs, whereas the second stage model relates exposure patterns to obesity, offering two different approaches to accommodate uncertainty in the exposure patterns estimated in the first stage.
Our analysis on the influence of patterns of FFR occurrence on obesity among Californian schoolchildren has indicated that, in 2010, among schools that are consistently assigned to a cluster, there is a lower odds of obesity amongst 9th graders who attend schools with most distant FFR occurrences in a 1-mile radius as compared to others.
