2019/04/25_Carla Moreira, Instituto de Saúde Pública da Universidade do Porto

April 25th 2019

Biomedical Research Center – CINBIO | Conference room – Torre CACTI

Body mass index transitions during childhood: a multi-state model approach


2019/04/25 – 10:00 h | Carla Moreira, Instituto de Saúde Pública da Universidade do Porto

Abstract

Prevalence of overweight and obesity in young children has risen dramatically in the last decades in most developed countries. Childhood overweight and obesity are known to have immediate and long-term health consequences and are now recognized important public health concerns of our time. In this study, we aimed to assess thetransitions across states defined in terms of body mass index categories on young children.

Although children experiences transitions in a continuous time, assessments on them are often made at irregularity spaced time points. A Markov 4-state model for examining longitudinal data on the body mass index (BMI) status collected under interval-censoring observation is formulated. The participants consisted of 4128 children from Generation XXI birth cohort, Porto – Portugal, with anthropometric evaluations at three follow up waves, from 2005 and 2017. The instantaneous rate of transition of children between the ages 4 and 10 years, among various states, defined by the BMI categories was estimated and the effect of maternal age and education, type of delivery, sex and birth weight was evaluated. Statistical significant results were only found for sex and maternal education and were only significant on the progressive transitions.

Authors: Carla Moreira, Luís Meira-Machado, Maria João Fonseca, Ana Cristina Santos.

  • EPIUnit – Instituto de Saúde Pública, Universidade do Porto
  • Departamento de Ciências da Saúde Pública e Forenses e Educação Médica, Faculdade de Medicina, Universidade do Porto, Porto, Portugal.
  • CMAT – Centre of Mathematics &Department of Mathematics and Applications, University of Minho, Portugal.