Centre for Health Economics & Policy Innovation, Imperial College Business School, London, UK.
Obes Rev. 2021 Jan;22(1):e13104. doi: 10.1111/obr.13104. Epub 2020 Jul 27.
Current evidence of the impact of childhood obesity on human capital development does not point in a consistent direction, and its interpretation is challenging. We carried out a systematic review of studies from high-income countries that used robust causal inference approaches to assess the impact of childhood overweight and obesity on outcomes typically linked to human capital development in economics. Global Health, Medline and EconLit were used to search for peer-reviewed papers. Three reviewers independently assessed study quality using the Newcastle-Ottawa Scale. Nineteen papers representing 22 studies met the inclusion criteria. Included studies were categorized based on three components of human capital: cognitive performance (n = 18), measured through test scores; educational attainment (n = 3), through grade progression and college completion; and labour market outcomes (n = 1), through wages. We find that childhood overweight and obesity hinder education outcomes, with effects mostly observed at older ages of exposure measurement (12+ years). Girls with overweight and obesity experienced larger negative effects and more often than boys. Future research should elucidate the pathways through which childhood obesity impacts human capital development, to support policies that may mitigate those impacts, thus averting social costs that are currently widespread, increasing and unaccounted for.
目前，关于儿童肥胖对人力资本发展影响的证据并不一致，其解释具有挑战性。我们对来自高收入国家的研究进行了系统综述，这些研究使用了稳健的因果推理方法来评估儿童超重和肥胖对经济学中与人力资本发展相关的结果的影响。我们使用了全球健康、Medline 和 EconLit 来搜索同行评议的论文。三位审稿人使用纽卡斯尔-渥太华量表独立评估研究质量。有 19 篇论文代表 22 项研究符合纳入标准。纳入的研究根据人力资本的三个组成部分进行分类：认知表现（n = 18），通过考试成绩衡量；教育程度（n = 3），通过年级进步和大学毕业衡量；以及劳动力市场结果（n = 1），通过工资衡量。我们发现，儿童超重和肥胖会阻碍教育成果，其影响主要在暴露测量的年龄较大时（12 岁以上）观察到。超重和肥胖的女孩比男孩受到更大的负面影响，且更常见。未来的研究应该阐明儿童肥胖影响人力资本发展的途径，以支持可能减轻这些影响的政策，从而避免当前广泛存在、不断增加且未被考虑的社会成本。
