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

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.

Source: Health Affairs - May 1, 2017 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Lee, B. Y., Adam, A., Zenkov, E., Hertenstein, D., Ferguson, M. C., Wang, P. I., Wong, M. S., Wedlock, P., Nyathi, S., Gittelsohn, J., Falah-Fini, S., Bartsch, S. M., Cheskin, L. J., Brown, S. T. Tags: Health Promotion/Disease Prevention, Maternal And Child Health, Public Health, Health Spending Children ' s Health Source Type: research