Work

Throwing Out the Baby with the Bathwater?: Comparing 2 Approaches to Implausible Values of Change in Body Size

Year: 2020

Type: article

Abstract: BACKGROUND: In childhood obesity research, the appearance of height loss, or "shrinkage," indicates measurement error. It is unclear whether a common response--excluding "shrinkers" from analysis--reduces bias. METHODS: Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we sampled 816 female adolescents (≥17 years) who had attained adult height by 1996 and for whom adult height was consistently measured in 2001 and 2008 ("gold-standard" height). We estimated adolescent obesity prevalence and the association of maternal education with adolescent obesity under 3 conditions: excluding shrinkers (for whom gold-standard height was less than recorded height in 1996), retaining shrinkers, and retaining shrinkers but substituting their gold-standard height. RESULTS: When we estimated obesity prevalence, excluding shrinkers decreased precision without improving validity. When we regressed obesity on maternal education, excluding shrinkers produced less valid and less precise estimates. CONCLUSION: In some circumstances, ignoring shrinkage is a better strategy than excluding shrinkers.

Source: Carolina Digital Repository (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

DOI: 10.17615/z8ar-jf63

Authors: Gray, Christine L., Robinson, Whitney R.

Language: English

Topic: Obesity, Physical Activity, Diet

Subfield: Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health

Field: Medicine

Domain: Health Sciences

SDG: Good health and well-being

Open Access status: green

Funders: Gillings School of Public Health, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development

Awards: G1165640160, G2428068543, Exome Variants Underlying Weight Gain from Adolescence to Adulthood, G597551293