Dr. Zhenlong Li received a new grant from the Social, Behavioral, & Economic COVID Coordinating Center (SBE CCC) at the University of Michigan to investigate the geographic and racial disparities of COVID-19 impact on obesity-related behaviors using cellphone-based place visitation data. The project team also includes Drs. Andrew T Kaczynski, Shan Qiao, Bankole Olatosi, Jiajia Zhang, and Xiaoming Li from Arnold School of Public Health.
Project overview: Obesity is a predictor of multiple negative health outcomes, including type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease, hypertension, various cancers, and premature death. In addition, obesity significantly affects quality of life and is bidirectionally associated with many mental illnesses including mood and anxiety disorders. Today, nearly two-thirds of US adults are overweight or obese, and one out of three is obese or morbidly obese. Examining the changes of obesity-related behaviors across different stages of the COVID-19 pandemic across changes by race/ethnicity and geolocation is important to better understand the impact of the pandemic on the obesity epidemic in the US. This study will investigate the changes of obesity-related behaviors during the pandemic using cellphone-based place visitation data for the entire US with the two specific aims: Aim 1: Quantify the visitation changes to the places that are relevant to obesity-related behaviors (i.e., physical activity, healthy and less healthy food choices) during the early-stage (2020) and later-stage (2021) of the pandemic at the Census tract level across US. The places include restaurants, fitness centers, recreation parks, and grocery stores identified using the North American Industry Classification System. Aim 2: Analyze the geographic disparities of the visitation changes derived in Aim 1 by examining the spatial distribution of the changes across US. Analyze the racial disparities of the changes using multivariate regression by integrating demographic and social determinants of health factors. Findings of this study will inform evidence-based policy making and strategies for reducing obesity disparities in terms of resource allocation and prevention interventions efforts in the context of the pandemic.
