Geographic disparities of obesity as a public health issue in Summit County, Ohio

Obesity is a huge public health issue that occurs in developed and developing countries. In the recent decades, the prevalence of obesity has increased dramatically in the United States especially, among the adults. More than one third of the US adults were considered obese. Obesity is a major cause of death in the United States, which could leads to chronic diseases, such as diabetes, stroke, heart attack, hypertension, cancer, and other types of chronic diseases. It has been suggested in the literature, that built environment and socioeconomic variables contribute to obesity prevalence in indirect way. The aim of this study is to examine the built environment and socioeconomic variables that are related to obesity in Summit County, Ohio. In addition, this study extends the model that has been applied by Thomas et al. (2013) for predicting when the prevalence of obesity would plateau. The study fixes the limitation of Thomas model by applying the model at the neighborhood level in Summit County, Ohio. The methods in this study are based on a quantitative approach, which use geographic information system (GIS) as a tool to analyze the prevalence of obesity at two different geographic scales, which are tracts and block groups. The results indicate that socioeconomic variables, such as income and education are related to obesity more than other socioeconomic variables and built environment features. The results also indicate that applying the dynamic model of obesity (Thomas et al., 2013) at the neighborhood level provide much more details and information rather than large geographic area. In conclusion, the socioeconomic variables and built environment features play an important role in affecting the prevalence of obesity especially at the neighborhood level.