The impact of childhood obesity on human capital in high‐income countries: A systematic review

Abstract

Summary Current evidence of the impact of childhood obesity on human capital development does not point in a consistent direction, and its interpretation is challenging. We carried out a systematic review of studies from high‐income countries that used robust causal inference approaches to assess the impact of childhood overweight and obesity on outcomes typically linked to human capital development in economics. Global Health, Medline and EconLit were used to search for peer‐reviewed papers. Three reviewers independently assessed study quality using the Newcastle‐Ottawa Scale. Nineteen papers representing 22 studies met the inclusion criteria. Included studies were categorized based on three components of human capital: cognitive performance (n = 18), measured through test scores; educational attainment (n = 3), through grade progression and college completion; and labour market outcomes (n = 1), through wages. We find that childhood overweight and obesity hinder education outcomes, with effects mostly observed at older ages of exposure measurement (12+ years). Girls with overweight and obesity experienced larger negative effects and more often than boys. Future research should elucidate the pathways through which childhood obesity impacts human capital development, to support policies that may mitigate those impacts, thus averting social costs that are currently widespread, increasing and unaccounted for.

Common health conditions in childhood and adolescence, school absence, and educational attainment: Mendelian randomization study

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How to tackle childhood obesity? Evidence and policy implications from a STOP series of systematic reviews

“…Combining height and BMI changes, girls in South Korea, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and some central Asian countries (e.g., Armenia and Azerbaijan), and boys in central and western Europe (e.g., Portugal, Denmark, Poland, and Montenegro) had the healthiest changes in anthropometric status over the past 3·5 decades 3 . Childhood overweight and obesity are clear precursors of the same conditions in adult life, but their detrimental impacts on children's human capital formation, which have become increasingly visible in the latest generations, are likely to be a cause of social, as well as health, disadvantage throughout the life course 4 …”

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“…RoB assessment procedures. [35][36][37] Abstract and title screening were conducted using the reference managing software, Rayyan. 38 39 An adapted Newcastle-Ottawa RoB tool was used for nonrandomised studies.…”