Obesity and the Factors Related to it in a High School Students Study in Tirana, Albania

Abstract

The aim of the study was to investigate the body weight models among adolescents school students. Overweight and obesity is a global public health concern. There is limited information on overweight and obesity in Albanian adolescents. A cross-sectional study on a stratified sample of 1786 adolescents who attended school , 705( 39%) males and 1081(61%) females was conducted in Tirana city in 2012. They were interviewed and examined for weight and height using standardized techniques. Referring to the 2007 WHO classification for the BMI scale it resulted that 4.4% 95% CI 3.5 -5.4 adolescents resulted overweight where 32.9% were females and 67.1% were males with a statistically significant difference among them, p<0.01. The overall prevalence of overweight in adolescent females was 2.4% , while in males was 7.5% . The prevalence of obesity class I resulted 0.4% , the obesity class II was 0.3% and obesity class III was 0.1% 95% CI 0.02 – 0.3 from the total of participants. A remarkable finding of our study was that 70.8% of adolescent school students were in normal weight, 20% of them underweight, where 71.7% were females, p<0.01.

DOI: 10.5901/jesr.2013.v3n7p563