Understanding the Individual and Socio-Environmental Health Risks of Obesity: The Canadian Heart Health Surveys Follow-up Study

Little is known about how physical and social environments modify the health risks associated with obesity, particularly within the Canadian context. The purpose of the Canadian Heart Health Surveys Follow-up Study is to develop a national research program to study the interaction of personal risk factors and community-level factors on the relationships between obesity, other disease risk factors, and premature death. To this end, a New Emerging Team of seven researchers from across Canada have been brought together to address these issues using a multi-method population health research approach. The proposed project builds upon the existing Canadian Heart Health Surveys, which were a series of provincial studies of heart disease risk factors conducted between 1986 and 1992. This new project proposes to create a new database by combining the existing risk factor database with community data taken from the Canadian census, and with data on deaths in the Canadian Mortality Database. The proposed New Emerging Team has the potential to advance the population study of obesity significantly. The inherent complexity of the proposed questions requires the expertise of a wide range of population scientists, and the proposed project will pull together the existing expertise into a national framework.