Diminishing benefits of urban living for children and adolescents' growth and development

NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC) Code and Data Sharing

This repository contains code and data for generating estimates of mean height and mean body-mass index (BMI) of children and adolescents aged 5 to 19 years living in rural and urban areas in 200 countries and territories from 1990 to 2020, as reported in the publication "Diminishing benefits of urban living for children and adolescents’ growth and development" [1].

Contents Guide

• data/   The list of data sources used in the study, together with input data used in the model from publicly available sources and contact information for other data sources.
• model/   R code for the Bayesian hierarchical model used to analyse the data to estimate mean height and mean BMI by country, year, age and rural and urban place of residence. See methods section of publication [1] for details of the statistical methods.
• figures/   R code to produce figures as appeared in publication [1].
• utils/   Essential covariate files; functions for producing figures.

Contact

• For more information about the paper or the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration, please see www.ncdrisc.org or contact ncdrisc@imperial.ac.uk.
• Codes for producing publication figures are provided for transparency and in the spirit of scientific collaboration. We will not be able to answer questions about the details of these codes.

Acknowledgements

• The shape file of the maps was based on Natural Earth [2].
• Population data used in this analysis were obtained from the 2019 revision to the United Nations' World Population Prospects [3].
• Data on percent national population living in urbanisation areas were obtained from the 2018 revision to the United Nations' World Urbanization Prospects [4].

References

1. NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC). Diminishing benefits of urban living for children and adolescents’ growth and development. Nature, 2023.

2. https://www.naturalearthdata.com/

3. United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2019). World Population Prospects 2019: Highlights (ST/ESA/SER.A/423)

4. United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2018). World Urbanization Prospects: The 2018 Revision, Online Edition