COLLABORATING TO TURN THE Tide

  • NCCOR was instrumental in the successful planning for the NIH Healthy Communities Study, a large study to assess the effectiveness of community obesity prevention efforts in areas where childhood obesity rates are highest.
  • NCCOR is pursuing work on Economics and Obesity, namely to address the economics gap in childhood obesity and establish an agenda to stimulate research on the cost effectiveness and benefit of interventions.
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  • NCCOR maintains two free, online resources—the Catalogue of Surveillance Systems and Measures Registry—which provide one-stop access for researchers to review, sort, and compare surveillance systems and measures relevant to childhood obesity research.

 

Supporting researchers

Using innovation to stimulate broad thinking

  • NCCOR supported a Green Health workshop with the National Academy of Environmental Design and in partnership with the U.S. Green Building Council Center for Green School; the workshop fostered new collaborations between childhood obesity researchers and the “green” design and building industries. A follow-on paper in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine presented principles for integrating childhood obesity prevention priorities into the field of green health research and practice.
  • NCCOR formed Envision, a global network of statistical and simulation modeling teams that forecast the impact of public health policies and interventions. Through Envision work, NCCOR supported a groundbreaking series of Envision papers in The Lancet. More than 630 media stories covered the series, stimulating debate and discussion among stakeholders.
  • NCCOR supports the Johns Hopkins Global Center on Childhood Obesity Request For Application (RFA) mechanism, which enables researchers to collect follow-up data and evaluate policy and environmental changes.
  • NCCOR was instrumental in creating a new rapid response funding mechanism through the National Institutes of Health, which significantly reduced grant application times and enhanced researchers’ ability to conduct time-sensitive research.
  • NCCOR supported critical updates to USDA’s Food Patterns Equivalents Database and developed a related plain language fact sheet.

 

Increasing knowledge to find solutions

  • NCCOR created exciting products to demonstrate applications of the Healthy Eating Index tool developed by NCI scientists. The work was presented at the National Conference on Health Communications, Marketing, and Media in August 2013.

The road ahead

  • NCCOR is constructing a Registry of Studies, a web-based resource with detailed descriptions of key outcome studies.
  • NCCOR is examining ways to support monitoring and analyses made possible by the Bridging the Gap School Wellness Survey, and exploring linkages to federal school health-related surveillance systems.
  • NCCOR is reaching out to new potential partners through strategic alliances.
  • NCCOR is building on current work to create a compendium of Youth Energy Expenditure values.
  • NCCOR is discussing strategies to encourage healthier food acquisitions by SNAP shoppers and supporting a workshop to incentivize healthier purchases.
  • NCCOR is continuing to get feedback on its strategic directions and maintaining links with the extramural community through the NCCOR External Scientific Panel (NESP).