Modelling life trajectories of body-mass index

Sabine Vuik and Michele Cecchini
Additional contact information
Sabine Vuik: OECD
Michele Cecchini: OECD

No 132, OECD Health Working Papers from OECD Publishing

Abstract: Body-mass index (BMI) tends to follow a typical trajectory over the life-course of an individual, increasing in early life while decreasing after middle age. To be able to reflect these trends in the OECD Strategic Public Health Planning for Non-Communicable Diseases (SPHeP-NCDs) model, this paper analyses longitudinal BMI data from 22 countries to build a mixed, autoregressive model predicting an individual’s BMI based on their sex, age and previous BMI. The resulting model shows how young people are likely to see an increase in BMI year-on-year, even if they already have overweight or obesity. It also shows that that a healthy weight in childhood does not protect against future overweight, as BMI continues to increase well into adulthood even for children who start off with a healthy weight. The results of this analysis will be incorporated in the OECD SPHeP NCDs model, to better simulate the longer-term impact of interventions, in particular interventions targeting childhood obesity.

Keywords: BMI; Public Health (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I12 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-11-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1787/0425d231-en (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oec:elsaad:132-en

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in OECD Health Working Papers from OECD Publishing Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by (health.contact@oecd.org).