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

2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (6) ◽  
Author(s):  
Arda Kılınç ◽  
Nilgün Çöl ◽  
Beltinge Demircioğlu-Kılıç ◽  
Neriman Aydin ◽  
Ayse Balat ◽  
...  

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. doi: https://doi.org/10.12669/pjms.35.6.748 How to cite this:Kilinc A, Col N, Demircioglu-Kilic B, Aydin N, Balat A, Keskin M. Waist to height ratio as a screening tool for identifying childhood obesity and associated factors. Pak J Med Sci. 2019;35(6):1652-1658. doi: https://doi.org/10.12669/pjms.35.6.748 This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

2022 ◽  
Vol 40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mateus Augusto Bim ◽  
André de Araújo Pinto ◽  
Gaia Salvador Claumann ◽  
Andreia Pelegrini

ABSTRACT Objective: To verify the prevalence of abdominal obesity with the waist-to-height ratio (WHtR) and associated factors in adolescents from a city in Southern Brazil. Methods: A total of 960 adolescents (494 boys) aged 15–18 years old participated in this study. The dependent variable was WHtR; independent variables were self-reported age, economic level, sexual maturation, physical activity level, screen time, and body fat. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and logistic regression. Results: It was observed that 36.7% of the adolescents presented high WHtR (50.2% in girls and 23.9% in boys). Regardless of sex, adolescents with high body fat were more likely of having high WHtR (boys: Odds Ratio [OR] 29.79; 95% confidence interval [95%CI] 16.87–52.62; girls: OR 19.43; 95%CI 10.51–35.94). In girls, high WHtR was associated with age (OR 1.83; 95%CI 1.17–2.87), and in boys, with economic level (OR 2.34; 95%CI 1.01–5.45). Conclusions: One in each three adolescents has abdominal obesity. Among adolescents with high body fat, girls aged 15–16 and boys with high-income are the groups most exposed to abdominal obesity.


2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 174
Author(s):  
Ushakiran C. B. ◽  
Sowmya Jagadeeshwara ◽  
Bharathi Lingaraju

Background: Worldwide raising trend in obesity among children is causing serious public health concerns and in developing countries it is threatening the viability of basic health care delivery. The objective of this study was to screen for overweight and obesity among school going children using the established methods as well as the newer screening tools and to compare the efficacy of the various screening toolsMethods: Prospective cross sectional study was conducted various government and non-government schools within city limits. And participants involves 1000 children in the age group of 5 to 15 years who met the predefined criteria were selected by purposive sampling.Results: Using BMI as a screening tool, 6.3% were identified as overweight and 5.8% as obese. Using Waist circumference alone, 5.2% were identified as overweight and 4.5% as obese. 13.8% and 5% were identified as overweight and obese respectively by waist circumference to height ratio. Using augmented BMI, 14.7% were identified as overweight and 4.3% as obese.Conclusions: Using WHTR and Augmented BMI, larger percentage of children were identified as overweight while the percentage of children identified as obese remained similar to using BMI or Waist circumference alone. 


2022 ◽  
Vol 40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mariana das Dores Paiva Canuto ◽  
Adriele Vidal Lucas Silva ◽  
João Victor Martins ◽  
Marlene de Melo Fonseca ◽  
Nathália Sernizon Guimarães ◽  
...  

ABSTRACT Objective: To evaluate the sociodemographic and lifestyle factors associated with abdominal obesity in children from public schools in Barbacena, state of Minas Gerais, Brazil. Methods: This is a cross-sectional study conducted on 326 students aged 7 to 9 years from public schools in the urban area of the city. Anthropometric data included body weight, height, body mass index according to age, waist circumference, and waist-to-height ratio. Food consumption was evaluated using the Previous Day Food Questionnaire. Abdominal obesity was assessed based on waist circumference and waist-to-height ratio. The bivariate and multivariate analyses were performed by logistic regression, estimating the crude and adjusted odds ratio (OR), with 95% confidence interval. Results: The prevalence of overweight was 30.7%; whereas the prevalence of abdominal obesity was 9.2 and 12.6% according to waist circumference and waist-to-height ratio, respectively. Boys (OR 2.76; 95%CI 1.22–6.25) and children from central schools (OR 2.73; 95%CI 1.08–6.80) presented an increased chance of abdominal obesity according to waist circumference. Abdominal obesity according to waist-to-height ratio was associated with the central location of the schools (OR 2.18; 95%CI 1.02–4.63) and the habit of skipping supper (OR 2.01; 95%CI 1.00–4.09). Conclusions: The findings showed that being a boy, studying in a central school, and skipping supper were the main risk factors associated with abdominal obesity.


BMJ Open ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (6) ◽  
pp. e037040
Author(s):  
Yalan Dou ◽  
Yuan Jiang ◽  
Yinkun Yan ◽  
Hongyan Chen ◽  
Yi Zhang ◽  
...  

ObjectivesTo demonstrate the accuracy and flexibility of using waist-to-height ratio (WHtR) as a screening tool for identifying children and adolescents with cardiometabolic risk (CMR) across a wide range of prevalence levels among general paediatric populations.DesignA nationwide population-based cross-sectional study with all data collected at school settings in six cities of China.ParticipantsA total of 8130 children and adolescents aged 7–18 years with complete anthropometric and CMR measurements based on blood tests were recruited.Outcome measuresElevated blood pressure, dyslipidaemia, elevated fasting blood glucose and central obesity were measured. The primary outcome, CMRs, was defined as meeting three or more of the above risk factors. The accuracy of WHtR for identifying CMRs was evaluated using areas under the curves (AUCs) with 95% CI of the receiver operating characteristic curve. The predictability of WHtR at given CMRs prevalence levels was estimated by positive predictive value (PPV) and negative predictive value.ResultsOverall, 6.1% of study participants were presented with CMRs. WHtR had high AUCs ranging from 0.84 (95% CI 0.81 to 0.88) to 0.88 (95% CI 0.86 to 0.90) in the total population and age-subgroup and gender-subgroup. The overall optimal WHtR cut-off value was 0.467, with boys having a higher cut-off than girls (0.481 vs 0.456). WHtR achieved an overall sensitivity of 0.89 and PPV of 18.8% at a specificity of 0.75. The screening performance of WHtR remained satisfactory across a wide range of given CMRs prevalence levels (5%, 10% and 20%).ConclusionWHtR as a screening tool could accurately and flexibly identify children affected with the clusters of three or more of CMR factors from the general paediatric population with various CMR prevalence levels. Our findings provide support for policy-making on early CMR identification and management in the high-risk group of children.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rajan Shrestha ◽  
Bijay Khatri ◽  
Madan P. Upadhyay ◽  
Janak R. Bhattarai ◽  
Manish Kayastha ◽  
...  

Abstract BackgroundObesity has become a global epidemic and an important risk factor for non-communicable diseases. Earlier thought to be a problem of developed world, it has now become a problem of low- and middle-income countries like Nepal. In absence of a routine surveillance or a registry system, the actual burden and trend of obesity in Nepal is unknown. Obesity and overweight are recognized risk factors for hypertension and associated with cardiovascular disease. The aim of the study was to find out burden of obesity, using three commonly employed metrics in hospital outpatient setting of a low-income country as predictors of hypertension, and compare ability of different anthropometric measurements through a non-inferiority study to predict hypertension.MethodsThis cross-sectional study was conducted among 40-69 years outpatients in a tertiary Eye and ENT hospital in a semi-urban area of Nepal among randomly selected 2,256 participants from 6,769 outpatients who were evaluated in Health Promotion and risk factor screening service. We did correlation analysis to determine the relationship between anthropometric measurement and blood pressure. The area under the Receiver Operating characteristic curve of Body Mass Index (BMI), Waist to Height Ratio (WHtR) and Waist Circumference (WC) was calculated and compared. ResultsThe prevalence of obesity and overweight by BMI was 16.09% and 42.20% respectively; by Waist-to-Height-Ratio was 32.76% which is two times higher than obesity measured by BMI. High waist circumference was observed among 66.76% participants. Female participants had greater prevalence of high WC (77.46%) than male (53.73%) (p<0.001). Prevalence of hypertension and pre-hypertension was 40.67% and 36.77% respectively. The areas under the curve were significantly higher than 0.5 for BMI (0.593), WHtR (0.602) and WC (0.610).ConclusionWaist circumference correlated well with obesity and hypertension. It also had higher predicting ability than WHtR and BMI to predict hypertension. Waist circumference thus proved to be non-inferior to two other commonly used metrics. It proved superior in detecting obesity in female. This simple and inexpensive tape measurement may play an important role in future diagnosis of obesity and prediction of HTN in resource constrained settings of developing countries.


2018 ◽  
Vol 21 (6) ◽  
pp. 1028-1035 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcelo Castanheira ◽  
Dóra Chor ◽  
José Uéleres Braga ◽  
Letícia de Oliveira Cardoso ◽  
Rosane Härter Griep ◽  
...  

AbstractObjectiveTo evaluate the performance of waist-to-height ratio (WHtR) in predicting cardiometabolic outcomes and compare cut-off points for Brazilian adults.DesignCross-sectional study. WHtR areas under the curve (AUC) were compared with those for BMI, waist circumference (WC) and waist-to-hip ratio (WHR). The outcomes of interest were hypertension, diabetes, hypertriacylglycerolaemia and presence of at least two components of metabolic syndrome (≥2 MetS). Cut-offs for WHtR were compared and validity measures were estimated for each point.SettingTeaching and research institutions in six Brazilian state capitals, 2008–2010.SubjectsWomen (n 5026) and men (n 4238) aged 35–54 years who participated in the Brazilian Longitudinal Study of Adult Health (ELSA-Brasil) at baseline.ResultsWHtR age-adjusted AUC ranged from 0·68 to 0·72 in men and 0·69 to 0·75 in women, with smaller AUC for hypertriacylglycerolaemia and the largest for ≥2 MetS. WHtR performed better than BMI for practically all outcomes; better than WHR for hypertension in both sexes; and displayed larger AUC than WC in predicting diabetes mellitus. It also offered better discriminatory power for ≥2 MetS in men; and was better than WC, but not WHR, in women. Optimal cut-off points of WHtR were 0·55 (women) and 0·54 (men), but they presented high false-negative rate compared with 0·50.ConclusionsWe recommend using WHtR (which performed similarly to, or better than, other available indices of adiposity) as an anthropometric index with good discriminatory power for cardiometabolic outcomes in Brazilian adults, indicating the already referenced limit of WHtR≥0·50.


2018 ◽  
Vol 2018 ◽  
pp. 1-7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Whye Lian Cheah ◽  
Ching Thon Chang ◽  
Helmy Hazmi ◽  
Grace Woei Feng Kho

This cross-sectional study was conducted to determine the predictive power of anthropometric indicators and recommend cutoff points to discriminate hypertension among adolescents in Sarawak, Malaysia. A total of 2461 respondents aged 12-17 years participated in this study with mean age of 14.5±1.50 years. All anthropometric indicators had significant area under the ROC curve, with body mass index (BMI) and waist circumference (WC) ranging from 0.7 to 0.8. The best anthropometric indicators for predicting hypertension for boys were WC, BMI, and waist-to-height ratio (WHtR). For girls, BMI was the best indicators followed by WHtR and WC. The recommended BMI cutoff point for boys was 20 kg/m2 and 20.7 kg/m2 for girls. For WC, the recommended cutoff point was 67.1 cm for boys and 68.2 cm for girls. BMI and WC indicators were recommended to be used at the school setting where the measurement can easily be conducted.


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