## REMINDER ## THIS WEDNESDAY ## REMINDER ## Dear all, On Wednesday 17th March, the RSS Leeds/Bradford local group will be hosting an afternoon of talks on "Statistics and obesity" featuring Kimberley Edwards (University of Leeds), Andy Sutherland (NHS IC) and Claire Griffiths (Leeds Metropolitan University). The meeting will be held at Leeds Metropolitan University Civic Quarter (City Site) in the Rose Bowl (Lecture Theatre F) between 2pm and 5pm, with a break for refreshments around 3.30pm. Refreshments will also be available from 1.30pm. For directions see: http://www.leedsmet.ac.uk/metoffice/estateservices/transport/ Further details can be found on our webpage: http://tinyurl.com/rss-lba Regards, Paul =================================================================== Dr. Paul D. Baxter Secretary/Treasurer, RSS Leeds/Bradford Local Group, Division of Biostatistics, University of Leeds, Leeds, LS2 9JT, UK. ------------------------------------------------------------------- Leeds/Bradford: Wednesday 17 March, 2.00pm, Leeds Metropolitan University. Statistics and obesity Andy Sutherland and Paul Eastwood (Information Centre for Health and Social Care) The shape of the nation: NHS statistics on obesity From surveys measuring Body Mass Index and waist circumference, and collections on children's height and weight to how obesity is linked to lifestyle habits, the risks of developing diseases due to obesity and hospital admissions and prescribing, the NHS has a wealth of information on this subject. Kimberley Edwards (University of Leeds) Spatial microsimulation modeling to estimate small area data: childhood obesity and the environment Obesogenic environments are a major explanation for the rapidly increasing prevalence in obesity. Investigating the relationship between obesity and obesogenic variables at the micro-level will increase our understanding about local differences in risk factors for obesity. Spatial microsimulation models can be used to estimate previously unknown data at the micro-level. SimObesity is a spatial microsimulation model designed to create micro-level estimates of obesogenic environment variables in Leeds: consisting of a plethora of health, environment, and socio-economic variables. It combines individual micro-data from two national surveys with a coarse geography, with geographically finer scaled data from the 2001 Census, using a reweighting deterministic algorithm. This creates a synthetic population of individuals / households in Leeds with attributes from both the survey and census datasets. Logistic regression analyses were used to identify the covariates that were the strongest predictors of the output variables and these were used as the model input variables. The model is validated using linear regression and equal variance t-tests. Height, weight, age, gender, and residential postcode data were collected on children aged 3 to 13 years in the Leeds metropolitan area, and obesity described as above the 98th centile for the British reference dataset. Geographically weighted regression is used to investigate the relationship between different obesogenic environments and childhood obesity. Validation shows that the small area estimates were robust. The different obesogenic environments, as well as the parameter estimates from the corresponding local regression analyses, are mapped, all of which demonstrate non-stationary relationships. These results show that social capital and poverty are strongly associated with childhood obesity (p < 0.001). This paper demonstrates a methodology to estimate health variables at the small area level. The key to this technique is the choice of the model`s input variables, which must be predictors for the output variables; this factor has not been stressed in other spatial microsimulation work. Validation of these models can be challenging and both internal and external validation should be undertaken. This paper also provides further evidence for the existence of obesogenic environments for children. Claire Griffiths (Leeds Metropolitan University) Childhood Obesity: A study of children in Leeds secondary schools Obesity is one of the most significant public health challenges facing the UK, with one in three children being affected. As a consequence of obesity children have an increased risk of developing serious health, psychological and social problems and are more likely to be obese in adulthood. The increased health risks translate into an increased burden on national health care budgets. Height, weight, age, gender, residential postcode, ethnicity and educational attainment data were collected on over 14 000 year 7 school children (aged 11-12) over a three year period (2005-2007) in Leeds. This presentation seeks to answer the question; what is the probability of a pupil being classified as overweight or obese, given his or her characteristics such as age, gender, socioeconomic status, ethnicity and previous educational attainment. This presentation employs a multilevel analysis to model overweight and obesity. Such detailed information could potentially ensure that in the future Government and public sector agencies provide appropriate levels of support and target appropriate levels of resources to those most in need. This has strong implications for clinical and public intervention and prevention programmes working to achieve local and national targets. The meeting will be held at Leeds Metropolitan University Civic Quarter (City Site) in the Rose Bowl (Lecture Theatre F) between 2pm and 5pm, with a break for refreshments around 3.30pm. Refreshments will also be available from 1.30pm. You may leave the list at any time by sending the command SIGNOFF allstat to [log in to unmask], leaving the subject line blank.