Endocrine Abstracts

Goal: To study the relation between the obesity of children and their parents, and energy intake.

Materials and methods: Of 236 households containing 828 population (356 children age 5–25 years, and the rest their parents) were selected from the subjects of ‘Tehran Lipid and Glucose study’ (2006–2008) for this study. Food intake of the subjects was studied using FFQ. In this study, energy intake ≥75 percentile was regarded as ‘high energy intake’ among the subjects considering their age and sex. Cut off point for defining overweight among subject age 5–19 years was considered as BMI≥95th percentile of reference diagram for Indian children. The cut off was also considered BMI≥30 for over 20 years old subjects.

Finding: Prevalence of overweight among the subjects from the household with both parents obese, one of the parents obese, and none of them obese were 44.2, 28.8 and 11.6% respectively. There were higher of OR for being over weight among the children with both parents obese (OR=5.1, 1.5–7.7) and even with one parent obese (OR=4.7, 1.6–13.4). There was a significant direct relation between BMI of fathers and mothers separately with BMI of their children, (r=0.43, P<0.001 and r=0.51, P<0.001 respectively). The relation between ratio of energy intake to BMR of children with their BMI (r=0.37, P<0.05) and also ‘the ratio of energy intake to BMR’of mothers with BMI of their children (r=0.3, P<0.05) were significant too.

Conclusion: The findings of this study shows the relation of genetic factors and nutritional habits of parents to their children’s obesity.