Collective behavior in the spatial spreading of obesity.
Collective behavior in the spatial spreading of obesity.
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DOI：
10.1038/srep00454
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发表时间：
2012
影响因子：
4.6
通讯作者：
Makse HA
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Gallos LK;Barttfeld P;Havlin S;Sigman M;Makse HA
在许多国家，肥胖症流行率正在以惊人的速度增加。在制定扭转这些趋势的政策时遇到的一个困难是确定肥胖症流行背后的驱动因素。在这里，我们实施了空间扩散分析，以调查肥胖是否显示空间相关性，揭示集体和全球因素的影响，个人的选择。我们发现了一个规律性的空间波动，其患病率揭示了无标度的长程相关性的模式。波动是异常的，从根本上偏离了在潜在的人口分布中发现的较弱的相关性，表明存在集体行为，即，个人习惯在形成传播模式方面的影响可能微不足道。有趣的是，我们在与粮食生产相关的经济活动中发现了同样的无标度相关性。这些结果激励未来的干预措施，以调查这种关系的因果关系，为预防性卫生政策的实施提供指导。
Obesity prevalence is increasing in many countries at alarming levels. A difficulty in the conception of policies to reverse these trends is the identification of the drivers behind the obesity epidemics. Here, we implement a spatial spreading analysis to investigate whether obesity shows spatial correlations, revealing the effect of collective and global factors acting above individual choices. We find a regularity in the spatial fluctuations of their prevalence revealed by a pattern of scale-free long-range correlations. The fluctuations are anomalous, deviating in a fundamental way from the weaker correlations found in the underlying population distribution indicating the presence of collective behavior, i.e., individual habits may have negligible influence in shaping the patterns of spreading. Interestingly, we find the same scale-free correlations in economic activities associated with food production. These results motivate future interventions to investigate the causality of this relation providing guidance for the implementation of preventive health policies.