ACE (Assessing Cost Effectiveness) Obesity America
Project Description
The Assessing Cost Effectiveness (ACE)-Obesity America project is a collaboration between the HPRC, Columbia University in New York, and Deakin University in Australia, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. It builds on the ACE-Obesity work of our Australian partners, Boyd Swinburn, Marj Moodie, and Rob Carter, and provides an illustration of the utility of applying thisapproach to the United States. The ACE group (Swinburn,Moodie, and Carter) will work with our U.S.-based team to review available policy and environmentalinterventions in the United States to identify cost-effective options for childhood obesity interventions.
The original ACE-Obesity approach used the best available evidence, including both interventions and epidemiological studies, to calculate health impacts in terms of body mass index (BMI) units and disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) saved. This approach complements our energy gap modeling approach as they also modeled the impact of interventions via energy balance. Aspart of our review of ACE and our review of policy and environmental change programs, we willidentify four interventions to evaluate using the ACE process.
Examples of interventions that we will considerinclude: reducing sugar-sweetened beverage intake, increasing physical activity in schools, improving pre-school policies, and limiting marketing to children.First, we will work with the ACE group in modifying and adapting the ACE process to fit the USexperience, our 18-month timeline, and the interventions selected. Interventions will be modeled based onthe most recent data available
and assumptions reflecting the U.S. experience. We will develop astakeholder group including policymakers who will meet three times over a year. The result of this process will be a first set of cost-effective options for policy and environmental changes in U.S. obesity prevention. We will produce several manuscripts for publication documenting results of these studies and implications for design of social, behavioral, and environmental strategies to slow and reverse the growing epidemic of obesity among children and youth.
Applying the ACE-Obesity framework to the U.S. is one aim of the Monitoring and Evaluating Childhood Obesity Interventions project.
Principal Investigator: Steven Gortmaker
Funder: Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
For more information, contact Catherine Giles.
Publications
Haby MM, Vos T, Carter R, Moodie M, Markwick A, Magnus A, Tay-Teo KS, Swinburn B. A new approach to assessing the health benefit from obesity interventions in children and adolescents: the assessing cost-effectiveness in obesity project. Int J Obes (Lond). 2006 Oct; 30(10): 1463–75
Carter R, Vos T, Moodie M, Haby M, Magnus A and Mihalopoulos C. Priority setting in health: origins, description and application of the Australian assessing cost-effectiveness initiative. Expert Rev. Pharmacoeconomics Outcomes Res. 2008; 8(6): 593-617.
Moodie M, Haby M, Wake M, Gold L, Carter R. Cost-effectiveness of a family-based GP-mediated intervention targeting overweight and moderately obese children. Econ Hum Biol. 2008 Dec; 6(3): 363-76
Carter R, Moodie M, Markwick A, Magnus A, Vos T, Swinburn B, Haby MM. Assessing cost-effectiveness in obesity (ACE-obesity): an overview of the ACE approach, economic methods and cost results. BMC Public Health. 2009 Nov 18; 9: 419.
The Harvard Prevention Research Center is a member of the Prevention Research Centers Program, supported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cooperative agreement number 1-U48-DP-001946.