Health Affairs Activity In The United States Modeling The Economic And Health Impact Of Increasing Children ' s Physical

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. R ising rates of obesity among children have caught the attention of many health care providers and health officials, leading to an increased focus on children’s diet and physical activity. Only 31.9 percent of children are “active to a healthy level” as defined by theSports andFitness IndustryAssociation (performing twenty-five minutes of high-calorieburning physical activity three times a week). From a policy perspective, however, without knowing the current physical activity landscape in children and the potential impact of increasing the number of children who meet the guidelines, policymakers and fundersmight not know where a strategy to increase children’s physical activity should rank among many competing priorities. Quantifying the resulting economic and health benefit would help decision makers understand the impact and priority of such a strategy. Quantifying this impact can be challenging. Although physical activity has immediate benefits such as improvedmood,much of the impact occurs in the future, throughout a person’s lifetime. The benefits include reducing the risk of obesity and associated chronic diseases, such as coronary heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. While helping manage weight is certainly not the only health benefit of physical activity, its potential to reduce obesity and overweight prevalence alonemakes increasing physical activity a potentially important public health intervention. To capture all of theseweight-related downstream effects, we developed a computational simulation model that represents the current population of US children and shows how changes in levels of physical activity could affect them throughout their lifetime, and the resulting economic impact. doi: 10.1377/hlthaff.2016.1315

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