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Assessment of Child Anthropometry in a Large Epidemiologic Study
Published on: February 2, 2017
Establishing a standard definition for child overweight and obesity worldwide: international survey
T J Cole1, M C Bellizzi, K M Flegal
1Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, Institute of Child Health, London WC1N 1EH. tim.cole@ich.ucl.ac.uk
Objective:
To develop an internationally acceptable definition of child overweight and obesity, specifying the measurement, the reference population, and the age and sex specific cut off points.
Design:
International survey of six large nationally representative cross sectional growth studies.
Setting:
Brazil, Great Britain, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, Singapore, and the United States.
Subjects:
97 876 males and 94 851 females from birth to 25 years of age.
Main Outcome Measure:
Body mass index (weight/height(2)).
Results:
For each of the surveys, centile curves were drawn that at age 18 years passed through the widely used cut off points of 25 and 30 kg/m(2) for adult overweight and obesity. The resulting curves were averaged to provide age and sex specific cut off points from 2-18 years.
Conclusions:
The proposed cut off points, which are less arbitrary and more internationally based than current alternatives, should help to provide internationally comparable prevalence rates of overweight and obesity in children.
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