Physical Activity Epidemiology

该计划的总体目标是了解身体活动与疾病之间的详细关系，特别是肥胖和代谢紊乱。此外，我们还在研究环境、早期生活因素（如出生体重）和基因如何影响体育活动与肥胖和代谢紊乱之间的关联。我们领导了一种基于心率和身体运动联合测量的客观方法的开发和评估，用于精确测量自由生活个体的身体活动。这项技术目前正在我们的流行病学研究中实施，并与英国和国外的研究人员合作。我们将在未来的研究中使用这种方法。我们试图了解身体活动的人口水平，以及活动水平如何随时间和人口亚组之间的变化而变化。我们已经证明，体力活动与儿童和成人的代谢紊乱呈正相关，这种关联独立于有氧健身。这具有重要的公共卫生意义，因为鼓励人们增加活动水平可能比改善有氧健身更可行，后者可能包括更剧烈的运动。我们将寻求进一步研究身体活动在疾病病因中的重要性，以及这些关联在人口亚组之间的差异。例如，我们将在不同的出生队列中从早期开始对身体活动和身体成分进行精确测量。最后，我们将在双胞胎研究中检查活动的遗传力，并在大规模观察性研究中检查活动的遗传决定因素。

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.