Prevalencia de obesidad infantil en la Región de Murcia, valorando distintas referencias para el índice de masa corporal

Abstract

IntroductionChildhood obesity is a problem of high magnitude with serious repercussions on health, which justifies estimating its prevalence at local level to identify conditioning factors and to take preventive actions. The main objective of the present work is to estimate the prevalence of overweight and obesity in the children in the general population of the Murcia Region, using the body mass index (BMI) and applying the International Obesity Task Force (IOTF) criteria, and to compare these results with the ones obtained from other frequently used references in Spain. Material and methodsThe BMI of 178,894 children aged from 2 to 14 years was determined. The prevalence of overweight and obesity was compared to the IOTF, to the studies of the World Health Organization, as well as those of the Orbergozo Foundation (FO), and the Cross-sectional Spanish Growth Study (ETEC) references. The agreement between the different results was evaluated using the kappa index. ResultsThe evaluation using the IOTF cut-off points gave an overweight prevalence of 20.6% (95% CI: 20.4-20.8), an obesity prevalence of 11.4% (95% CI: 11.2-11.5) and an overweight plus obesity prevalence of 32% (95% CI: 31.8-32.2), with this last one being higher in girls (33.2%) than in boys (30.9%). The highest agreement is between IOTF and FO-2011 (kappa=.795) and between FO-2011 and ETEC (kappa=.794). ConclusionA high prevalence of overweight and obesity in children in the Region of Murcia was found. The ETEC and the FO-2011 study showed the highest agreement with the results obtained using the IOTF criteria.