Low health-related quality of life among morbidly obese subjects is well-known. However, the relationship may not be simple. We aim to examine the association between pre-operative expectations and health-related quality of life and long-term changes in health-related quality of life after gastric banding. The questionnaires were answered twice: before and five years after gastric banding. Shor...

Although the overall population in the United States has experienced a dramatic increase in obesity in the past 25 years, ethnic/racial minorities, and socioeconomically disadvantaged populations have a greater prevalence of obesity, as compared to white, and/or economically advantaged populations. Disparities in obesity are unlikely to be predominantly due to individual psychosocial or biologi...

Obesity is a growing concern in the United States, particularly among children and adolescents. This study aimed to ascertain what factors including school/peer influences, culture, family lifestyle, and neighborhood environment, during individuals’ adolescence, impact their weight as young adults. The researcher conducted a survey that was given to students at a private catholic college in sou...

I estimate models of endogenous social interactions in body weight at the county and state levels. The results show that dispersion in body weight across time and space in the U.S. is not clearly excessive, and that much of this variation can be attributed to observable individual and regional characteristics. Models exploiting variants of methods proposed by Glaeser et al. (2003), fixed effect...

Childhood overweight/obesity is growing steeply, globally. It is usually regarded as a risk factor for severe obesity over life-time course. Here, we investigated temporal course of overweight/obesity development in Japanese school children. A six-year longitudinal study was performed on 16,245 Japanese primary school children (8,427 boys and 7,818 girls) comprising three cohorts of 1(st) appro...