App Stats: Mozaffarian on "Estimating the Global Impact of Poor Dietary Habits on Chronic Diseases" 

 We hope you can join us this Wednesday, February 27, 2013 for the  Applied Statistics Workshop .  Dariush Mozaffarian , Associate Professor in the  Department of Epidemiology  at the Harvard School of Public Health, will give a presentation entitled "Estimating the Global Impact of Poor Dietary Habits on Chronic Diseases". A light lunch will be served at 12 pm and the talk will begin at 12.15. 

 "Estimating the Global Impact of Poor Dietary Habits on Chronic Diseases" 
Dariush Mozaffarian 
Department of Epidemiology, Harvard School of Public Health 
CGIS K354 (1737 Cambridge St.)  
Wednesday, February 27, 2013, 12.00pm 

 Abstract: 
 Nearly every nation in the world is undergoing rapid epidemiologic transition toward noncommunicable chronic diseases (NCDs) including cardiovascular disease (CVD), obesity, diabetes, and cancers.  Numerous organizations including the United Nations, World Health Organization, US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and other national and international organizations have emphasized the importance of dietary habits as a key risk factor for NCDs.  Yet, the burdens of suboptimal dietary habits on NCDs globally, as well as heterogeneity in these burdens by region, country, age, and sex, are not established.  Quantification of these burdens has been limited by inadequate or absent data on dietary habits in many nations, not only for each country as a whole, but also for age- and sex-specific strata.  As part of our work in the 2010 Global Burden of Diseases Nutrition and Chronic Diseases Group, we systematically identified and obtained data on national and subnational individual-level surveys of dietary consumption worldwide; and used a Bayesian hierarchical model to evaluate and account for differences in comparability, assessment methods, representativeness, and missingness.  We also quantified effects of dietary habits on NCDs, including differences by age, in new meta-analyses.  We compiled additional data to quantify the alternative optimal distribution of key dietary risk factors, and the numbers of cause-specific deaths by country, age, and sex.  Using this compilation of global data, we used comparative risk assessment to quantify the impacts of current dietary habits on NCDs in each nation around the world.  The case of sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) and CVD, adiposity-related cancers, and diabetes will be presented as an example of our newest findings.