Waist to height ratio as a screening tool for identifying childhood obesity and associated factors.

Arda Kılınç,Ayse Balat,Nilgün Çöl,Neriman Aydin,Beltinge Demircioğlu-Kılıç,Mehmet Keskin

doi:10.12669/pjms.35.6.748

Abstract

Objective:To investigate the prevalence of obesity and associated factors during childhood in Southeastern Turkey. Another objective was to determine the cut-off points of Waist to Height Ratio (WHtR) values for defining obesity/abdominal obesity.Methods:The community-based descriptive cross-sectional study was conducted in Gaziantep Turkey between November 2011 and December 2011 with 2718 primary school/high schools students aged 6-17 years. The SPSS 22.00 was used for the analysis of data.Results:The prevalence of overweight, obesity, abdominal obesity, was 13.2%, 4.2% ,26.4%, respectively. There was a reverse relationship between BMI/WC values and sleep durations (p<0.05). The BMI/WC values were higher in students with computer usage time ≥1 hours in a day (p<0.05). Parental obesity status has an effective role on the WC/BMI values of children (p<0.05). The WHtR was a good predictor of diagnosis on obesity and abdominal obesity (AUC=0.928, p<0.0001; AUC=0.920, p<0.0001; respectively). The optimal cut-off values for obesity and abdominal obesity were detected as 0.5077, 0.4741, respectively.Conclusions:The WHtR can be used for diagnosis of obesity/abdominal obesity. Parental obesity, short sleep duration and computer use more than one hour per day are risk factors for the development of obesity in children and adolescents.

Highlights

Abdominal obesity is associated with hypertension, diabetes, and dyslipidemia.[4]
The overweight and obesity were more frequent in males
Our study demonstrated that the prevalence of overweight/ obesity in 6-17 years’ school children were 13.2%/4.2%

Summary

Introduction

Childhood obesity has become one of the most serious health problems of the last century.[1,2] Obesity is a multifactorial disease determined by genetic/environmental interactions (e.g. sleep duration, computer usage time, television viewing time, physical activity, and food consumption)and is an important risk factor for the development of metabolic syndrome, insulin resistance, hyperlipidemia, and cardiovascular disease.[1,2,3] Abdominal obesity is associated with hypertension, diabetes, and dyslipidemia.[4] Diagnosis of obesity/ abdominal obesity are required age, gender, and height specific percentiles. Waist-to-height ratio (WHtR) recommended as analternative measurement method for determining obesity/abdominal obesity. Pak J Med Sci November - December 2019 Vol 35 No 6 www.pjms.org.pk 1652 in childhood.[4] It is a simple, age-independent marker to preventing the need for age-related reference charts in different ethnic/gender groups.[5]

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Conclusion