Economic Contributions of Physical Activity Programs to the Publicly Funded Healthcare System
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Chronic diseases place a substantial economic burden on the health care system. Total costs of illness, disability and death in Canada due to chronic diseases are more than $80 billion annually. Physical inactivity, poor diet and smoking are considered as the main causes of major chronic diseases. The evidence clearly supports the positive influence of physical activity on health determinants, other health outcomes and quality of life in older adults with chronic illnesses. This implies that an increase in physical activity improves general health status and has the potential to reduce utilization of expensive healthcare services and disability days. Earlier studies showed that physical activity programs would be an effective way of providing preventive care for older adults with chronic conditions. However, there is no study investigating the net economic contributions of different types of physical activity programming to the healthcare system. The aim of this paper is to examine the impacts of class based and home based physical activity programs on healthcare costs, and to estimate the net benefit from these programs. From 2002 to 2003, adults over the age of 50 years, in a mid-size Canadian city, presenting with overweight, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, dyslipidemia or osteoarthritis were recruited. Following a screening process, eligible participants were randomly assigned to one the two programs. Validated questionnaires related to health status and quality of life were completed and physical tests were carried out at baseline, 3, 6, 12 month, and annually until year 4 post-intervention. In addition participants' use of physician and hospital services and pharmaceutical expenditures were accessed through their healthcare utilization files for five years, from one year before entrance into the study to four years after the intervention. Using healthcare expenditure data, measures of physical performance, function, physical activity, quality of life and health status, we will estimate the treatment effect for each program, and then extrapolate the net benefit from each intervention.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".