Study to Test Effect of Less Video Time, Park Access on Teens' Physical Activity

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- If young teenagers can't watch TV or play computer games, will they fill that time with physical activity?

And will living close to a park play a role in how active they are during their video downtime?

These are questions researchers at the University at Buffalo hope to answer via a three-year, $1.4 million grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

"A lot of our research has shown that for children, living in a neighborhood with high park access is associated with being more physically active," said James N. Roemmich, Ph.D., associate professor of pediatrics and exercise and nutrition sciences in the UB School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences and lead researcher on the study.

"This is the first effort to test these findings in a randomized controlled experiment. We want to know if the built environment a child lives in affects physical activity, and if access to parks stimulates an increase in physical activity when access to television and computer is reduced by one-half.

"In addition to providing some interesting data on the influence of the built environment on youth physical activity, these data can be used to guide the design of new neighborhoods or the redesign of existing neighborhoods to best promote spontaneous physical activity of teens," said Roemmich.

Experimental sessions will take place during the school year, with the first cohort expected to begin in early spring 2008. The interdisciplinary study involves specialists in geographic information systems (GIS), urban planning and health behavior, as well as pediatrics and exercise science.

Sedentary overweight boys and girls between the ages of 12-14 years old who live in neighborhoods with high or low access to parks will be selected for the study.

Urban planning experts from the Department of Urban and Regional Planning in the UB School of Architecture and Planning have charted the physical characteristics of every parcel of land in Erie County using GIS, including dimensions, housing density, width of streets, number of intersections per mile, distance to parks and other aspects that may influence activity.

Also involved in the study are graduate students from the Department of Geography in the College of Arts and Sciences who have been assisting with completing the measures of the neighborhood parcels and developing methods to determine which parcel types children use most frequently to be physically active and the duration and intensity of their activity in those parcels.

Within the high- and low-park-access groups, the teens will be randomized into two subgroups: those limited to 50 percent of their normal access to TV and video, and those with no limit. All participating households will be equipped with devices that record TV and computer-monitor viewing time.

Participants will wear accelerometers, which measure the time and intensity of physical activity, and wrist GPS devices to show where the physical activity took place. Parents or primary caregivers in the households also will wear accelerometers to determine if parent modeling is a factor in physical activity.

Data on activity and food intake will be collected at the start of each session, at two months and at the end of the session at four months.

Coinvestigators on the study are Samina Raja, Ph.D. and Li Yin, Ph.D., UB assistant professors of urban and regional planning and Leonard Epstein, Ph.D., UB Distinguished Professor of pediatrics and social and preventive medicine. Christina Lobarinas is the study coordinator. Sol-Hyon Baek, doctoral student in geography, is providing additional GIS expertise.

Preliminary data for combining GIS, GPS, and physical activity monitor technologies to determine the location and intensity of children's physical activity within their neighborhood parcels were collected in an earlier study funded by the UB 2020 Interdisciplinary Research Development Fund (IRDF) from the UB Office of the Vice President for Research. All of the base GIS datasets were collected and provided by the Department of Urban and Regional Planning.

The University at Buffalo is a premier research-intensive public university, the largest and most comprehensive campus in the State University of New York. The School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences is one of five schools that constitute UB's Academic Health Center. UB's more than 28,000 students pursue their academic interests through more than 300 undergraduate, graduate and professional degree programs. Founded in 1846, the University at Buffalo is a member of the Association of American Universities.

EDITORS NOTE: This is a revised version of a press release originally posted on October 29, 2007.