Assessment of nutritional status in children living in rural Guarulhos, SP, Brazil

Resumo

Introduction: Obesity is closely related to an increased incidence of cardiovascular disease, hyperlipidemia, hypertension, diabetes, among others. Epidemiological studies show a trend of increasing weight of the population of both developed and developing countries. In the last 20 years in almost all age groups, there was an increase in the prevalence of obesidade, including among children 3 to 12 years of age.

Objective: Assess the nutritional status of a group of children in pre-school and school age. Test the accuracy of the new WHO child curves of growth based on BMI.

Methodology or experience description: Conducted a cross-sectional, descriptive, observational study to assess the nutritional status of a group of children in preschool and school-age residents of the public school in a rural area of the municipality of Guarulhos - SP, Brazil. The sample consisted of 800 children classified into two age groups. Anthropometric variables body weight (kg) and height (m) were measured to calculate BMI (kg / m²). Weight was measured in single outlet with mechanical scale platform type with a capacity of 150 kg and 100 g precision. To measure the height, the measurement was taken in triplicate to calculate the average value, using a stadiometer aluminum tape type set to balance.

Results: The results of the evaluation of the nutritional status of the total study population (n = 4 800), we obtained the following percentages; 0.5% of severe thinness (n = 4 ), 2% of underweight (n = 4 16), 72.5 % of eutrophic (n = 4 580), 4.37% risk for overweight (n = 4 35), 11% overweight (n = 4 88), 7% were obese (n = 4 56) and 2.63% of severe obesity (n = 21). The results corroborate the trend of childhood obesity observed in developed countries, which already shows significant increase also in developing countries.

Conclusions or Hypothesis: The results of this study demonstrated that the curves for Body Mass Index (BMI) proposed by the World Health Organization (WHO) are sensitive to the nutritional profile screening tool in children, highlighting the global trend of increasing childhood obesity .