Children living in urban areas with high levels of air pollution, noise and traffic may be at higher risk of childhood obesity, according to a study by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal)—a centre supported by the ”la Caixa” Foundation—and the University Institute for Primary Care Research Jordi Gol (IDIAP Jordi Gol). The study was funded by the La Marató de TV3 Foundation.
Children living in urban areas with high levels of air pollution, noise and traffic may be at higher risk of childhood obesity, according to a study by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal)—a centre supported by the ”la Caixa” Foundation—and the University Institute for Primary Care Research Jordi Gol (IDIAP Jordi Gol). The study was funded by the La Marató de TV3 Foundation.
Published in Environment International, the study analysed data on 2,213 children aged 9 to 12 years in the city of Sabadell (Barcelona) who were participating in the ECHOCAT and INMA projects. Forty percent of the children were overweight or obese. The researchers investigated the association between urban factors that the children were exposed to between October 2017 and January 2019 (ambient air pollution, green spaces, built environment, density of unhealthy food establishments, road traffic and road traffic noise) and various measures of childhood obesity (body mass index, waist circumference and body fat) and weight-related behaviours (fast food and sugar-sweetened beverage consumption, physical activity, sedentary behaviour, sleep duration and well-being).
To date, few studies have assessed whether the urban environment influences children’s behaviours in order to better understand the relationship between this environment and the risk of childhood obesity. An understanding of the mechanisms of this relationship will facilitate the development of community-level health promotion programmes to encourage healthier behaviours in the city. Another novel aspect of this study is that it assessed multiple urban exposures together, in accordance with the concept of exposome or the study of multiple simultaneous environmental factors.
Read more at: Barcelona Institute for Global Health
