Supervisors

Jenna Panter, Jean Adams, David Ogilvie, Thomas Burgoine

Programme

Population Health Interventions

Summary

People’s physical and social environments affect behaviours and these in turn affect chronic diseases. Environments may be more or less supportive for diet, physical activity or both, and environmental features may be spatially clustered. However, most research has not considered potential interactions between food and activity environment exposures. Our recent work exploring this in the Fenland cohort (a cohort of 12,000 adults aged 30-55 living in Cambridgeshire who have been followed up in three waves since 2005) found a stronger protective effect against adiposity of living in a ‘highly walkable and low fast-food’ neighbourhood than for either exposure alone. More systematic consideration of such joint exposures may help identify the synergistic or antagonistic mechanisms they trigger and how these are moderated by context (e.g. wealthier households may be buffered from adverse environments if they can afford healthier foods or private sports facilities).

This student could, for example: conduct detailed analyses of the neighbourhoods identified as ‘highly walkable, low fast-food’ or the converse to understand the types of environments participants experience; develop a more multidimensional measure capturing, for example, exposure to green space, sports facilities and fast food outlets; and develop and test mechanistic hypotheses using cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses, e.g. that increasing both green space and sports facility provision serves the needs of different socioeconomic groups and thereby promotes more equitable health benefits, particularly where complemented by greater accessibility of healthier food.

If you are interested in this topic, please contact Jean Adams in the first instance.