Lee Hedwig, Hicken Margaret T
Department of Sociology, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195-3340, USA.
J Health Care Poor Underserved. 2013 May;24(2):907-27. doi: 10.1353/hpu.2013.0090.
Racial/ethnic disparities in adolescent obesity in the U.S. are stark, and the causes of these disparities are largely unknown. We used a cumulative risk index (CRI) to examine the role of social risk in racial/ethnic disparities in obesity. Using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and multinomial logistic regression, we examined the role of this CRI in disparities in obesity in the transition from adolescence to adulthood. Controlling for sociodemographic characteristics, compared with White females, Black and Hispanic females had roughly a 50% increase in the odds of newly-developed obesity in adulthood and a 90% increase in the odds of persistent obesity in adolescence and adulthood. After adding our CRI, the Black-White disparities were attenuated to statistical non-significance. Hispanic-White disparities did not change. There were no disparities in obesity for males. Our results suggest that social risk factors accumulate to explain Black-White disparities in obesity for females.
美国青少年肥胖问题上的种族/族裔差异十分明显，而这些差异的成因在很大程度上尚不清楚。我们使用累积风险指数（CRI）来研究社会风险在肥胖问题的种族/族裔差异中所起的作用。利用全国青少年健康纵向研究和多项逻辑回归分析，我们研究了这一CRI在从青春期到成年期肥胖差异中所起的作用。在控制了社会人口学特征后，与白人女性相比，黑人女性和西班牙裔女性成年后新患肥胖症的几率大约增加了50%，在青春期和成年期持续肥胖的几率增加了90%。加入我们的CRI后，黑人和白人之间的差异减弱至无统计学意义。西班牙裔和白人之间的差异没有变化。男性在肥胖问题上没有差异。我们的结果表明，社会风险因素的累积可以解释女性肥胖问题上的黑人和白人差异。
