Health economic aspects of childhood excess weight
Publications:
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Health Economic Aspects of Childhood Excess Weight: A Structured Review
Journal article
Onyimadu O. et al, (2022), Children, 9
Approximately 380 million children worldwide are estimated to be overweight or obese. In England, approximately one in five children are obese by the time they enter adolescence and excess weight tracks into adulthood.
Being overweight is associated with significant negative consequences for children's physical health, social and emotional well-being, self-esteem, academic performance and health-related quality of life. The economic consequences of excess weight in childhood are less well understood, but limited evidence suggests that it may result in significantly increased costs to health services, other sectors of the economy and to individuals.
Given finite public resources, it is important to assess the cost-effectiveness of interventions to prevent or treat obesity. However, one of the challenges in conducting economic evaluations in this area is the paucity of data on the economic consequences of excess weight through various stages of childhood, adolescence and beyond.
This DPhil project aims to enhance knowledge about the economic consequences of excess weight in childhood and to develop an economic framework for assessing the cost-effectiveness of interventions aimed at its prevention or the alleviation of its effects. The DPhil Project involves:
- Conducting a literature review of economic aspects of childhood obesity, which will cover evidence on resource use, costs, health utilities (preference-based health-related quality of life outcomes) and cost-effectiveness of intervention strategies.
- Primary research on the economic consequences of childhood obesity, based on evidence from QResearch, the UK’s largest anonymised medical research database that includes patient linked primary care and hospital records tracked over the past 25 years.
- Development of a UK micro-simulation model for body weight in childhood and later health and economic outcomes. The model will be informed by clinical, epidemiological and economic data extracted from the QResearch database, data from external longitudinal and cross-sectional studies and data from the literature. It will ultimately be used as a standardised economic evaluation framework to aid the decisions of health care decision-makers in the UK when allocating resources in this area.
Project lead:
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Olu Onyimadu
Health Economist, DPhil Candidate
Supervisors:
Stavros Petrou, University of Oxford
Susan Jebb, University of Oxford
Julia Hippisley-Cox, University of Oxford
Dates:
October 2020 – September 2023
Funder:
National Institute for Health Research Applied Research Collaboration Oxford and Thames Valley
Our team
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Stavros Petrou
Academic Research Lead in Health Economics
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Lucy Abel
Health Economist, DPhil student
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Felix Achana
Senior Researcher in Health Economics
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Laura Armitage
Wellcome Trust Doctoral Research Fellow
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Corneliu Bolbocean
Senior Researcher in Health Economics
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Laia Bosque Mercader
Research Fellow in Health Economics
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Lin Bowker-Lonnecker
DPhil Student
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John Buckell
Researcher
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Padraig Dixon
Senior Researcher in Health Economics
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Patrick Fahr
Quantitative Researcher
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Carmen Fierro Martinez
NIHR Pre-Doctoral Fellow
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Nadeem Hussein
NIHR Pre-Doctoral Fellow
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Joseph Kwon
Researcher in Health Economics
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Sungwook Kim
Senior researcher in Health Economics
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Joan Madia
Researcher in Health Economics
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Joaquim Vidiella Martin
Researcher in Economics
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Catia Nicodemo
Senior Research Fellow in Health Economics
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Olu Onyimadu
Health Economist, DPhil Candidate
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May Png
Senior Researcher in Health Economics
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Stuart Redding
Project Lead, Centre for Health Service Economics & Organisation
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Elizabeth-Ann Schroeder
Senior Researcher in Health Economics
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Raphael Wittenberg
Deputy Director, Centre for Health Service Economics and Organisation
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Yaling Yang
Senior Researcher in Health Economics