Senior Lecturer
Pham Ngoc Thach Uni Med, Vietnam
Dr. Hong K. Tang is a senior lecturer in epidemiology at the Faculty of Public Health, Pham Ngoc Thach University of Medicine in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), Vietnam. Since 2004, she has conducted many research projects on adolescent overweight and obesity in HCMC, including a unique longitudinal study of adolescents. This cohort study has produced important results about the different roles of environmental and lifestyle behaviours on adolescent overweight and obesity and identifying the factors most strongly associated with overweight and obesity in urban Vietnamese adolescents. She has also investigated physical activity among adolescents in the HCMC Youth Cohort study. She also assessed the feasibility of an intervention to prevent obesity in adolescents in HCMC and conducted pilot studies, including testing curriculum changes in physical education as well as peer-led education and peer support to promote healthy lifestyles and physical activity among adolescents of HCMC. Recently she has launched a well-designed comprehensive pilot project that generated evidence to design a large-scale intervention trial for preventing adolescent obesity in HCMC through the improvement of a healthy lifestyle by a school-based peer-led education program. She has also worked on the international surveillance study of 24-hour movement behaviors in the early years (SUNRISE study), of which Vietnam will be one of the participating countries. The proposed study responds to a recommendation in the recent WHO Ending Child Obesity Report on providing guidance around these behaviors to parents, caregivers, teachers and health professionals.