Childhood Sugar-Sweetened Beverage Consumption: an Agent-Based Model of Context-Specific Reduction Efforts.

INTRODUCTION: Despite widespread recognition among public health experts that childhood sugar-sweetened beverage consumption should be reduced, doing so has proven to be a challenge. An agent-based model of early childhood sugar-sweetened beverage consumption was applied to data from three high-quality, longitudinal cohort studies to gain insight into potentially effective intervention strategies across contexts. METHODS: From 2021 to 2023, a single agent-based model design was applied to data sets derived from three separate cohorts of children followed from infancy to childhood, with very different populations and environments (participants recruited in 1999-2002; 2003-2010; and 2009-2014). After assessing its ability to reproduce observed consumption patterns across cohorts, it was used to simulate potential impacts of multiple intervention strategies across contexts. RESULTS: Interventions reducing home availability of sugar-sweetened beverages consistently had the largest potential effects. Impact differed between cohort settings: a complete decrease in availability resulted in an estimated 87% decrease in overall early childhood consumption for one of the cohorts, compared with 61% and 54% in the others. Reducing availability in center-based child care resulted in substantially greater reduction in one cohort relative to the other two. CONCLUSIONS: There is untapped potential for strategies targeting children's sugar-sweetened beverage consumption in the home, but in some instances, other approaches might also yield meaningful effects. Tailoring approach to setting may be important, and agent-based models can be informative for doing so. This agent-based model has broad generalizability and potential to serve as a tool for designing effective, context-specific strategies to reduce childhood sugar-sweetened beverage consumption.

Childhood Adversity, Impulsivity, and HIV Knowledge as Predictors of Sexual Risk Outcomes in At-Risk Female Youth.

Sexual risk behavior in adolescence can lead to adverse health consequences, particularly for female youth. Most interventions focus on imparting knowledge about the consequences of such behaviors, even though little research has examined whether increasing such knowledge results in desired behavioral changes. Further, individual factors such as impulsivity and childhood adversity might moderate this relationship. We examined associations between HIV knowledge and sexual risk behavior and condom use efficacy in a sample of 122 at-risk females, aged 13-18. HIV knowledge was unrelated to sexual risk behavior, but positively related to condom use efficacy. Impulsivity and childhood adversity had direct effects, with no interaction effects. Increasing HIV knowledge may play an important role in promoting proximal predictors of safer sex practices.