Relationships between County Health Rankings and child overweight and obesity prevalence: a serial cross-sectional analysis

Creative Approaches for Assessing Long-term Outcomes in Children

Advances in new technologies, when incorporated into routine health screening, have tremendous promise to benefit children. The number of health screening tests, many of which have been developed with machine learning or genomics, has exploded. To assess efficacy of health screening, ideally, randomized trials of screening in youth would be conducted; however, these can take years to conduct and may not be feasible. Thus, innovative methods to evaluate the long-term outcomes of screening are needed to help clinicians and policymakers make informed decisions. These methods include using longitudinal and linked-data systems to evaluate screening in clinical and community settings, school data, simulation modeling approaches, and methods that take advantage of data available in the digital and genomic age. Future research is needed to evaluate how longitudinal and linked-data systems drawing on community and clinical settings can enable robust evaluations of the effects of screening on changes in health status. Additionally, future studies are needed to benchmark participating individuals and communities against similar counterparts and to link big data with natural experiments related to variation in screening policies. These novel approaches have great potential for identifying and addressing differences in access to screening and effectiveness of screening across population groups and communities.

Natural environment and childhood obesity: A systematic review

The associations between built and food environments and childhood obesity have been studied extensively. However, the association between the natural environment and childhood obesity has received too little scholarly attention. This study reviewed the literature published before 1 January 2019, which described associations between a full range of natural environmental factors (e.g., rainfall, temperature, sunlight, natural disasters, flood and drought) and weight-related behaviours and childhood obesity. Five cross-sectional studies and one longitudinal study were identified. Measures of natural environmental factors varied across six included studies, falling into five broad categories: weather conditions, altitude, natural disaster risk, air quality and day length. It was found that temperature was a significant weather indicator in most included studies and was associated with a reduction of daily physical activity. Children living in high-altitude areas were more likely to be shorter and heavier than their counterparts in low-altitude areas. Findings of this study will contribute to helping multiple stakeholders, including policy makers and urban planners, and formulate health policies and interventions to mitigate the detrimental impact of the natural environment on childhood obesity. More longitudinal studies should be designed to confirm these effects and explore the potential health effects of more natural environmental factors.

Uses of Population Health Rankings in Local Policy Contexts: A Multisite Case Study

Population health rankings are a common strategy to spur evidence-informed health policy making, but little is known about their uses or impacts. The study aims were to (1) understand how and why the County Health Rankings (CH-Rankings) are used in local policy contexts, (2) identify factors that influence CH-Rankings utilization, and (3) explore potentially negative impacts of the CH-Rankings. Forty-four interviews were conducted with health organization officials and public policy makers in 15 purposively selected counties. The CH-Rankings were used instrumentally to inform internal planning decisions, conceptually to educate the public and policy makers about determinants of population health, and politically to advance organizational agendas. Factors related to organizational capacity, county political ideology, and county rank influenced if, how, and why the CH-Rankings were used. The CH-Rankings sometimes had the negative impacts of promoting potentially ineffective interventions in politically conservative counties and prompting negative media coverage in some counties with poor rank.