Prevalence of obesity among secondary school students from 2009 to 2014 in China: a meta-analysis

In recent years, obesity was a major public health problem in many countries. It was estimated that 8% of their children are obese. However, little is known about the overall prevalence of obesity among secondary students in China, the aim of this study was to evaluate the overall obesity prevalence of student from Chinese secondary school.

Publications from 2009 to 2014 on the obesity prevalence among secondary school students in China were retrieved from PubMed, online Chinese periodical full-text databases of VIP, CNKI and Wan fang. Meta Analyst was used analyze the total rates of obesity for Chinese secondary school.

After evaluation of the quality of the articles, 32 papers were finally included in our study, and the total sample sizes on the obesity investigation were 218317 (107631 male and 110686 female), in which 27455(14865 male and 12590 female) were obesity. Meta-analyst findings showed that the pooled prevalence of obesity in secondary school students are 8.4 %( 95% CI: 6.2%- 11.3%) and 4.8 %( 95% CI: 3.2%-7.2%) for boy and girl respectively.

Our results suggest that school and government related department should pay more attention to the obesity among secondary school students in China, and take some properly measures should to curve the trend growth of obesity.