ArticleTheoretical biology & medical modelling2013
Modeling the obesity epidemic: social contagion and its implications for control.
Article in Theoretical biology & medical modelling, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
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8 citing papers in PubMed, 38 citations in OpenAlex.
- Survey on mathematical modeling of infectious disease dynamics: insights and applications.BMC infectious diseases · 2026Review
- Dynamic Empirically Based Model for Understanding Future Trends in US Obesity Prevalence in the Context of Social Influences.Obesity (Silver Spring, Md.) · 2019Article
- A Mathematical Model for Predicting Obesity Transmission with Both Genetic and Nongenetic Heredity.Obesity (Silver Spring, Md.) · 2018Article
- Modeling the Diet Dynamics of Children: the Roles of Socialization and the School Environment.Letters in biomathematics · 2018Article
- The statistical mechanics of human weight change.PloS one · 2017Article
- Perceived vulnerability to disease and antifat attitudes in a sample of children and teenagers.Eating and weight disorders : EWD · 2015Article
- Modeling and calibration for exposure to time-varying, modifiable risk factors: the example of smoking behavior in India.Medical decision making : an international journal of the Society for Medical Decision Making · 2015Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundAs an obesity epidemic has grown worldwide, a variety of intervention programs have been considered, but a scientific approach to comparatively assessing the control programs has still to be considered. The present study aims to describe an obesity epidemic by employing a simple mathematical model that accounts for both social contagion and non-contagious hazards of obesity, thereby comparing the effectiveness of different types of interventions.
methodsAn epidemiological model is devised to describe the time- and age-dependent risk of obesity, the hazard of which is dealt with as both dependent on and independent of obesity prevalence, and parameterizing the model using empirically observed data. The equilibrium prevalence is investigated as our epidemiological outcome, assessing its sensitivity to different parameters that regulate the impact of intervention programs and qualitatively comparing the effectiveness. We compare the effectiveness of different types of interventions, including those directed to never-obese individuals (i.e. primary prevention) and toward obese and ex-obese individuals (i.e. secondary prevention).
resultsThe optimal choice of intervention programs considerably varies with the transmission coefficient of obesity, and a limited transmissibility led us to favour preventing weight gain among never-obese individuals. An abrupt decline in the prevalence is expected when the hazards of obesity through contagious and non-contagious routes fall into a particular parameter space, with a high sensitivity to the transmission potential of obesity from person to person. When a combination of two control strategies can be selected, primary and secondary preventions yielded similar population impacts and the superiority of the effectiveness depends on the strength of the interventions at an individual level.
conclusionsThe optimality of intervention programs depends on the contagiousness of obesity. Filling associated data gaps of obesity transmission would help systematically understand the epidemiological dynamics and consider required control programs.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.