The Frequency of Obesity, Hypertension, and Anemia in School-Aged Children: A Retrospective Cross-Sectional Study from a Family Health Center

Objective: This study aimed to evaluate the frequency of obesity, hypertension and anemia in the periodic follow-up of school-age children and adolescents aged between 6-19 years. Methods: In this retrospective cross-sectional study, weight, height, body mass index (BMI), systolic/diastolic blood pressure measurements and complete blood count results were compiled between January 2018 and August 2019 at a family health center. School-age children and adolescents examined for periodic screening purposes and whose completed measurement records were included while incompleted records were excluded from the study. IBM SPSS 22.0 program was used to analyze the data, and statistical significance was accepted as p<0.05. Results: The follow-up results include the data of 1049 children, (536 boys; 513 girls), with an average age of 11.4±3.2 years. The frequency of obesity, hypertension, anemia, short height, and underweight was 7.3%, 24.5%, 76.6%, 1.9%, and 21.3% respectively. The frequency of anemia was observed higher in girls (85.2%) than in boys (68.6%) (p<0.001). While there is no significant difference between age groups and genders in terms of the presence of hypertension (p=0.299 and p=0.270), a higher hypertension diagnosis rate was observed in primary school children (26.1%) than children with hypertension diagnosis in secondary school (24.3%) and high school (19.9%), significantly (p<0.001 and p<0.001). Although the frequency of hypertension (31%) and anemia (85%) was higher in obese groups compared to other groups, it was not found statistically significant (p=0.151 and p=0.196). Conclusion: This study was performed in a primary health care institution; despite the prevalence of obesity at a similar rate to previous studies, it has demonstrated that one out of every four children was hypertensive or underweight, and almost all of the girls were anemic, resulting in cautionary results in terms of preventing growth and development problems, adult cardiovascular and maternal-fetal mortality risks.