Elsevier

Preventive Medicine

Volume 39, Issue 2, August 2004, Pages 369-372
Preventive Medicine

Association of reduction in parental overweight with reduction in children's overweight with a 3-year follow-up

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ypmed.2004.01.033Get rights and content

Abstract

Background. Parental overweight has been reported to be a risk factor predicting obesity of their children. However, the effect of changes in parental overweight on the changes in children's overweight is not yet characterized.

Methods. Six hundred five children of 9–10 years underwent physical examinations and a survey concerning parents' body mass index (BMI) with a 3-year follow-up.

Results. In families where both parents' BMI was above 25 at baseline, when either parents' BMI decreased to less than 25 kg/m2, children improved their adiposity, atherosclerosis index (AI), and systolic blood pressure (SBP). No such improvement was observed in children both of whose parents maintained BMI ≥25 kg/m2.

Conclusions. Improving parental overweight possibly reduced the risk of overweight in their children. Changes in parental overweight status were associated with changes in overweight status of their children.

Introduction

Since the prevalence of obesity in Japanese children at 10 years of age has been increasing from 1970 with 3.6% in boys and 3.9% in girls to 2000 with 10.7% in boys and 9% in girls, childhood obesity is becoming a public health problem [1], [2], [3], [4]. Obesity in adults causes an increased risk of diseases such as hypercholesterolemia and hypertension [5]; furthermore, since Japanese are more sensitive to overweight which likely causes lifestyle-related disease such as diabetes [6], childhood obesity with possible future lifestyle-related diseases receives considerable attention [7], [8], [9].

In National Health Promotion Movement in the 21st Century (Healthy Japan 21), decreasing the rate of obesity in children to less than 7% was shown in addition to the goal for adults to under 15% for males and 20% for females [10]. Thus, the effort to lower the rate of overweight or obesity as a family-based approach is desirable in Japan. Studies in other country have revealed that intervention for obese children with the parents induced more behavioral changes, greater weight loss [11], and longer-term weight reduction [12] than children only. However, the effectiveness of promoting familial effort to improve anthropometric status and lifestyles is not yet clear for both obese children and parents because the association between decreasing body mass index (BMI) in parents and the change of overweight in children has not been well documented. Furthermore, parental overweight has been well known as a risk factor predicting childhood obesity or adolescent obesity in the future [4], [13], [14], [15]. Thus, we have examined the association of changes in parental overweight with the change in children's overweight during a 3-year period.

Section snippets

Methods

Six hundred five children of 9–10 years in three schools in a community of Japan underwent physical and blood examinations consisting of height, weight, body fat, blood pressure, cholesterol, HDL-cholesterol, alanine aminotransferase (ALT), and a survey concerning parents' height and weight in 1997–1999 completed by the parents. Follow-up examinations and a survey were carried out after 3 years. The examinations and follow-up examinations were performed at 9–10:30 a.m. in early September every

Results

Between values at baseline and at 3 years in children, significant differences were observed in height, weight, degree of overweight, BMI, body fat, HDL-cholesterol, AI, systolic blood pressure (SBP), and ALT (Table 1).

Between values at baseline and at 3 years in parents, significant differences were observed in weight and BMI in mothers, although the difference was approximately 1% between the two periods (Table 2).

The correlation of changes in physical characteristics in children and BMI in

Discussion

During the 3-year period, in families where both parents' BMI was above 25 at baseline, when either parents' BMI decreased to less than 25 kg/m2 (group B), children improved their adiposity and related factors such as atherosclerosis index and SBP. No such improvement was observed in children both of whose parents maintained BMI ≥25 kg/m2 (group D).

Previous studies have reported that the children's risk of becoming overweight increased with parental obesity [13], [14], [15], which has been

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank members of the Board of Education in Ina-machi of Saitama Prefecture, and Ina-machi Conference for the Promotion and Operation of Childhood Lifestyle-Related Diseases Prevention Examination (Chairman: Dr. Michio Sato).

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