1265-P: Understanding the Childhood Obesity Trend in Brazil: The Target for Diabetes Prevention

Diabetes mellitus (DM) in children is on the rise worldwide and it’s well established the relationship between it and obesity. The understanding of this risk factor for DM is critical to preventing the disease. The objective is to analyze epidemiological trends of weight in children, adding data from 2019. Temporal cross-sectional analysis of the years 2001, 2011 and 2019 was randomly done with children aged 5 to 9 years and proportionally selected from public and private schools in Feira de Santana, Bahia, Brazil. Overweight and obesity were defined using body mass index (BMI) ≥ the 85th and the 95th percentiles for age and gender, respectively. A total of 1.994 children were studied, being 699 (15.6±2.5 BMI; 366 [52%] girls; 7.1±1.3y), 714 (16.6±3.0 BMI; 348 [48.9%] girls; 7.6±1.4y), 581 (17.0±3.7 BMI; 303 [53.2%] girls; 6.9±2.2y) in 2001, 2011 and 2019 respectively. The excessive weight prevalence increased significantly from 2001, 2011 to 2019 (overweight [9.2%, 15.5% and 16.9%] and obesity [4.4%, 7.2%; 11.7%]) and normal weight decreased (86.4%, 68.6%, 61.9%) with p value <0.005 for all analyzes. Classifying by type of school, private (group 1) and public (group 2), in both groups comparing 2001, 2011 and 2019, the rate of normal weight decreased (84.2%, 68.6%, 59.4% for group 1 and 88.0%, 81.7% and 67.6% for group 2), also with significance. The prevalence of overweight significantly increased between 2001 and 2011 for both private (9.9%, 19.9%) and public (8.7%, 13.3%) sectors, but maintained itself stable for both between 2011 and 2019 (group 1[19.9%, 18.6%], group 2 [13.3%, 12.8%]). As for obesity, it did significantly increase in both groups through the entire period, at a rate of 6.0%, 11.5% and 13.2% in group 1 and 3.4%, 5.0% and 8.4% in group 2, respectively for 2001, 2011 and 2019. This trend towards increased prevalence of obesity in children from both the private and public sectors confirms the urgency in taking preventive measures to control not only obesity but its comorbidities such as DM.