Association of Neighborhood Geographic Spatial Factors With Rates of Childhood Obesity

IMPORTANCE: Childhood obesity is a principal public health concern. Understanding the geographic distribution of childhood obesity can inform the design and delivery of interventions. OBJECTIVE: To better understand the causes of spatial dependence in rates of childhood obesity across neighborhoods. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS: This cohort study used data from a legislatively mandated body mass index screening program for public school children in Arkansas from the 2003-2004 through 2014-2015 academic years. Spatial autoregressive moving average (SARMA) models for panel data were used to estimate spatial dependency in childhood obesity at 2 levels of spatial aggregation. Data were analyzed from August 2017 to February 2018. EXPOSURES: The SARMA models included geographic fixed effects to capture time-invariant differences in neighborhood characteristics along with controls for the mean age of children and the proportion of children by race/ethnicity, school meal status, and sex. MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES: The proportion of obese schoolchildren in Arkansas neighborhoods by year, defined at larger (census tract) and smaller (census block group) spatial scales. RESULTS: The geographic aggregations were based on 935 800 children with a mean (SD) age of 132 (39) months. Of these children, 51% were male; 65% were white, 21% were black, 10% were Hispanic, 2% were Asian, and the remainder were of other or unidentified race/ethnicity. In models without geographic fixed effects, there was evidence of positive and significant spatial autocorrelation in obesity rates across tracts (ρ = 0.511; 95% CI, 0.469-0.553) and block groups (ρ = 0.569; 95% CI, 0.543-0.595). When geographic fixed effects were included, spatial autocorrelation diminished at the census tract level (ρ = 0.271; 95% CI, 0.147-0.396) and disappeared at the census block group level (ρ = −0.075; 95% CI, −0.264 to 0.114). CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE: Because block groups are smaller than tracts, children in neighboring block groups were more likely to attend the same schools and interact through neighborhood play. Thus, geographic-based social networks were more likely to span block group boundaries. The lack of evidence of spatial autocorrelation in block group–level models suggests that social contagion may be less important than differences in neighborhood context across space. Caution should be used in interpreting significant spatial autocorrelation as evidence of social contagion in obesity.