Modeling the economic and health impact of increasing children’s physical activity In the United States

Increasing physical activity among children is a potentially important public health intervention. Quantifying the economic and health effects of the intervention would help decision makers understand its impact and priority. Using a computational simulation model that we developed to represent all US children ages 8-11 years, we estimated that maintaining the current physical activity levels (only 31.9 percent of children get twenty-five minutes of high-calorie-burning physical activity three times a week) would result each year in a net present value of $1.1 trillion in direct medical costs and $1.7 trillion in lost productivity over the course of their lifetimes. If 50 percent of children would exercise, the number of obese and overweight youth would decrease by 4.18 percent, averting $8.1 billion in direct medical costs and $13.8 billion in lost productivity. Increasing the proportion of children who exercised to 75 percent would avert $16.6 billion and $23.6 billion, respectively.

Conclusion: This study quantified the potential weight-related costs and health effects that might be averted by increasing the percentage of youth who meet different recommended levels of physical activity, demonstrated that the possible savings substantially outweigh published costs of physical activity interventions, and identified the key drivers of these savings. These numbers underestimate the impact of increasing physical activity, as physical activity also influences health through important mechanisms that are independent of the effect of physical activity on weight status. Current efforts to increase physical activity may not match the magnitude of the possible savings, which suggests that increasing physical activity should be a higher national priority.