Analysing the effect of public health campaigns on reducing excess weight: A modelling approach for the Spanish Autonomous Region of the Community of Valencia

Abstract

Excess Weight is becoming a serious health concern that is increasing in developed and developing countries. Public health authorities are worried about it and develop health communication campaigns to inform the population the health problems that may be derived from excess weight and change their nutritional behaviour. Recent studies determine that the average health campaign affects the intervention community by about 5%. The aim of this paper is to quantify the effect of different health campaigns on the population over the next few years changing the dietary behaviour and, consequently, reducing the weight of a significant number of people. This study is based on recent works that consider excess weight as a consequence of the transmission of unhealthy lifestyles from one individual to another. Under this point of view a model is presented and policies based on communication health campaigns addressed to avoid people gaining weight (prevention) and policies addressed to excess weight individuals for reducing their weight (treatment) are simulated in order to evaluate their effectiveness. The study concludes that preventive strategies are more effective than the treatment ones.

Modelling the dynamics of the students’ academic performance in the German region of the North Rhine-Westphalia: an epidemiological approach with uncertainty

“…The predictions of the academic results using confidence intervals could be compared with the real ones corresponding to the new curriculum in order to evaluate if the change has been as good as expected. Our work goes along the line of other studies based on social problems using typeepidemiological mathematical models such as obesity [6], shopaholism [7], spread of ideas [8], and so on.…”

Modeling Social Transmission Dynamics of Unhealthy Behaviors for Evaluating Prevention and Treatment Interventions on Childhood Obesity

“…Social Transmission Rates. The adult-to-adult social transmission rate, b AA , was identified from numerical simulations reported from a study in Spain [29]. This value was used to define an appropriate range for sensitivity analysis for our research.…”

“…Other researchers have used mathematical models to understand the growth of obesity via social transmission [26,[29][30][31]. Evangelista et al [30] used peer pressure to become a fast food eater as a parameter in a model to simulate changes in overweight and obesity rates.…”

“…We built a stock and flow diagram to model the underlying structure, and governing equations of the model were adapted from previous models [26,[29][30][31]. The stock and flow diagram indicates stocks of normal, overweight, and obese adults and children respectively with flows in-between ( Figure 2).…”

“…For our research we build upon several models that use mathematical and system dynamics methodologies to consider excess weight as a consequence of the transmission of unhealthy lifestyles from one individual to another [26,[29][30][31]; however, to our knowledge no models have simultaneously accounted for peer and adult transmission of behaviors for childhood overweight and obesity.…”