PREVALENCE OF OBESITY IN YOUNG ADOLESCENTS OF URBAN BHOPAL

Abstract

Background: As the country’s economy is improving at exponential rate, living habits of Indian population has changed abruptly leading to rapid proliferation of fast food centers thus increase in consumption of fatty food leading to increase in tendency of obesity. Obesity is the major risk factor for non communicable diseases like hypertension, diabetes and cardiovascular diseases.

Materials and methods: For this study 684 both male and female participants with age group between 16 to 18 years of age   (both male and females with equal number) who are non smokers, non alcoholics and were not suffering from any systemic illness were recruited. BMI (body mass index) and waist to hip ratio (WHR) was assessed in all the participants. WHR 0.85 was considered as cutoff.

Results: We observed 11.54% of study population was obese with BMI >30 and 18.56 were overweight with BMI 25-29.9. About 31.87% of study population has truncal obesity with WHR of >0.85. And were observed no statistically significant variation in the percentage of obesity between male and females but males has statistically significant high truncal obesity than females (p<0.01).

KEYWORDS: obesity; BMI; WHR