Journal
HEALTH AFFAIRS
Volume 36, Issue 5, Pages 902-908Publisher
PROJECT HOPE
DOI: 10.1377/hlthaff.2016.1315
Keywords
-
Funding
- Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) [U01 HD086861, R01 HD08601301]
- Global Obesity Prevention Center at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health [U54HD070725]
- Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality [R01HS023317]
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Increasing physical activity among children is a potentially important public health intervention. Quantifying the economic and health effects of the intervention would help decision makers understand its impact and priority. Using a computational simulation model that we developed to represent all US children ages 8-11 years, we estimated that maintaining the current physical activity levels (only 31.9 percent of children get twenty-five minutes of high-calorie-burning physical activity three times a week) would result each year in a net present value of $1.1 trillion in direct medical costs and $1.7 trillion in lost productivity over the course of their lifetimes. If 50 percent of children would exercise, the number of obese and overweight youth would decrease by 4.18 percent, averting $8.1 billion in direct medical costs and $13.8 billion in lost productivity. Increasing the proportion of children who exercised to 75 percent would avert $16.6 billion and $23.6 billion, respectively.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available