Childhood obesity in Greece: the emerging role of primary health care.

188 adoption of the IADPSG diagnostic criteria and to discuss the implications of this change " 2. When applying the IADPSG criteria on the HAPO cohort, the majority of women diagnosed with GDM were identified by the FPG and the 1-hour measurement of the 75 g OGTT (8.3% and 5.7% of the entire study population, respectively) 3. Adding the 2-hour measurement identified another 2.1%. Thus, alternative diagnostic strategies such as measuring FPG alone or omitting the 2-hour blood draw can indeed be appealing. It would thus be interesting to verify their cost-effectiveness in comparison with the unmodified IADPSG diagnostic recommendations in a large prospective multicentre trial. Dear Editor, The prevalence of overweight and obesity among children and adolescents seems to be rising at particularly alarming rates in many regions of the world. This fact is particularly important in terms of cardiovascular health since childhood obesity tracks into adulthood and is associated with the presence of cardiovascular risk factors and target organ damage. Greece has a predominant place with regard to this issue, since it has been reported to have one of the highest prevalences in childhood obesity with significant rising trends 1-4. Childhood obesity has a multifactorial pathogenesis with genetic background, reduced physical activity along with a sedentary status, and poor dietary habits as contributory factors, although the role of each of them in the emergence of obesity remains elusive. However, the available evidence, although not strong enough, suggests that practices such as appropriate dietary behaviour and regular physical activity appear to be protective against weight and fatness gain during childhood and adolescence. These observations are important in the context of developing primary prevention programs against childhood obesity. In the last years, several cross-sectional studies have assessed obesity status in Greek children with measured data and according to the International Obesity Task Force standards. These studies report childhood obesity rates from 4% to 11% 1-4. Factors which may account for the observed discrepancies include time period of the study, characteristics and representativeness of the sample examined. It should be noted that the purpose of this letter was not to conduct a systematic review and of-course there are studies not mentioned. However, in most of these studies, overweight and obesity affect about one third of the examined young population. Moreover, overweight/obesity rates seem to be higher among boys compared to girls 1,2,4 although there are studies not confirming this observation 3. …