A longitudinal study of social connections and central obesity in aging women and men in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It is known that social connections can influence morbidity and mortality, and may alter physiological risk factors including adiposity. However, the causal link between different social connections and central adiposity of women and men is unknown. To address existing knowledge gaps, this project had two objectives: (1) systematically review evidence on the impact of social connection transitions on obesity outcomes in aging adults from a gender perspective and (2) investigate whether changes in different social connections result in changes in waist circumference (WC) among middle-aged and older adults in Canada over time, with a focus on gender differences. My first study systematically searched five bibliographic databases and reference lists of relevant reviews and papers. I screened for longitudinal studies examining changes in marital status, living arrangements, social participation, and social networks in relation to obesity outcomes and I found 41,910 titles; I read 252 full texts and included only 7 relevant studies. All studies were form the United States and focused on marital transitions. Overall, marriage was found to significantly increase body mass index (BMI) for both genders, while transitioning out of marriage through widowhood or divorce led to decreases in weight, WC, and BMI. My second longitudinal, secondary analysis study used repeated data from the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging (CLSA, 2012-21). I used multivariable random coefficient regression to assess changes in marital status, living arrangements, and social participation (baseline to follow-up 1) in relation to changes in WC (follow-up 1 to follow-up 2), and adjusted models for WC at follow-up 1 and known confounders; my analysis was stratified by sex. Among men, becoming divorced was significantly associated with change in WC (1.45 cm [0.14, 2.75]); this effect was reversed for men becoming widowed [-1.41 [-2.85, 0.03]. Decreased social participation was significantly associated with WC among women (0.47 cm [0.11, 0.83]). Results for changes in living arrangement and WC were null but directions differed by gender. My thesis demonstrated that specific changes in several social connections, particularly marital transitions, may be determinants of central obesity in aging adults, and effects are gendered.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.016 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".