BACKGROUND: The Stand Up Victoria multi-component intervention successfully reduced workplace sitting time in both the short (three months) and long (12 months) term. To further understand how this intervention worked, we aimed to assess the impact of the intervention on four social-cognitive constructs, and examined whether these constructs mediated intervention effects on workplace sitting...

BACKGROUND: Perceived and objectively-assessed aspects of the neighbourhood physical environment have been postulated to be key contributors to regular engagement in active travel (AT) in older adults. We systematically reviewed the literature on neighbourhood physical environmental correlates of AT in older adults and applied a novel meta-analytic approach to statistically quantify the stre...

BACKGROUND: Breaks in prolonged sitting may have beneficial cardiometabolic and musculoskeletal health outcomes. Desk-based work settings are an important environment to promote and support breaks in sitting time. However, few studies have reported the psychometric properties of self-report measures to assess the frequency and duration of breaks from sitting. This study examined the concurrent...

BACKGROUND: The hyperinsulinemia of obesity is a function of both increased pancreatic insulin secretion and decreased insulin clearance, and contributes to cardiovascular risk. Whilst weight loss is known to enhance insulin clearance, there is a paucity of data concerning the underlying mechanisms. This study was conducted to examine the inter-relationships between changes in sympathetic nerv...

BACKGROUND: Identifying attributes of the built environment associated with health-enhancing levels of physical activity (PA) in older adults (≥65 years old) has the potential to inform interventions supporting healthy and active ageing. The aim of this study was to first systematically review and quantify findings on built environmental correlates of older adults' PA, and second, investigat...

BACKGROUND: Ecological models are currently the most used approaches to classify and conceptualise determinants of sedentary behaviour, but these approaches are limited in their ability to capture the complexity of and interplay between determinants. The aim of the project described here was to develop a transdisciplinary dynamic framework, grounded in a system-based approach, for research o...

BACKGROUND: Aboriginal Australians suffer from poorer overall health compared to the general Australian population, particularly in terms of cardiovascular disease and prognosis following a cardiac event. Despite such disparities, Aboriginal Australians utilise health care services at much lower rates than the general population. Improving health care utilisation (HCU) among Aboriginal cardiac ...

BACKGROUND: Despite large disparities in health outcomes between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians, detailed evidence on the health and lifestyle characteristics of older Aboriginal Australians is lacking. The aim of this study is to quantify socio-demographic and health risk factors and mental and physical health status among Aboriginal participants from the 45 and Up Study and to com...

BACKGROUND: Low 25-hydroxy vitamin D (25(OH)D) levels have been associated with an increased risk of albuminuria, however an association with glomerular filtration rate (GFR) is not clear. We explored the relationship between 25(OH)D levels and prevalent chronic kidney disease (CKD), albuminuria and impaired GFR, in a national, population-based cohort of Australian adults (AusDiab Study). MET...

BACKGROUND: To provide a detailed description of young adults' sedentary time and physical activity. METHODS: 384 young women and 389 young men aged 22.1 ± 0.6 years, all participants in the 22 year old follow-up of the Raine Study pregnancy cohort, wore Actigraph GT3X+ monitors on the hip for 24 h/day over a one-week period for at least one 'valid' day (≥10 h of waking wear time). Each ...

BACKGROUND: In Australia, higher rates of chronic hepatitis B (HBsAg) have been reported among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (Indigenous) compared with non-Indigenous people. In 2000, the Australian government implemented a universal infant/adolescent hepatitis B vaccination program. We undertook a systematic review and meta-analysis to assess the disparity of HBsAg prevalence between ...

BACKGROUND: Circulating microRNAs may represent novel markers for cardiovascular diseases. We evaluated whether circulating miRNAs served as potential biomarkers for diffuse myocardial fibrosis in patients with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM). METHODS: Cardiac magnetic resonance imaging with postcontrast T1 mapping was performed to non-invasively quantify diffuse myocardial fibrosis in...

BACKGROUND: The island country of Samoa (population 188,000 in 2011) forms part of Polynesia in the South Pacific. Over the past several decades Samoa has experienced exceptional modernization and globalization of many sectors of society, with noncommunicable diseases (NCD) now the leading cause of morbidity and mortality. The evolution of risk factor prevalence underpinning the increase in ...

BACKGROUND: The IPEN (International Physical Activity and Environment Network) Adult project seeks to conduct pooled analyses of associations of perceived neighborhood environment, as measured by the Neighborhood Environment Walkability Scale (NEWS) and its abbreviated version (NEWS-A), with physical activity using data from 12 countries. As IPEN countries used adapted versions of the NEWS/NEW...

BACKGROUND: While Indigenous Australians are believed to be at a high risk of psychological illness, few screening instruments have been designed to accurately measure this burden. Rather than simply transposing western labels of symptoms, this paper describes the process by which a screening tool for depression was specifically adapted for use across multiple Indigenous Australian communities...

BACKGROUND: In addition to insufficient moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA), prolonged sitting time is also a health risk for older adults. An understanding of population subgroups who have prolonged television viewing (TV) time, a predominant sedentary behavior, can aid in the development of relevant health promotion initiatives; however, few such studies have focused on older adults...

BACKGROUND: For almost two decades, chlamydia and gonorrhoea diagnosis rates in remote Indigenous communities have been up to 30 times higher than for non-Indigenous Australians. The high levels of population movement known to occur between remote communities may contribute to these high rates. METHODS: We developed an individual-based computer simulation model to study the relationship betw...

BACKGROUND: Oxytocin is known for its capacity to facilitate social bonding, reduce anxiety and for its actions on the stress hypothalamopituitary adrenal (HPA) axis. Since oxytocin can physiologically suppress activity of the HPA axis, clinical applications of this neuropeptide have been proposed in conditions where the function of the HPA axis is dysregulated. One such condition is major dep...

BACKGROUND: The relationship between socioeconomic position and obesity has been clearly established, however, the extent to which specific behavioural factors mediate this relationship is less clear. This study aimed to ascertain the contribution of specific dietary elements and leisure-time physical activity (LTPA) to variations in obesity with education in the baseline (1990-1994) Melbourne...

BACKGROUND: Neighborhood walkability has been shown to be associated with walking behavior. However, the availability of geographical data necessary to construct it remains a limitation. Building on the concept of space syntax, we propose an alternative walkability index, space syntax walkability (SSW). This study examined associations of the full walkability index and SSW with walking for t...