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CDC: Childhood obesity rates down in Philadelphia; unhealthy weight still 'unacceptable'
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Childhood obesity is subsiding in Philadelphia, according to prevalence data and trends for more than 100,000 public school children within the School District of Philadelphia. However, high rates of obesity and severe obesity continue to pose a threat to the health and future of school children, data indicate.
“Recent efforts have been made to assess the epidemic increases in childhood obesity in the United States through public health surveillance methods. An important context in which such surveillance can take place is the school, because most children aged 5 through 18 years are enrolled in school and 90% of these students attend public schools,” researchers wrote.
Students’ height and weight were measured by school nurses. However, BMI for girls whose medical records indicated pregnancies were excluded from the analysis, researchers wrote.
Severe obesity was defined as BMI of ≥35. Secondary analyses of BMI values above the 99th percentile were conducted to evaluate the sensitivity to the differences in definition of severe obesity, researchers wrote. Demographic variables included sex; race/ethnicity; socioeconomic status (using free or reduced-price school lunches as a proxy); and grade.
Researchers found that the prevalence of obesity from 2009 to 2010 accounted for 20.5% of Philadelphia’s public school students, with a higher prevalence reported among students in grades six through eight (23%) compared with kindergarten through fifth grade (19.1%) and high school students (20.8%), researchers wrote.
Among boys in 2009 to 2010, Hispanics had the highest prevalence of obesity (25.6%), followed by whites (20.7%). However, among girls in 2009 to 2010, blacks had the highest prevalence (22.7%), followed by Hispanics, researchers wrote, adding that Asian females had the lowest prevalence in this time frame.
“Obesity declined slightly from 21.5% in 2006-2007 to 20.5% in 2009-2010, representing a 4.8% decrease. Most of the decrease was between 2006-2007 and 2008-2009, followed by a leveling off in 2009-2010. This pattern varied by demographic group,” researchers wrote.
Overall, severe obesity prevalence decreased from 8.5% to 7.9% from 2006-2007 to 2009-2010, marking a 7.7% decrease, researchers wrote. Further data demonstrate some groups that displayed a decrease in obesity, severe obesity or both — including those with the highest prevalence for severe obesity — achieved nonsignificant increases during the 2009-2010 school year.
“Some of these findings are consistent with national statistics on child overweight and obesity from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys (NHANES), although national rates of obesity in 2009-2010 were lower than those found among Philadelphia public school children,” researchers wrote.
Due to limitations and inconsistencies, they said the prevalence of unhealthy weight is still “unacceptably high” among school children in Philadelphia.
Disclosure: Funding for this project was made possible by cooperative agreement No. 3&58DP002626-01S1 from the CDC, US Department of Health and Human Services, and Get Healthy Philly. The researchers report no relevant financial disclosures.
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