Overweight and Obesity among School-Aged Children of Metropolitan Tehran, Iran
Abstract
To investigate the prevalence of overweight and obesity based on Body Mass Index (BMI) values among children in Tehran. Cross-sectional survey of a randomized sample of school aged children in Tehran. A total of 3104 boys and girls in 3 aged groups with mean age 6, 8 and 10 years. The data consisted of parents-reported measures of height and weight that were obtained from questionnaires, and then BMI [weight (kg) / height (m) 2 ] was calculated. The prevalence of overweight and obesity was higher than expected as related to recent Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention (CDC) growth charts in comparison to a recent International Obesity Task Force (IOTF) approach. These differences were higher among Iranian girls than boys. While obesity prevalence might not be important as a definition of IOTF and CDC, but rapid increases of obesity in recent years are potentially dangerous. International authorities should accelerate the efforts regarding construction a global BMI reference data, based on obesity definition in developing countries.
Keywords:
Overweight, obesity, less developed countries, BMI, growth chartsArticle Metrics
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Copyright (c) 2005 Asian Network for Scientific Information
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
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