Modeling The Economic And Health Impact Of Increasing Children's Physical Activity In The United States.

ABSTRACT: Increasing physical activity among children is a potentially important public health intervention. Quantifying the economic and health effects of the intervention would help decision makers understand its impact and priority. Using a computational simulation model that we developed to represent all US children ages 8-11 years, we estimated that maintaining the current physical activity levels (only 31.9 percent of children get twenty-five minutes of high-calorie-burning physical activity three times a week) would result each year in a net present value of $1.1 trillion in direct medical costs and $1.7 trillion in lost productivity over the course of their lifetimes. If 50 percent of children would exercise, the number of obese and overweight youth would decrease by 4.18 percent, averting $

SUBMITTER: Lee BY 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5563819 | biostudies-literature | 2017 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature