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THEMES & PROJECTS |
ACTIVITIES |
AFFILIATIONS |
Health Processes & Aging |
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The CRAN group concentrates not only on obesity related issues in early adolescents but also looks at behavioral roots of obesity in children 3-5 years old. One of the key gaps in understanding childhood obesity is the lack of an accurate assessment of the intensity of children’s physical activity. On a project funded through this R21, MPRC associates Sandra Hofferth (Family Studies) and Natasha Cabrera (Human Development) use 24-hour diary data to determine the context of children’s physical activity and inactivity, and to examine the association between activity measures and the overweight status of children. The project has a large methodological content and aims to develop and validate new measures for physical activity and energy expenditure among youth, including the cost and effectiveness of the protocols and equipment used for these measures in large-scale studies. In related work, MPRC associate Carolyn Voorhees (Public Health) studies school- and community-based interventions to increase physical activity in adolescent girls. Currently, she participates in four projects funded by NIH, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Centers for Disease Control examining the relationship among multi-level environmental factors (individual, social and macro environment) and physical activity and obesity in adolescents. Infectious Disease and Limiting Their Spread As part of a larger NIH-funded interdisciplinary team Catherine Dibble (Geography) brings her expertise as a geographer to modeling the spread of infectious disease in the U.S. Dibble is specifically interested in predicting how the introduction of mutated Avian Flu in the U.S. that could be transmitted in humans. Her interest is in how it would spread spatially and how with limited resource public health officials could optimally respond. Using agent-based modeling, Dibble simulates the introduction of an airborne disease with the likely virulence of Avian Flu using the actual transportation hubs in place in the U.S. today. The challenge of this work is that many of the parameters such as the virulence of the disease, the point of entry and the behavioral responses to the disease are unknown. Instead of depending on one set of parameters Dibble conducts two kinds of analyses. First, she solves for the optimal intervention across cities under a wide variety of parameters. As it turns out, a recommendation of intervening in large cities regardless of the entry point of the disease holds under a wide variety of circumstances to both minimize the expected number of deaths and minimize the chances of a pandemic. Dibble also develops fast algorithms that would allow the model to be run in real time as a disease spread and parameters to be adjusted to support decision making as information on the spread of the disease is accumulated. Impact on Health of Care Systems and Social Programs MPRC associate Mark Duggan (Economics) has a series of projects that examine the impact of fast-growing federal disability insurance programs in a variety of health, economic and social outcomes. Between 1984 and 2004, a series of law changes and federal court decisions doubled the fraction of the non-elderly receiving disability insurance through either the Social Security Disability Insurance (DI) or Supplemental Security Insurance (SSI) programs. David Autor and Duggan demonstrate that a sizeable portion of the decline in the unemployment rate in the 1990s was due to unemployed workers leaving the labor market and entering federal disability insurance programs (Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2003). In a recently published paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Autor and Duggan argue that a rising retirement age in Social Security and no corresponding changes in the DI program have encouraged people to retire early though the DI program, negating much of the cost savings from the increase in the retirement age. In ongoing work funded by NICHD through the R03 mechanism, Duggan and fellow MPRC associate Melissa Kearney (Economics) are currently examining how the SSI program interacts with the more traditional welfare programs. Because benefit levels in this program are set at the national level, parents in states with low welfare benefits have an increasing incentive to enroll in the SSI program. In this project, Duggan and Kearney look at the impact of expansions in the SSI program on child poverty and parental labor supply. Health Transitions and Disability in Old Age MPRC Associate Director Rebeca Wong (Sociology) continues her NIA-funded work on aging, health and well-being in Latin American populations with collaborator Alberto Palloni from the University of Wisconsin. This work draws heavily on cross-national comparisons based on newly available household survey data produced partly by these investigators. They examine patterns, transitions and determinants of health status and disability in a comparative framework within urban areas in seven countries of the Latin American and Caribbean region. This thematic emphasis resulted in a 2006 special volume of the Journal of Aging and Health, devoted to health of Hispanic and Latin-American elderly, edited by Alberto Palloni, Martha Peláez and Rebeca Wong. This research confirms patterns of socioeconomic gradients of health that had been previously reported for developed countries only, and that can be examined in population-based studies in Latin America. Another finding is the importance of diabetes among the elderly in the region, which may be an early indicator of higher rates of future disability. |
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Maryland Population Research Center
0124N Cole Student Activities Building (#162)
College Park, MD 20742
Phone: 301-405-6403
Fax: 301-405-5743