Prevalence and causes of paediatric obesity.
2005
Reilly, J. J.
Recent estimates based on body mass index suggest that 10-20% of the paediatric population were obese in the developed world by the late 1990s. These may be conservative assessments of the extent of the paediatric obesity epidemic: secular trends in body fatness and fat distribution suggest that contemporary children and adolescents may typically be fatter than in the past, and with a more central fat distribution. This in turn suggests that lifestyle changes in children and adolescents have been pervasive. Despite its apparent physiological simplicity, aetiology of obesity is complex and remains poorly understood. Studies of energy expenditure to date have failed to confirm that low energy expenditure predisposes to obesity. More epidemiological approaches to investigating the aetiology of paediatric obesity have been limited in the past, but recent studies have been more productive, suggesting a number of aetiological or "risk" factors which are now based on reasonably sound evidence. Some of these risk factors are promising candidate behaviours for strategies aimed at obesity prevention.
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