The Study On The Relationship Between Parents' Knowledge-Attitude-Practice About Obesity And Children's Overweight/Obesity In Primary And Middle Schools

Objective: To investigate the epidemiological distribution on overweight and obesity of the primary and middle school students in Tianjin; to describe parents' knowledge, attitude and practices(KAP) on overweight and obesity. Compare the differences of parents' KAP about obesity between overweight/obese group and non-overweight group. Exploring the influence factors of students' overweight/obesity. Provide reasonable suggestions for preventing overweight/obesity in children, and provide guidance for the intervention and family health education in the future.Method: There were totally 13 primary and middle schools selected from both urban areas and rural areas in Tianjin by using random sampling method. Multi-stage stratified cluster sampling was used to select 10265 samples in these schools,height and weight were measured by the professional staff to calculate body mass index(BMI).The parents of the students had taken a part in a questionnaire survey. The questionnaire included the following aspects:(1)the characteristics of the family;(2)the parent's knowledge of obesity;(3)the parent's attitude to obesity;(4)the parent's parent's dietary history and exercise behavior about obesity. All data were input by Epi Data 3.0 and analyzed by SPSS 17.0. Overweight and obesity rates were compared by chi-square test, defining P<0.05 to have statistical significance.Result:1. The overweight/obesity rate of students in primary and middle school in TianjinOverweight relevance ratio was 13.7% and obesity relevance ratio was 16.0% respectively; while urban boys, urban girls, rural boys and rural girls overweight combine with obese relevance ratio were 37.8%, 26.4%, 29.9%, 24.7% respectively. The relevance ratio of overweight combine with obese of urban boys in Tianjin stays in a high position without going down. The average value of BMI of urban boys in 7-12-year old, 15-year old and 17-18-year old close to critical value of overweight referred to the WOCG standard.2. Parents' knowledge, attitude and practices(KAP) on overweight and obesityMost parents in Tianjin knew knowledge related to obesity well. About the attitudes toward obesity, the consistency between parents' cognition and children's real weight is general(kappa=0.421).Parents in urban area are more likely to underestimate their child's weight. The difference of the answers to "the frequency of eating high calorie snacks during the past week" between the parents whose child was overweight/obese and the parents whose child was not overweight had a statistical difference(P = 0.038). On the physical behavior, the answer to "How many days that you take exercise with your child during the last week?" has a statistical significance between the two groups(P<0.001). On the sedentary behavior, the answer to "How long did you take to use a computer or play video games average during the last week?" has a statistical significance between the two groups(P=0.030).3. Influential factors analysis on overweight and obesity of students in TianjinMultivariate analysis showed that 10-12 years old, cesarean section production, father/mother overweight/obese, being underestimated weight by parents, and child's birth weight?4000g were the risk factors of overweight/obesity, while girls, not "the China one", and to see nutrition labels were the protective factors of overweight/obesity to primary and middle school students in Tianjin.Conclusion:1. The problem of overweight and obesity among primary and middle school students in Tianjin is still serious. The parents of KAP about obesity is not enough to resist the prevalence of children obesity in Tianjin.2. Parent's underestimation of child's weight is one of the risk factors of child's overweight/obesity. Health education staff should provide parents the method that judging their child overweight/obesity, to correct children's status of overweight/obesity in time.