The EMGO+ 2010 annual report is online

The annual report for 2010 of the EMGO Institute for Health & Care Research is online. The report is electronic-only this year, which makes it readily available, easy to browse through and easy to disseminate in the wider local, national and international scientific community (and it helped us to save some trees and money).

Please take some time to browse through the report. This will inform you about the very interesting range of programs, projects and research topics our institute covers, and about our infrastructure that supports our research. When reading the report you will notice that our efforts in 2010 have resulted in output and impact that is (again!) substantially better than in the year before. We have published substantially more, without a reduction in quality of the papers, our citation index remained at its constant high level, we were able to acquire another record high amount of Euros in external grant money, and we were again able to show that our work is regarded as highly relevant by our external stakeholders.

The fact that our 2010 results show better performance than the 2004-2009 period, i.e. the period that was evaluated as excellent on all counts in the report of the external international evaluation committee, is very good news for the institute.

The EMGO+ annual meeting is underway

Today we have our annual meeting of the EMGO Institute for Health and Care Research. The entire day is focussed on measurement, which is, of course, one of the cores of scientific research and progress. As Baron Kelvin said: "if you cannot measure it, then it is not science". But measurement comes in many different ways, and to quote another icon of science -Einstein-: "not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be conted. Our program today is about computer adaptive testing, on using smart phones in measurement, on applying registrations, etc. This program was designed by Dr. Caroline Terwee, the coordinator of the Knowledge Center for Measurement of the EMGO Institute for Health and Care Research.

At the end of the meeting the societal impact and science awards were granted and celebrated, and the EMGO+ junior fellows, i.e. the mid-career researchers within the institute that are supported by EMGO+ with personal post-doctoral grants to boost their research careers - were interviewed (see photo), as well as the junior researchers who received travel grants to establish international collaborations.
Ludeke Lambeek recieved the science award for her paper in the British Medical Journal on the economic evaluation of integrated care for low back pain patients.
Hanneke Wijnhoven received the societal impact award for her work in developing, testing and disseminating the SNAQ questionnaire to detect undernutrition in the elderly.

Wendy Brouwer defends her doctoral thesis on exposure to internet health promotion interventions

Today, Dr. wendy Brouwer defended her doctoral thesis on exposure to internet-delivered interventions aiming to promote health behaviors, such as healthy eating, non smoking and physical activity. Her thesis research shows that characteristics of the users predict whether they will go to a health promotion website, but that characteristics of the intervention are crucial predictors of really using the web-based intervention and staying long enough to get exposed to the health promotion information and feedback. Major parts of her research are published in scientific journals such as the Journal of Medical Internet Research and Health Education Research.

Dr. Patti-Jean Naylor presents research on Action Schools BC

This week Dr. Patti-Jean Naylor from the University of Victoria, Canada, visited the Youth & Health research group of the EMGO Institute for Health and Care Research, led by Dr. Mai Chinapaw.

Dr. Naylor presented results on the evaluation of the Action Schools BC program, a best-practice project to provide school children in British Colombia, Canada with more options to make healthy choices regarding physical activity and healthy eating. The health outcome evaluation she presented strongly indicates that  the model was effective at increasing the physical activity level of students, and contributed to improvements in their bone health, heart health, dietary requirement awareness, and academic performance. Pilot research regarding the healthy eating part of the model suggested that the initiative was effective at changing the pattern of vegetable and fruit consumption of school children in Grades 4 to 7.

This program has strong similarities with projects conducted at EMGO, such as the DoIT, Go4it and Jump-in projects.

Mediators of effective energy-balance interventions in youth

Obesity prevention in youth requires effective interventions targeting the so-called energy balance-related behaviours (that is, physical activity, sedentary and dietary behaviours). To improve (cost-)effectiveness of these interventions, we need to know the working mechanisms underlying behavioural change. Mediation analyses is a technique that helps to explore an analyse via what pathways interventions have their effects (...or not). Identifying such mediators of intervention effects can help professionals in developing new interventions or adapting existing interventions so that these are targetted at these succesful mediators as good as possible. Dr. Maartje van Stralen and colleagues just published a systematic review of studies on  identification of psychosocial and environmental mediators of  school-based interventions for youth, aiming to change physical activity, dietary and/or sedentary behaviours. The review paper was published in the International Journal of Obesity and was conducted as part of the ENERGY project, a cross-European and European Commission funded project to inform effective prevention of overweight and obesity in schoolchildren across Europe. Twenty-four studies were identified in the scientific literature. Based on the review of these 24 studies, strong evidence for self-efficacy and moderate evidence for intention as mediators of physical activity interventions was found, i.e. improvements in physical activity were brought about via positive changes in self-efficacy and intentions. Some evidence was found that attitudes, knowledge and habit strength were mediators of dietary behaviour interventions. Too few studies were avialbale on interventions aiming to reduce sedentary time to draw any conclusions regarding potential mediators.

KLV 125 years

The Wageningen University and Research Center Alumni network (KLV) celebrates its 125 year anniversary this year. Part of the celebrations is a series of presentations and debates on emerging topics regarding food, nutrition and agriculture, with ‘How to feed the World’ as the over-arching theme. Yesterday afternoon I presented at one of these debate sessions in Nieuwspoort in the Hague.


The topic of the afternoon was how healthy and sustainable food and nutrition can and should go together. The debate focussed on whether promotion of healthy and sustainable food should be primarily be pursued via health education to encourage well-informed healthy choices, or more via health protection measures, i.e. by changes in the availability and accessibility of foods in order to make the healthy and sustainable choice more or less the ‘default’ choice.

The great public health promotion accomplishments (the US Centers of Disease Control (CDC) as well as for example the department of Public Health of Erasmus University Medical Center have made overviews succeses of prevention as well as   of the past were mostly the result of health protection measures. Two well-known examples are the building of drinking water and sewage systems that has resulted in the almost disappearance of some major infectious diseases; and traffic safety measures have resulted in an impressive reduction in (fatal) traffic accidents.

Recent research shows that our dietary choices are strongly influences by environmental cues, i.e. by what is easily available and accessible. And in our fast food nations, some of the most readily available and almost unavoidable foods are high calorie-low nutrient foods like sweet and savoury snacks, sugar-sweetened drinks.

the impact of too much sitting...

A recent systematic review conducted by Dr. Mai Chinapaw and colleagues, published in the journal Obesity Reviews, focusses on the possible health consequences of sedentary behavior. Recent research indicates that sedentary behavior, often operationalized as TV-time and other screen viewing behaviors, is associated with higher risk for being overweight and obese, as well as (other) metabolic health problems. the effects of sedentary behavior appear to be rather independent of physical activity, i.e. even when people do exercise a lot, sitting for prolonged periods of time may still increase their risk. The aim of this systematic review was to describe the prospective relationship between childhood sedentary behaviour and health indicators. 31 studies were indentified in data bases of scientific publications. In these studies 27 different cohorts were investigated. The systematic review of these studies confirmed that more  'sedentary time'- mainly TV viewing - predicts a higher body mass index (BMI) and other indicators of body fat. Evidence was also found that more sedentary time is associated with lower fitness levels, but no convincing evidence was found that sedentary time is associated with higher blood pressure, blood lipids or lower bone mass.