_01.jpg)
_02.jpg)
Arnold School study of national program: Obesity levels show sharp decline when living conditions improve
December 14, 2010
An Arnold School epidemiologist is studying what environmental factors are at play when low-income families move to better living conditions and become healthier and trimmer.
With support from a National Institutes of Health grant, Dr. Natalie Colabianchi will spend the next few years reviewing environmental characteristics surrounding the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) demonstration, a project launched in 1994 by housing authorities in five U.S. cities.
The MTO project recruited about 4,600 persons from very low-income families to examine the outcomes of moving to better living conditions from their current public housing homes and neighborhoods.
The goal of MTO was to determine whether persons who moved to better neighborhoods would find improvements in outcomes such as education, employment and health compared to similar persons who did not move. Better neighborhoods were defined as neighborhoods where less than 10 percent of the people were living in poverty.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development organized MTO by randomly offering families an opportunity to move out of their neighborhoods with either: 1) housing vouchers for use in low-poverty neighborhoods only (the experimental group) or 2) vouchers for low-income Section 8 housing with no neighborhood restrictions (the Section 8 group). A third 'control' group did not receive vouchers.
Four to seven years into the project, the prevalence of obesity among adults in the families of the experimental group (i.e., those who moved to the low poverty neighborhoods) was 11 percentage points lower compared to the control group.
What researchers want to know is, "Can environmental attributes of the neighborhoods explain the differences we see in the obesity levels?" said Colabianchi. "A key element of our study is the fact that participants were randomized into the three groups. There are a number of individual attributes that influence body weight. Since we are working with a group of participants that have been randomized, we can operate from the assumption that individual attributes that influence body weight are similar across these groups, at least at baseline.
"This allows us to focus on the environmental attributes around their homes as a likely reason for why there are differences in obesity levels at follow up," she said. "One of the factors we will be examining is food availability. Was the availability of a grocery store nearby enabling people to eat healthier? We're also going to be doing an analysis of food pricing."
Additionally, the $1 million, three-year RO1 study will review residents' access to physical activity facilities such as parks and whether the neighborhoods have characteristics that encourage people to walk.
Researchers also will look at land use, residential density, crime statistics and census data, Colabianchi said.
Co-investigators on the study include Arnold School colleague Dr. Dwayne Porter, head of the Department of Environmental Health Science; Dr. Claudia Coulton of Case Western Reserve University; Dr. Mickey Lauria of Clemson University and Dr. Robert Kaestner of the National Bureau of Economics.
Colabianchi's research interests have centered on social epidemiology, physical activity epidemiology, and adolescent health.
