Walkability indices and childhood obesity: A review of epidemiologic evidence

Abstract

Summary The lack of an active neighbourhood living environment can impact community health to a great extent. One such impact manifests in walkability, a measure of urban design in connecting places and facilitating physical activity. Although a low level of walkability is generally considered to be a risk factor for childhood obesity, this association has not been established in obesity research. To further examine this association, we conducted a literature search on PubMed, Web of Science and Scopus for articles published until 31 December 2018. The included literature examined the association between measures of walkability (e.g., walkability score and walkability index) and weight‐related behaviours and/or outcomes among children aged under 18 years. A total of 13 studies conducted in seven countries were identified, including 12 cross‐sectional studies and one longitudinal study. The sample size ranged from 98 to 37 460, with a mean of 4971 ± 10 618, and the age of samples ranged from 2 to 18. Eight studies reported that a higher level of walkability was associated with active lifestyles and healthy weight status, which was not supported by five studies. In addition to reviewing the state‐of‐the‐art of applications of walkability indices in childhood obesity studies, this study also provides guidance on when and how to use walkability indices in future obesity‐related research.

Identifying Communities at Risk for COVID-19–Related Burden Across 500 US Cities and Within New York City: Unsupervised Learning of the Coprevalence of Health Indicators

“…Although it could be argued that the deep learning analysis of satellite imagery is simply a measurement of population density, this approach also measures several other factors that may contribute to COVID-19 infection and death rates independent of population density, such as built environment features that contribute to the development of COVID-19 risk factors and features that may put individuals at risk of contracting COVID-19. Examples of features that may put individuals at risk for developing risk factors include walkability (which contributes to obesity [48]) and road proximity (which can increase risk for heart disease [49]). Additionally certain architectural and built environment features that might put individuals at risk of COVID-19 infection, such as the configuration of pedestrian traffic in an urban area [50], can be partly quantified with this approach.…”

Relación cuantitativa entre atropellamientos y puentes peatonales en Chihuahua, México

“…Un creciente número de estudios han utilizado distintas metodologías y descriptores para evaluar la caminabilidad de un entorno. En la actualidad existen aproximaciones basadas en sistemas de información geográfica, los cuales emplean métricas basadas en áreas -como la densidad de restaurantes, minoristas de alimentos y características ambientales construidas dentro de unidades estadísticas (distritos censales y zonas postales) (Yang et al, 2021)-. De igual manera, se pueden emplear métricas basadas en redes, considerando la caminabilidad como una medida de accesibilidad a servicios cercanos (como el transporte público o centros educativos) desde ubicaciones residenciales o lugares de trabajo (D'Orso y Migliore, 2020; Yitzhaki, 1983).…”

The Modified Normalized Urban Area Composite Index: A Satelliate-Derived High-Resolution Index for Extracting Urban Areas

“…Moreover, the MNUACI has a higher spatial resolution than the previous DMSP/OLS-and NPP-VIIRS-based indexes by using NTL data from the Luojia 1-01 NTL satellite, designed and developed by Wuhan University in China, which has started providing nighttime imagery with a finer resolution of 130 m since 2018. The MNUACI would be useful for a wide array of urban studies, such as urban population health [25], urban spatial structure [26], and energy carbon emissions [27], where such an index has been urgently demanded.…”