This article is more than 5 years old. Information may no longer be current.
Minimal decreases in obesity seen with children on Medicaid
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
Children insured by Medicaid did not experience as sharp a reduction in obesity rates as those insured by non-Medicaid plans, according to study results published online.
Xiaozhong Wen, MD, PhD, and colleagues, of the obesity prevention program at the department of population medicine at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute in Boston, examined data from 108,762 well-child visits for children who were aged younger than age 6 years between 1999 and 2008. The researchers set out to track obesity rates and compare them with two national databases: the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey and the Pediatric Nutrition Surveillance System (PedNSS).
Wen and colleagues found that after noting the steep increase in obesity from 1980 to 2001 examined by other studies, obesity rates in Massachusetts plateaued from 1999 to 2003 and then sharply decreased from 2004 to 2008. This decrease between 2004 and 2008 matches results from NHANES and PedNSS. However, those children who were insured through Medicaid experienced less significant declines, which the researchers hypothesized may be because children of lower socioeconomic status have less access to health education and supermarkets, and instead get much of their diet from convenience stores and fast-food restaurants.
“The smaller decrease in obesity prevalence in Medicaid-insured children suggests that the coming years may see a widening of socioeconomic disparities in childhood obesity,” the researchers wrote. “Continued routine surveillance by using well-child visit records will be one important method to gauge the success of ongoing policies and programs to decrease obesity rates overall and among young disadvantaged and minority children, among whom the prevalence of obesity remains especially high.”
Disclosure: Dr. Wen reports no relevant financial disclosures.
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts