Physical Activity Epidemiology

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The overall aim of this programme is to understand the detailed relationships between physical activity and disease, particularly obesity and metabolic disorders. Further, we are also examining how the environment, early life factors such as birth weight, and genes affect the associations between physical activity with obesity and metabolic disorders. We have lead the development and evaluation of an objective method based on the combined measurement of heart rate and body movement for measuring physical activity precisely in free living individuals. This technique is now implemented in our epidemiological studies and in collaboration with researchers in UK and abroad. We will use this method in future studies. We seek to understand population levels of physical activity and how activity levels might change by time and between sub-groups of the population. We have shown that physical activity is positively associated with metabolic disorders in both children and adults and this association is independent of aerobic fitness. This has important public health implications as it may be more feasible to encourage the population to increase their levels of activity rather than improving aerobic fitness which is likely to include more vigorous exercise. We will seek to further examine the importance of physical activity in the causation of disease and how these associations differ between sub groups of the population. For example, we will include precise measurements of physical activity and body composition from early age in various birth cohorts. Finally, we will examine the heritability of activity in twin studies and the genetic determinants of activity in large scale observational studies.