Category 10
Obesity Prevention, Physical Activity, Exercise Physiology, Movement

Background: University of Maryland (UMD) students often use walking as their primary mode of transportation on the College Park campus. With construction of the Purple Line light rail train, there may be impediments to walking and other forms of active transportation throughout campus. Students who live further away and commute to and from campus may also experience changes in their commute due to the ongoing construction on campus.

Goal: The TERPS Transport Study: Investigating the Effects of the University Purple Line on Active Transport will examine how the Purple Line campus construction has affected active transportation and commuting patterns among UMD undergraduate and graduate students.

Objectives: The TERP Transport Study has (3) objectives.

1. To assess the forms of transportation students use to travel to and on campus

2. To assess how the Purple Line construction impacts travel to and on campus

3. To assess the perceptions and intended use of the Purple Line once it is in operation

Approach/Methods: The TERPS Transport Study collected data from current UMD students (18 years or older) using an online questionnaire via Qualtrics.com. The questionnaire link was emailed to all students via UMD listservs in February 2021. Visualizations and descriptive statistics were used to examine data distributions, identify category thresholds, and outliers.

Results: The TERPS Study sample (n=230) includes 82.61% female, 16.52% male, and 0.87% non-binary respondents. The majority (74.35%) of respondents are White and 8.26% are Latinx. Preliminary results have found that, before the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic university shut-down, 43.16% of respondents commuted to campus and of those commuters, 47.92% used active transportation by walking (39.05%), biking (4.14%), or public transportation (4.73%). Over half (54.07%) of the respondents indicated that the Purple Line construction made it more difficult to navigate the campus, and among the students who walk to the majority of their campus destinations (85.17%), 57.41% reported that the construction blocked their walking routes. More than 30% reported that they will not use the Purple Line once it begins operating and some of these reasons were attributed to no longer being on campus due to graduation, inconvenience of the location, safety, and lack of knowledge as to where the Purple Line travels. There is a statistically significant relationship between race and campus AT, however no relationship between gender and campus AT. When looking at perceptions of the Purple Line, there is a statistically significant relationship between gender and Purple Line use when operation begins.

Importance to Public Health: Active transportation for UMD students, such as walking, biking or using public transportation, can significantly pare down automobile trips, traffic congestion and associated environmental emissions. In addition to these environmental benefits, active transportation is considered a strategic pathway to increasing physical activity levels, maintaining a healthy body mass index and reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease and mortality.

Background: Exercise training (ET) has shown improving subjective well-being (SWB), but little is known about the link between ET and SWB in individuals with mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Further, anterior insular (AI) functional connectivity (FC) has been shown be associated with SWB, but evidence regarding the SWB-AI FC relationship is scarce in MCI.

Goal: The aim of this study is to examine the effects of a 12-week walking exercise on SWB and underlying neural mechanism in older adults with MCI.

Objectives:

1. To investigate if ET alters SWB in MCI

2. To investigate if ET leads to changes in AI FC

3. To investigate if the relationship between SWB and AI FC changes between before and after walking exercise intervention

Approach/Methods: Older adults with MCI and normal cognition underwent a 10-week walking intervention and their SWB and fMRI data were collected before and after ET.

Results: There was a significantly increased SWB in MCI while no changes were found in CN after ET. Increased SWB was co-occurred with increased AI FC in MCI.

Importance to Public Health: Our findings provide evidence that SWB was significantly increased following 12-weeks of ET in individuals diagnosed with MCI. Furthermore, increased AI FC may reflect neural network plasticity associated with exercise-related improvements SWB in individuals diagnosed with MCI. Many MCI studies have been focused on the cognitive changes in response to exercise intervention, but our study elucidates that regular participation in exercise also enhances SWB, an indicative of enhanced quality of life, in older adults with MCI.

Background: Obesity is commonly defined as excess body weight for height and typically measured using body mass index (BMI) (weight divided by square of the height). Despite the simplicity of this metric, the complex etiology of obesity phenotypes expressed as body fatness can differ metabolically. Obesity is associated with increased all-cause mortality, hypertension, dyslipidemia, type II diabetes, cardiovascular disease, mental illness and cancers. Previous studies have measured obesity phenotypes using hip-to-waist circumference, imaging techniques and metabolomic profiles. Metabolomic profiling identifies specific and dynamic information about the metabolome, and can reveal associations with obesity phenotypes. There is an emerging interest and critical need to understanding the metabolic composition associated with obesity phenotypes.

Goal: To further our understanding of how obesity may affect metabolomic profiles overall, by sex, and by race, and whether patterns vary by obesity metric.

Objectives: To conduct a systematic review examining studies focused on the relationships between obesity, characterized by different metrics, and metabolomic profiles.

Approach/Methods: We identified human-based, English-language published studies until July 17, 2020 via PubMed database search. We included original epidemiological studies, study populations 18 years and older, untargeted/targeted metabolomic approaches, biospecimen (urine, blood, plasma or serum, adipose tissue), at least one obesity metric (body mass index (BMI), waist-to-hip ratio (WHR), waist circumference, hip circumference, dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA), computed tomography scan (CT-scan), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)) and a minimum sample size of n=50. We conducted a multi-round review of 1233 abstracts based on our inclusion and exclusion criteria. The eligible abstracts were reviewed for full-text eligibility. We conducted data extraction of 34 full-text articles and excluded 6 articles. The sample was n=28.

Results: Of the 28 eligible studies, 20 studies focused on targeted, 4 studies on untargeted, and 4 studies on both targeted and untargeted metabolomics approach. Most of the studies were of cross-sectional (n=21) design, while the rest were either longitudinal, case-control, or both cross-sectional and longitudinal. The major classes of metabolites assessed by the different studies in serum/plasma/urine included amino acids, acylcarnitines, lipids and its metabolites, nucleotide and its metabolites, organic acids, peptides, steroids, alcohol, and sugars. The different obesity metric used for the studies were BMI, waist circumference, hip circumference, WHR, DXA, and CT- scan. Data abstraction for this systematic review to assess the association between obesity and metabolomic profiles is still ongoing.

Importance to Public Health: Our review expands the current knowledge about obesity phenotypes and metabolomics and contributes to the molecular understanding of obesity.

Background: A new challenge arrived when all in-person exercise sessions halted as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our team quickly put together a virtual exercise program that helped the study continue on.

Goal: The main goal was to get virtual sessions running as soon as possible to prevent interference with participants' progress in the study.

Objectives: Creating virtual sessions had to be completed quickly so that participants didn't experience too much disruption to their exercise program. Emergency protocols were implemented in the case of a remote adverse effect.

Approach/Methods: The pre-Covid study used a control group (CG) completing low-intensity style workouts designed to raise the heart rate to an upper limit of 60% using HRR (Howley, 2007). The control group (CG) exercise plan did not change with the virtual redesign. By introducing a combination of low to mid-impact aerobics, but still keeping the upper limit heart rate protocol of 75% HRR, a HIIT (Skinner, 2015) style workout was programmed using varying exercises that would gradually increase in intensity as the study progressed. Both programs developed familiarity, muscle memory, muscle deviation, and learning stimulation. The program designs were based on the ACE IFT model and general guidelines of coronary respiratory fitness (Howley, 2007; Skinner, 2015). To help with uniformity, participants were asked to use an oximeter or other related device for heart rate measurement, rather than a manual pulse count.

Results: The transition to virtual exercise sessions also allowed for the study to continue with abidance to CDC and University Covid-specific guidelines. The virtual format has removed the geographic and physical space-related limitations of in-person exercise sessions, thereby making our study much more accessible to people living throughout the Washington DC/Baltimore metro area. The current use of breakout rooms allows participants and instructors to join separate assigned sessions with the use of a single zoom link.

Importance to Public Health: Public health can continue to be supported even in the context of a global public health crisis. Remote exercise interventions can be useful in any situation where social contact has to be limited due to social or health-related threats.