Obesity and respiratory symptoms in primary school.

Abstract

SUMMARY The association of weight for height and triceps skinfold with seven respiratory symptoms has been examined using logistic regression analysis in 7800 5 to 11 year old children (6200 in England and 1600 in Scotland). The (SDS).10 " The SDS is calculated for each child as the difference between his or her measurement and the average measurement of a population of the same age, sex, and country divided by the standard deviation of the measurement for that population. Here overweight and underweight refer to the two extremes of the range for weight for height, and fat and lean for triceps skinfold. The studied respiratory symptoms are shown in Table 1.Method of analysis. A logistic regression analysis was conducted for each respiratory symptom as a dichotomous dependent variable; the children being divided into two groups, those who had a positive response for the respiratory symptom and those who had a negative response. Children with a missing value were excluded. The analyses were conducted separately for weight for height and for triceps skinfold, each as a continuous independent variable. Many other independent variables were included in the analysis for each respiratory symptom because they had a possible association with respiratory symptoms. A sequence of linear models was fitted to the data to determine the extent to which the dependent variable was associated with each independent factor after adjustment for all other independent variables. The association with each obesity measure was also examined when adjustment was only made in the model for two of the independent variables, age and sex. This age-sex model was also

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Obesity is associated with increased risk of allergy in Vietnamese adolescents

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