Prevalence of childhood obesity.

Abstract

Background The prevalence of obesity in children and adolescents has been increasing worldwide [1, 2], having impact on children's physical, psychological and social well-being [3, 4]. Objective To identify the prevalence of childhood obesity worldwide. Methods A systematic review of the literature began with the question: “What is the prevalence of childhood obesity worldwide?” The research was carried out on the EBSCO host, Google Scholar and B-On, on the scientific databases Medline/Pubmed, LILACS, CINAHL, Nursing & Allied Health Collection, Cochrane Plus Collection, MedicLatina and SciELO. The inclusion criteria were: full-text articles, in English, Portuguese or Spanish, published from 2013 to 2017. The Boolean equation used was: (Pediatric Obesity) OR (Overweight) AND (Children) AND (Prevalence). One hundred twenty-two (122) articles were found, of these, 24 were selected after comprehensive reading. Results Globally, in 2016, there were 41 million children under 5 years of age who were overweight or obese and 340 million children and adolescents aged 5 to 19 years were overweight/obese [5]. In 2013, in the European region the prevalence of overweight/obese people was 31.6%, with 17.7% corresponding to pre-obesity and 13.9% to childhood obesity [6, 7]. In China, the prevalence of overweight people doubled from 13% in 1986, to 27.7% in 2009. In the United States, 31.8% of children were overweight or obese [8]; in New Zealand, 31.7% were overweight and obese, and 2.5% were severely obese [9]. In Mexico City, 30.8% of adolescents, 24.2% of school-age children, 14.5% of latent and 11.5% of children in preschool age were overweight and obese [2]. In Brazil, 30.59% of the children/adolescents studied were overweight, obese or severely obese [8]. Conclusions Childhood obesity is one of the Public Health problems worldwide, it becomes urgent to monitor the problem properly and implement preventive measures to reduce this risk.