PREVALENCE AND TRENDS IN CHILDHOOD OBESITY

Prevalence and Trends in Childhood Obesity

Prevalence and Trends in Childhood Obesity

Introduction

Childhood obesity is a particular concern for several reasons. Excess weight in childhood raises the risk of excess weight in adulthood and with it the risk of earlier onset of obesity-related chronic disease. Overweight children may carry early signs of chronic disease without being aware of the problem, exacerbating the likely disease outcome. They may also suffer psychosocial problems due to obesity, including low self-esteem and reduced social networking.

Health policy-makers seeking to estimate the burden of childhood obesity, and health-promotion workers designing interventions to reduce prevalence levels need to be aware of trends and the extent of the problem. Representative surveys of child obesity prevalence are required, and they depend on agreed definitions of child obesity, taking account of children's natural growth - especially the changes in growth rates found in early infancy and puberty. There are several approaches to measuring obesity in children, and these give differing estimates of the extent of the problem. However, all the approaches have one thing in common: they have demonstrated a substantial and rapid increase in the numbers of children affected, in most regions of the world, within the past two or three decades.

Defining Child Overweight and Obesity

An ideal measure of obesity should be an accurate estimate of fat in the body; easy to obtain in time, cost and terms of acceptance of children, and a good record, and the published reference value. Unfortunately, no existing measure satisfies all these criteria. Measurement of obesity (obesity) in children and adolescents are usually approximate, obtained by indirect measurement method based on a series, and the scope of the commitments set. Results proposed using several different criteria for the definition of obesity, which is a variety of reference charts and tables.

For young children, especially those under 5 years of age, has been common practice to use weight for height instead of BMI to indicate nutritional status. This stems from many decades of concern with infant malnutrition and retarded growth, expressed as thinness and stunting. 'Weight-for-age', 'height-for-age', and 'weight-for-height' are used to measure expansion and are compared with published growth curves taken from a reference population (Willett 2008, 74).

In recent years, body mass index has been increasingly accepted as valid indirect measures of obesity in school-age children and adolescents for survey purposes. It leads to different methods of selecting the appropriate threshold for body mass index, BMI in the normal fluctuations in the growth account. Age, body weight reference map has been developed by several organizations, such as the US National Centre for Health Statistics and national authorities in the UK and France.

In adults, obesity is generally defined as a BMI greater than 30 kg/m2, and overweight as a BMI between 25 and 30 kg/m2. Defining a single standard for children is more difficult: healthy between height and weight of children showed a significant relationship between volatility as they grow through infancy and childhood (Flegal 2002, ...