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Celebrating 100 Years of Health Sciences
The Study and Promotion of
Physical Activity for Health
The goal of this project is to study barriers to and
factors that facilitate health-seeking behaviours such as
physical activity, in various settings and populations, in
order to develop and then measure the effectiveness of
interventions aimed at improving these lifestyle behaviours
and health status. This project is led by Dr Tracy Kolbe-
Alexander, who leads ESSM’s public health and physical
activity research, along with Professor Vicki Lambert.
Prevention and
Management of Chronic
Diseases
South Africa faces enormous challenges as a result
of the rising prevalence of obesity and associated
disease such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes.
Paradoxically, these diseases of “excess” occur against
a South African context of poverty, and the combination
has significant implications for the health of our country.
Research Projects
Working in conjunction with Discovery Vitality,
academics from the University of the Witwatersrand,
and Emory University, Dr Kolbe-Alexander has helped
to develop and evaluate the Healthy Company Index in
South African companies. The first in a series of peer-
reviewed publications was published in the
Journal of
Occupational and Environmental Health
. In recognition
of her research in this area, Dr Kolbe-Alexander was
asked to serve as a panelist and speaker at the recent
Global Healthy Workplace Awards and Summit in
London. A similar project is the South African Fittest
City Index, which compares the health and fitness
profiles of eight metropoles. Finally, in an African
first, Dr Kolbe-Alexander investigated the relationship
between the built environment and physical activity in
older adults, finding that neighbourhood safety was
one of the main barriers to physical activity while the
neighborhood aesthetics played a role in increasing
activity among those over the age of 60 years.
Professor Lambert and her team have been focusing
on the ecological determinants of adult and childhood
obesity, aspart of the five-country,NIH-funded,Modelling
the Epidemiological Transition Study, spearheaded
by the Department of Epidemiology and Community
Health at Loyola University in Chicago, and including the
Seychelles, Ghana, Jamaica, USA and South Africa. More
recently, Professor Lambert has served as the in-country
PI for the 12-country ISCOLE Study (International Study
of Childhood Obesity, Lifestyle and the Environment).
Data from this study will be used to formulate the third
in a series of Healthy Active Kids South Africa Report
Cards (2007, 2010, and now 2014), and forms the basis
of two doctoral studies. Finally, Professor Lambert was a
member of a prestigious writing group for
The Lancet’s
Physical Activity Series of five scholarly peer-reviewed
manuscripts which appeared in July 2012 in conjunction
with the London 2012 Olympics, and had as the primary
focus the global evidence for physical activity and health.
For the last couple of years, Dr Lisa Micklesfield
and Dr Julia Goedecke have explored various
methods to measure visceral adipose tissue (VAT),
the fat around the organs associated with metabolic
disease. Waist circumference can be used as an
indirect measure of VAT; however, there are a
number of limitations with this method, and for
this reason they have assisted with developing a
method to more accurately estimate VAT using dual
x-ray absorptiometry technology.
This work was subsequently published in the
Journal of
Obesity
, and has subsequently received a fair amount
of attention both internationally and locally. This
methodology has since been included in the dual
energy x-ray absorptiometry software (DXA) to allow
for more accurate measurement of VAT using this
technology. Future research will include examining
the association between this DXA-derived measure
of VAT and disease outcomes in different populations
and hopefully will increase our understanding of this
association.