142nd APHA Annual Meeting and Exposition

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309059
Age and Sex specific Body Mass Index cut-offs among the school children of West Bengal

142nd APHA Annual Meeting and Exposition (November 15 - November 19, 2014): http://www.apha.org/events-and-meetings/annual
Tuesday, November 18, 2014

Parthasarathi Mukherjee Sr., PhD, PGDPHN , Public Health, Liver Foundation, West Bengal, Kolkata, India
Title: Age and Sex specific Body Mass Index cut-offs among the school children of West Bengal.

Tapas Saha, Tushar Kanti Pathak, Partha Sarathi Mukherjee

Background: Though the body mass index (BMI) was developed in long back by Adolphe Quetelet, is still used to see trends in health and illness. It provides an easy way to measure obesity and underweight despite in recent years many researchers said that BMI is not the accurate way to measure body weight as this cannot estimate the visceral (abdominal) fat. But BMI is still proving useful in public health viewpoint to predict metabolic health disorders as well as malnutrition.

Objective: This study aims to develop the age and sex specific cut-offs for BMI to identify the under-weight, normal-weight, over-weight and obesity among the School children of West Bengal.

Study Design: 15357 children (aged between 5 to 16 years) were measured in this cross-sectional school based study. Students were participated in this study from various government schools from both Panchayet and rural areas.   

Result: This study explores the BMI cut-off values of school going children of West Bengal and it is seen that control limit of BMI values is lesser than suggested by many other reports. This study also finds underweight and obesity percentage is quite high for both boys and girls.

Conclusion: The age and sex specific BMI cut-off will be very useful to predict morbidity among the school children of West Bengal.   

Key words:  BMI, Children, Cut-off

Learning Areas:

Epidemiology

Learning Objectives:
Evaluate & Compare of BMI among school children.

Keyword(s): Epidemiology

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Qualified on the content I am responsible for because: I am the project director and chief functionary of Liver Foundation, West Bengal working in different public health programs since last 7 years.
Any relevant financial relationships? No

I agree to comply with the American Public Health Association Conflict of Interest and Commercial Support Guidelines, and to disclose to the participants any off-label or experimental uses of a commercial product or service discussed in my presentation.