Vol. 2, Issue 7 (2013)

Material and Methods

Study Design: This was a school-based, cross-sectional, questionnaire based study carried out over a period of six months at Department of Physiology, Alluri sitarama Raju academy of sciences Eluru, Andhra Pradesh. We adopted a multistage stratified random sampling procedure. Six schools were selected by a simple random technique.The subjects were children, 6 to 15 years of age. Children with history of chronic diseases like Tuberculosis, asthma, diabetes were not included. Anthropometric measurements: Trained investigators weighed all of children without shoes and heavy clothing, using an electronic weighing scale with an error of ±100 g.

Result: A total of 90 children in the age group of 6 to 15 years were analyzed. Out of these 59 (65%) subjects were males and 31 (35%) subjects were females. Body Mass Index, we have categorized Male and Female as Underweight (UW), Healthy weight (HW) and Overweight + Obese (OW). The average Body Mass Index (BMI) for boys was 17.9 and that of girls was 18.32.

In male category, 67 (38%) were underweight, 71 (40.3%) were healthy weight and 38 (21.5%) were Overweight + Obese. In female category, 36 (29%) were underweight, 57 (45.9%) were healthy weight and 31 (25%) were Overweight + Obese. It has been found that, more no. of subjects and more than 2 hours watching T.V are from overweight+obese group whereas less than 1 hours watching T.V belonged to underweight and healthy weight were less numbers.

Conclusion: We found a high prevalence of overweight and obese children in our study. Since obesity in adulthood has its onset in childhood, it is important to have effective implementation of school health activities to reduce and curb the burden of childhood obesity.