Clustering of Unhealthy Behaviors: Protocol for a Multiple Behavior Analysis of Data From the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging

© 2021 (JMIR Publications). Shared with permission under the CC BY 4.0 license. This article was first published as: van Allen, Z., Bacon, S. L., Bernard, P., Brown, H., Desroches, S., Kastner, M., Lavoie, K., Marques, M., McCleary, N., Straus, S., Taljaard, M., Thavorn, K., Tomasone, J. R., & Presseau, J. (2021). Clustering of Unhealthy Behaviors: Protocol for a Multiple Behavior Analysis of Data From the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging. JMIR research protocols, 10(6), e24887. https://doi.org/10.2196/24887https://doi.org/10.2196/24887 ; Background: Health behaviours such as physical inactivity, unhealthy eating, smoking tobacco, and alcohol use are leading risk factors for non-communicable chronic disease and play a central role in limiting health and life satisfaction. To date, however, health behaviours tend to be considered separately from one another, resulting in guidelines and interventions for healthy aging siloed by specific behaviours and often focused only on a given health behaviour without considering the cooccurrence of family, social, work and other behaviours of everyday life. Objective: Understanding how behaviours cluster, and how such clusters are associated with physical and mental health, life satisfaction, and health care utilization may provide opportunities to leverage this co-occurrence to develop and evaluate interventions to promote multiple health behaviour change. Methods: Using cross-sectional baseline data from the Canadian Longitudinal Study of Aging, we will perform a pre-defined set of exploratory and hypothesis-generating analyses to examine the cooccurrence of health and everyday life behaviours. We will use agglomerative hierarchical cluster analysis to cluster individuals based on their behavioural tendencies. Multinomial logistic regression will then be employed to model the relationships between clusters and demographic indicators, healthcare utilization, and general health and life satisfaction, and assess whether sex and age moderate these relationships. ...