Youth hEAlth from a Holistic perspective (YEAH!)

The YEAH! project’s main aim is to develop and evaluate an intervention to improve health behaviours (physical activity, sedentary behaviour, sleep, diet) and health (psychological well-being, social well-being, weight status) in children and adolescents. This intervention is aimed at parents and teachers and will involve a digital component (e.g., a chatbot for the parents) as well as “real life” components, and it will be co-created together with children/parents/teachers.

In a first step, we will determine the main determinants of health behaviours and health in children and adolescents by performing systematic reviews/meta-analyses and by analysing exposome data from four cohorts representative for the European population: Born in Bradford (BiB) in the UK, Amsterdam Born Children and their Development (ABCD) in the Netherlands, and Walnuts Smart Snack (WALNUTS) and Brain dEvelopment and Air pollution ultrafine particles in school children (BREATHE) in Spain. For the harmonization of the data, we will use the protocol developed as part of a previous project (i.e., the Equal-Life project which already includes ABCD, WALNUTS and BREATHE). We will perform both data-driven and hypothesis-driven analyses. The data-driven analysis will take an exposome approach and focus on the identification of sociodemographic factors (e.g., age, gender, socioeconomic status), (socio)environmental factors (e.g., green and blue spaces, walkability, socioeconomic status of the neighbourhood), interpersonal factors (e.g., social support, parenting styles) and intrapersonal factors (e.g., behavioural attitudes and beliefs, health literacy) that affect child and/or adolescent health behaviours and/or health. The hypothesis-driven analyses will investigate specific pathways and moderators of associations for which there are reasons to expect an effect but with insufficient or inconclusive evidence of what results form the systematic meta-analyses that we will perform on the topic.
The project received ethical clearance by the European Commission (ref. Ares(2024)75002169) and ISGlobal and IISPV received additional approval for the analyses described here by the Ethics Committee for Research with Medicines of the Parc de Salut MAR (ref. 2024/11931) and the Ethics Committee for Research with medicines from the IISPV (CEIm) (ref. 258/2024), respectively.