Creator:

Statistics Canada

Geography:

North America > Canada

Categories:

• Nutrition, Obesity, and Body Mass

Tags:

• Body Mass Index
• child development
• child obesity
• health surveys
• longitudinal
• trajectories

Date:

2009

URL:

http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/82-003-x/2009003/article/10921-eng.pdf

Annotation:

Researchers have yet to provide a comprehensive explanation of the variability in the development of childhood obesity, owing in part to the dearth of longitudinal studies. Such an understanding would
contribute to the improvement of approaches for the primary and secondary prevention of childhood
obesity. This study identifi es, in a representative sample of Canadian children, age-related patterns of overweight and obesity between toddlerhood and childhood.  The data are from cycles 2 through 5 (1996/1997 to 2002/2003) of the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth. The sample comprised children aged 24 to 35 months at baseline, who were followed biennially over six years. Group based mixture modelling analyses (using SAS PROC TRAJ) were conducted to identify the sex-specific developmental trajectories of body mass index (BMI).