Increased Physical Activity for Kids Would Have Health and Economic Benefits
If half of U.S. children 8 to 11 years old got the recommended amount of physical activity, the proportion of children who are overweight or obese would decrease by 4 percent, according to new research funded partially by AHRQ. This would save $8 billion in annual medical costs associated with obesity-related conditions, researchers concluded. Having this same 50 percent of kids receive the recommended amount of exercise would also avert approximately $14 billion in annual lost productivity costs over their lifetimes, researchers concluded. The article in the May issue of Health Affairs estimated that only 32 percent of children currently get recommended amount of exercise, which consists of 25 minutes of high-calorie-burning physical activity three times a week. The study authors concluded that increasing children’s physical activity should be a higher national priority, in part because possible savings substantially outweigh the costs of interventions promoting increased physical activity. Access the abstract.
Modeling The Economic And Health Impact Of Increasing Children’s Physical Activity In The United States
- Bruce Y. Lee1,*,
- Atif Adam2,
- Eli Zenkov3,
- Daniel Hertenstein4,
- Marie C. Ferguson5,
- Peggy I. Wang6,
- Michelle S. Wong7,
- Patrick Wedlock8,
- Sindiso Nyathi9,
- Joel Gittelsohn10,
- Saeideh Falah-Fini11,
- Sarah M. Bartsch12,
- Lawrence J. Cheskin13 and
- Shawn T. Brown14
+Author Affiliations
- ↵*Corresponding author
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 $8.1 billion in direct medical costs and $13.8 billion in lost productivity. Increasing the proportion of children who exercised to 75 percent would avert $16.6 billion and $23.6 billion, respectively.
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