American journal of preventive medicine
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Although having a greater number of neighborhood parks may be associated with greater overall physical activity in children, information is lacking about the extent to which children actually use parks for physical activity. ⋯ Although children's use of neighborhood parks was generally low, it increased substantially when parks were closer to children's homes and had greater vegetation density.
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Crowdsourcing is an online, distributed, problem-solving, and production model that uses the collective intelligence of networked communities for specific purposes. Although its use has benefited many sectors of society, it has yet to be fully realized as a method for improving public health. This paper defines the core components of crowdsourcing and proposes a framework for understanding the potential utility of crowdsourcing in the domain of public health. Four discrete crowdsourcing approaches are described (knowledge discovery and management; distributed human intelligence tasking; broadcast search; and peer-vetted creative production types) and a number of potential applications for crowdsourcing for public health science and practice are enumerated.
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Observational Study
Sedentary behavior and mortality in older women: the Women's Health Initiative.
Although epidemiologic studies have shown associations between sedentary behavior and mortality, few have focused on older women with adequate minority representation and few have controlled for both physical activity and functional status. ⋯ There was a linear relationship between greater amounts of sedentary time and mortality risk after controlling for multiple potential confounders.
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Preventing obesity requires maintenance of healthy eating behaviors over time. Food labels and strategies that increase visibility and convenience of healthy foods (choice architecture) promote healthier choices, but long-term effectiveness is unknown. ⋯ A traffic-light and choice architecture cafeteria intervention resulted in sustained healthier choices over 2 years, suggesting that food environment interventions can promote long-term changes in population eating behaviors.
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Characterizing the smoking patterns for different birth cohorts is essential for evaluating the impact of tobacco control interventions and predicting smoking-related mortality, but the process of estimating birth cohort smoking histories has received limited attention. ⋯ A novel method of generating smoking histories has been applied to develop smoking histories that can be used in micro-simulation models, and has been incorporated in the National Cancer Institute's Smoking History Generator. These aggregate estimates developed by age, gender, and cohort will provide a complete source of smoking data over time.