| 1. |
- Lind, Lars, et al.
(författare)
-
Heterogeneous contributions of change in population distribution of body mass index to change in obesity and underweight NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC)
- 2021
-
Ingår i: eLife. - : eLife Sciences Publications Ltd. - 2050-084X. ; 10
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- From 1985 to 2016, the prevalence of underweight decreased, and that of obesity and severe obesity increased, in most regions, with significant variation in the magnitude of these changes across regions. We investigated how much change in mean body mass index (BMI) explains changes in the prevalence of underweight, obesity, and severe obesity in different regions using data from 2896 population-based studies with 187 million participants. Changes in the prevalence of underweight and total obesity, and to a lesser extent severe obesity, are largely driven by shifts in the distribution of BMI, with smaller contributions from changes in the shape of the distribution. In East and Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, the underweight tail of the BMI distribution was left behind as the distribution shifted. There is a need for policies that address all forms of malnutrition by making healthy foods accessible and affordable, while restricting unhealthy foods through fiscal and regulatory restrictions.
|
|
| 2. |
- Bixby, H., et al.
(författare)
-
Rising rural body-mass index is the main driver of the global obesity epidemic in adults
- 2019
-
Ingår i: Nature. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 0028-0836 .- 1476-4687. ; 569:7755, s. 260-4
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Body-mass index (BMI) has increased steadily in most countries in parallel with a rise in the proportion of the population who live in cities(.)(1,2) This has led to a widely reported view that urbanization is one of the most important drivers of the global rise in obesity(3-6). Here we use 2,009 population-based studies, with measurements of height and weight in more than 112 million adults, to report national, regional and global trends in mean BMI segregated by place of residence (a rural or urban area) from 1985 to 2017. We show that, contrary to the dominant paradigm, more than 55% of the global rise in mean BMI from 1985 to 2017-and more than 80% in some low- and middle-income regions-was due to increases in BMI in rural areas. This large contribution stems from the fact that, with the exception of women in sub-Saharan Africa, BMI is increasing at the same rate or faster in rural areas than in cities in low- and middle-income regions. These trends have in turn resulted in a closing-and in some countries reversal-of the gap in BMI between urban and rural areas in low- and middle-income countries, especially for women. In high-income and industrialized countries, we noted a persistently higher rural BMI, especially for women. There is an urgent need for an integrated approach to rural nutrition that enhances financial and physical access to healthy foods, to avoid replacing the rural undernutrition disadvantage in poor countries with a more general malnutrition disadvantage that entails excessive consumption of low-quality calories.
|
|
| 3. |
- Mishra, A, et al.
(författare)
-
Diminishing benefits of urban living for children and adolescents' growth and development
- 2023
-
Ingår i: Nature. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 1476-4687 .- 0028-0836. ; 615:7954, s. 874-883
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Optimal growth and development in childhood and adolescence is crucial for lifelong health and well-being1–6. Here we used data from 2,325 population-based studies, with measurements of height and weight from 71 million participants, to report the height and body-mass index (BMI) of children and adolescents aged 5–19 years on the basis of rural and urban place of residence in 200 countries and territories from 1990 to 2020. In 1990, children and adolescents residing in cities were taller than their rural counterparts in all but a few high-income countries. By 2020, the urban height advantage became smaller in most countries, and in many high-income western countries it reversed into a small urban-based disadvantage. The exception was for boys in most countries in sub-Saharan Africa and in some countries in Oceania, south Asia and the region of central Asia, Middle East and north Africa. In these countries, successive cohorts of boys from rural places either did not gain height or possibly became shorter, and hence fell further behind their urban peers. The difference between the age-standardized mean BMI of children in urban and rural areas was <1.1 kg m–2 in the vast majority of countries. Within this small range, BMI increased slightly more in cities than in rural areas, except in south Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and some countries in central and eastern Europe. Our results show that in much of the world, the growth and developmental advantages of living in cities have diminished in the twenty-first century, whereas in much of sub-Saharan Africa they have amplified.
|
|
| 4. |
|
|
| 5. |
|
|
| 6. |
|
|
| 7. |
- Taddei, C, et al.
(författare)
-
Repositioning of the global epicentre of non-optimal cholesterol
- 2020
-
Ingår i: Nature. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 1476-4687 .- 0028-0836. ; 582:7810, s. 73-
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- High blood cholesterol is typically considered a feature of wealthy western countries1,2. However, dietary and behavioural determinants of blood cholesterol are changing rapidly throughout the world3 and countries are using lipid-lowering medications at varying rates. These changes can have distinct effects on the levels of high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol and non-HDL cholesterol, which have different effects on human health4,5. However, the trends of HDL and non-HDL cholesterol levels over time have not been previously reported in a global analysis. Here we pooled 1,127 population-based studies that measured blood lipids in 102.6 million individuals aged 18 years and older to estimate trends from 1980 to 2018 in mean total, non-HDL and HDL cholesterol levels for 200 countries. Globally, there was little change in total or non-HDL cholesterol from 1980 to 2018. This was a net effect of increases in low- and middle-income countries, especially in east and southeast Asia, and decreases in high-income western countries, especially those in northwestern Europe, and in central and eastern Europe. As a result, countries with the highest level of non-HDL cholesterol—which is a marker of cardiovascular risk—changed from those in western Europe such as Belgium, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and Malta in 1980 to those in Asia and the Pacific, such as Tokelau, Malaysia, The Philippines and Thailand. In 2017, high non-HDL cholesterol was responsible for an estimated 3.9 million (95% credible interval 3.7 million–4.2 million) worldwide deaths, half of which occurred in east, southeast and south Asia. The global repositioning of lipid-related risk, with non-optimal cholesterol shifting from a distinct feature of high-income countries in northwestern Europe, north America and Australasia to one that affects countries in east and southeast Asia and Oceania should motivate the use of population-based policies and personal interventions to improve nutrition and enhance access to treatment throughout the world.
|
|
| 8. |
- Cohen, Joel E., et al.
(författare)
-
Body sizes of hosts and parasitoids in individual feeding relationships
- 2005
-
Ingår i: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. - : National Academy of Sciences. - 0027-8424 .- 1091-6490. ; 102:3, s. 684-689
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In a natural community of 49 species (12 species of aphids and 37 species of their parasitoids), body lengths of 2,151 parasitoid individuals were, to an excellent approximation, related to the body lengths of their individual aphid hosts by a power law with an exponent close to 3/4. Two alternative models predict this exponent. One is based on surface area to volume relationships. The other is based on recent developments in metabolic ecology. Both models require a changing ratio (in both host and parasitoid) of length to diameter with increasing body length. These changing ratios are manifested differently in the two models and result in testably different predictions for the scaling of body form with increasing size. The estimated exponent of 3/4 for the relationship between individual host body size and individual parasitoid body size degrades to an exponent of nearly 1/2, and the scatter in the relationship between aphid and parasitoid body length is substantially increased, if the average length of a parasitoid species is examined as a function of the average length of its aphid host species instead of using measurements of individuals.allometry | aphids | development | metabolism | weight–length relationsExplaining the size of organisms is an enduring challenge to ecologists and evolutionary biologists (1, 2) to cellular and developmental biologists (3). Ecological studies of the relationship between consumer and resource body sizes (4–8) usually assume that the average body size of a species is an adequate approximation to the size of the individuals taking part in a particular trophic interaction. However, individuals of different size within one resource species may be selectively consumed by different consumer species or individuals of different size within a given consumer species. Vice versa, individuals of different size within one consumer species may selectively consume resource species of different average size or individuals of different size within a given resource species. To understand the relationship between consumer and resource body sizes, it is important that the data correctly represent the body sizes of the consumers and resources involved in the trophic interactions. What are the consequences of focusing on body sizes of consumer and resource individuals vs. average sizes of taxonomic species for understanding feeding relations in natural communities? To answer this question, here we report quantitative field data on body sizes in individual events of parasitism.Animal consumers are often considerably larger than their prey (4), whereas parasites and pathogens are generally much smaller than their resources (5). Solitary insect parasitoids that complete their larval development on or in the body of other living insects, and require just a single host to complete development, lie between these extremes: they are often similar in size to their insect hosts. Parasitoid and host body sizes are well suited to shed light on the role of individual differences in consumer-resource body size relations because the variations in both parasitoid and host body sizes are likely to be of comparable magnitude.Parasitoids are important components of all terrestrial ecological communities. Probably 1–2 million species are parasitoids (9), and they are thus a significant fraction of all species on this planet. As potentially important regulators of their host populations, parasitoids are intensively used in biological control (10). Most prior studies of the body sizes of hosts and parasitoids consider only a single species of host. The few studies (11–14) that consider host–parasitoid size relationships of multiple species have only one data point per species.We studied quantitatively the relationship between final individual aphid host and parasitoid body length in a natural aphid-parasitoid community with multiple species of hosts and parasitoids. The objectives of the study were to (i) describe the relationship between final aphid host and parasitoid body size, (ii) analyze the consequences of focusing on body sizes of consumer and resource individuals vs. average sizes of taxonomic species for the apparent relationship between final aphid host and parasitoid body size, and (iii) offer two alternative explanations for the relationship between final aphid host and parasitoid body size. We hope that future studies will discriminate between these alternative explanations.
|
|
| 9. |
- Van Dijk, Willeke, et al.
(författare)
-
The Effect of Mechanical Massage and Mental Training on Heart Rate Variability and Cortisol in Swedish Employees : A Randomized Explorative Pilot Study
- 2020
-
Ingår i: Frontiers in Public Health. - : Frontiers Media S.A.. - 2296-2565. ; 8
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Work-related stress is relatively common in modern society and is a major cause of sick-leave. Thus, effective stress reducing interventions are needed. This study examined the effects of mental training and mechanical massage, on employee's heart rate variability (HRV) and plasma cortisol at their workplaces. Moreover, it was investigated whether baseline systolic blood pressure (SBP) can explain differences in effectiveness of the intervention. Ninety-three participants from four workplaces were randomly assigned to one of the five programs: (I) Mechanical massage and mental training combined, II) Mechanical massage, III) Mental training, IV) Pause, or V) Control. HRV and plasma cortisol were measured at baseline and after 4 and 8 weeks. SBP was measured at baseline. On the reduction of cortisol levels, a small effect of the mechanical massage program was found, whereas no effect was found for the other programs. None of the programs showed any effect on HRV. Nonetheless, when the level of systolic blood pressure was taken into account, some small beneficial effects on HRV and cortisol of mental training and the mechanical massage were found. This exploratory pilot-study provides useful information for future studies that aim to reduce stress among employees.
|
|
