The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is launching two major research efforts — worth $72.5 million — to find ways to end the childhood obesity epidemic in the United States.
Battelle’s Health and Life Sciences Global Business has won a $23 million contract to study community programs for their roles in increasing or decreasing the risk of childhood obesity.
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The Columbus, Ohio, charitable trust is using the grant from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute — and its own experience in large program evaluation and community health studies — to subcontract with the likes of University of California, Berkeley, to find new ways to evaluate community-based programs for their influence on childhood obesity.
Obesity rates have increased four-fold among children in the past 40 years, the NIH says. Today, 17 percent of U.S. children and adolescents are obese.
Since the 1970s when Battelle started down the research path of understanding the childhood obesity trend, the rate of obese children and adolescents has roughly tripled.
“The need to identify the most promising approaches that communities can use to reduce the obesity epidemic is urgent,” said Howard Fishbein, Battelle’s principal investigator for the study, in a press release. “This study represents an opportunity for conducting a comprehensive and systematic evaluation of the strategies that communities across the country have initiated to prevent childhood obesity.”
The project goal is to build a platform so study partners, including the National Institutes of Health, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, can evaluate individual programs. The end-goal is to find was to prevent childhood obesity.
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The rest of the NIH research effort — $49.5 million — will launch the Childhood Obesity Prevention and Treatment Research program, which aims to be different from other childhood obesity studies. Two obesity prevention and two obesity treatment randomized clinical trials will be conducted over seven years, the NIH said in a release.
Investigators will collaborate with local, state and national organizations to test long-term interventions through several levels of influence — community youth organizations, schools, primary care providers, home and families — rather than focus solely on individual behavior, as past studies have done.
The prevention and treatment research program will be conducted at four universities and coordinated by the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (principal investigator: June Stevens):
- Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, Nashville, Tennessee (principal investigator: Dr. Shari L. Barkin)
- Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio (principal investigator: Dr. Leona Cuttler)
- Stanford University, Palo Alto, California (principal investigator: Dr. Thomas N. Robinson)
- University of Minnesota, Twin Cities (principal investigator: Simone French)
