The FLASH team, which studies health and habits of college students, is “cleaning up” the data it started collecting with the class of 2009, program manager and graduate student Adam Abudra said.
The team is working on examining 1,571 physical assessments and more than 10,000 surveys, Abudra said. This involves looking over the surveys and physical assessments and finding the data that does not fit, Abudra said. Body mass indexes range from 15 and below — very underweight — to 35 and above — very obese, he said.
“We’re trying to figure out why someone had a BMI of 300 and what was wrong with their data sheet that made them have that,” Abudra said.
Cleaning is an important step which must be completed before the team can analyze the data, he said. If the data is not cleaned, the results of the study will be useless, Abudra said. Because the FLASH team has to physically look over all of the numbers, cleaning the data is a big job, he said.
“Cleaning the data is a long process,” Abudra said. “It involves going through each data sheet and looking at it individually. We enter it once and then enter it again by a second person. After that, we look at the outliers and try to determine what was wrong.”
Once an outlier, or a number that doesn’t make sense, is identified, the team has to determine the best way to fix it, Abudra said.
“When we find an outlier we have to go back to the individual, contact them and hopefully get them retested,” he said. “If we are unable to contact them, the principle investigators then have to make the decision on whether we keep trying to contact them or we throw this person out of the data set.”
Cleaning the data is important because it ensures that the study will accurately reflect the student population at Cal Poly, Abudra said.
“If we don’t clean the data, then we have a lot of outliers and problems with the data, which skews it and makes it useless in terms of how reliable and valid the data is,” Abudra said.
The team expects to be working on cleaning the data for at least a few months, Abudra said. Once the data is cleaned, the team will begin analyzing it to see how healthy — or unhealthy — Cal Poly students are, he said.
“We are looking to see if college students are as healthy as they think they are,” Abudra said
Cal Poly students also wonder about their actual health when compared to their conception of their own health, biomedical engineering senior Chris Blecher said.
“I would like to know how healthy I am compared to how healthy I feel like I am,” Blecher said.
Along with overall health, the study is also looking at certain risk factors, such as heart disease, for college students, according to FLASH founder Ann McDermott, who is now a research scientist at Johns Hopkins University.
“This study wanted to learn about risk factors for cardiovascular disease and diabetes,” McDermott said. “Also normal health patterns and growth patterns within this four-year window.”
While the team has not begun analyzing the data, there have been two findings from the study. One, students generally overestimate their actual level of health, Abudra said.
“Right now, we are seeing that Cal Poly students are not as healthy as they think they are when we compare the survey data and the data the FLASH team actually measured,” Abudra said.
It was also found in early testing that a large proportion of students at Cal Poly had elevated blood pressure, McDermott said.
“In preliminary testing, 65 percent of the men had elevated blood pressure which includes prehypertension and hypertension,” McDermott said.
The finding confirmed the need to look at cardiovascular risk factors among college students since researchers have very little data on the college years, McDermott said.
The FLASH study has taken the first step to helping researchers gain a perspective on student health during college, McDermott said.
“Cal Poly has set the foundation to have universities across the nation join into this study,” McDermott said. “The heavy work has been done by establishing training for physical assessments and standard surveys. Performing this study at other universities would give us more information on student health during the college years and tell us how Cal Poly compares to different campuses.”
“The data that we do have is on a very small population and there is no perspective on how college students change through the years.”
Morgan Butler contributed to this article.