1. State your health outcome of interest. (It could be the one you used for week #2 or another one.) Pick two key behaviors that are important factors leading to your health outcome. Explain the importance of these behaviors either for etiology, prevention, or intervention. (If none of the behaviors in the readings are important for your health outcome, suggest another behavior that is.)
Health outcome: ADHD (in children)
Exercise/Physical Activity: multiple research studies reveal that ADHD is associated with obesity despite the “hyperactive” factor in ADHD. Some studies show that many children with ADHD are less likely to be involved in rigorous physical activity or organized sports. One way to combat ADHD is through behavioral intervention, primarily organized sports/physical activity, which helps the child exercise his/her energy through an adaptive healthy behavior, and could also increase his/her ability to concentrate—which tackles another deficit or symptom associated with ADHD in children: lack of concentration.
Sleeping Habits: Sleeping habits also play a significant role in the etiology and could potentially be used as a mechanism of change via intervention to treat ADHD. Studies reveal that children with less-than-needed hours of sleep (i.e., sleep deprivation) tend to develop symptoms that are similar to those of ADHD. A low number of sleep hours has shown to be marginally associated with an increase in screen time (i.e., time spent viewing a screen such as watching TV, playing video games, etc.), and an high screen time is highly associated with bad eating habits, which could lead to obesity.
2. Describe how you would study the role of one of the behaviors described for question #1 and your health outcome of interest. Incorporate a social factor (e.g. race/ethnicity, social exclusion, stress) in the study approach.
One way to study the association between sleeping habits and ADHD is to conduct a study between children with ADHD and children without ADHD (as a control) and measure the hours of sleep they get via an actigraph and a diary for parents to keep track of their kids’ hours of sleep. One way to incorporate a social factor is to measure racial/ethnic differences in sleeping patterns as well, to test whether it could have an effect on sleeping habits. That would require a larger sample size that is diverse in its racial distribution.
3. If key health behaviors (e.g. smoking, exercise, nutritious diet) are strongly influenced by neighborhood, income, and/or education, do we need to continue to study how these behaviors influence health outcomes? Why or why not?
Most definitely! By studying neighborhood, income and/or education, we could develop interventions that could be beneficial on a community-level. For example, if a neighborhood does not have a gym, one way to encourage its members to engage in physical activity is by first providing a convenient resource. Studying these situational factors allows us to tackle macro-problems that could simultaneously solve or alleviate micro-problems.