Levich Institute and Physics Department, City College of New York, New York, NY 10031, USA.
Sci Rep. 2012;2:454. doi: 10.1038/srep00454. Epub 2012 Jun 14.
Obesity prevalence is increasing in many countries at alarming levels. A difficulty in the conception of policies to reverse these trends is the identification of the drivers behind the obesity epidemics. Here, we implement a spatial spreading analysis to investigate whether obesity shows spatial correlations, revealing the effect of collective and global factors acting above individual choices. We find a regularity in the spatial fluctuations of their prevalence revealed by a pattern of scale-free long-range correlations. The fluctuations are anomalous, deviating in a fundamental way from the weaker correlations found in the underlying population distribution indicating the presence of collective behavior, i.e., individual habits may have negligible influence in shaping the patterns of spreading. Interestingly, we find the same scale-free correlations in economic activities associated with food production. These results motivate future interventions to investigate the causality of this relation providing guidance for the implementation of preventive health policies.
肥胖症的患病率在许多国家以惊人的速度上升。制定扭转这些趋势的政策的一个难点是确定肥胖症流行背后的驱动因素。在这里，我们实施空间传播分析来研究肥胖症是否存在空间相关性，揭示了集体和全球因素对个人选择的影响。我们发现，通过无标度长程相关性模式，揭示了它们流行率的空间波动具有规律性。这些波动是异常的，与基础人群分布中发现的较弱相关性有根本的偏离，表明存在集体行为，即个人习惯在塑造传播模式方面的影响可能可以忽略不计。有趣的是，我们在与食品生产相关的经济活动中也发现了同样的无标度相关性。这些结果促使未来的干预措施调查这种关系的因果关系，为实施预防保健政策提供指导。
