In the past two decades, there has been a 2to 4-fold increase in childhood obesity in the United States. The current epidemic of childhood obesity in the United States can be expected to cause a surge in cardiovascular disease in this generation.1,2 Already, obesity-related illnesses account for nearly 300 000 deaths and about $100 billion in economic costs per year in the United States. Theref...

UNLABELLED POLICY POINTS: The American public--both men and women and those with and without children in the household--holds parents highly responsible and largely to blame for childhood obesity. High attributions of responsibility to parents for reducing childhood obesity did not universally undermine support for broader policy action. School-based obesity prevention policies were strongly su...

BACKGROUND Childhood obesity rates have been increasing disproportionately among disadvantaged communities including culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) migrant groups in Australia due to their poor participation in the available obesity prevention initiatives. We sought to explore service providers' perceptions of the key factors influencing the participation of CALD communities in th...

Last year it was reported that a 9-year-old boy had died at school from sleep apnoea and Pickwickian syndrome. He weighed between 105 and 120 kg, and despite the overseeing medical doctor insisting that he be admitted for further investigations and treatment, his parents refused. He had been falling asleep in the classroom on a regular basis for 2 months before his tragic death. Obesity rates a...

There are different approaches used in science to elucidated important relationships and work better understand cause effect. The cohort study is one of the strongest observational designs because it can be temporal between exposures outcomes. However, studies also have a limitation as they usually unfold over relatively short period time static environment. In this volume Journal, Robinson et ...

BACKGROUND Identifying adults at increased risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) on the basis of childhood body mass index (BMI) could be informative for disease prevention but depends on the utility of childhood BMI cutoffs. OBJECTIVE We aimed to establish how well the International Obesity Task Force (IOTF) and population-specific cutoffs for childhood BMI predict CVD risk factors in midadul...

Against the background of rising rates of obesity in children and adults in the USA, and modest effect sizes for obesity interventions, the aim of the present narrative review paper is to extend the UNICEF care model to focus on childhood obesity and its associated risks with an emphasis on the emotional climate of the parent-child relationship within the family. Specifically, we extended the U...

Background: With the increased survival rates following the treatment of childhood cancer, it becomes equally important that the need for evidence based surveillance of long term effects of cancer therapy is addressed. This includes the risk of development of metabolic syndrome features like obesity, altered lipid and sugar profile, which was attempted in the present study. Materials and Metho...

The Communities for Healthy Living program used a community-based participatory research (CBPR) approach to empower Head Start parents in designing and pilot testing a multi-component family-centered obesity prevention program. One program component was a childhood obesity awareness campaign addressing common parental misconceptions about obesity. The campaign was designed by a community adviso...

INTRODUCTION Although studies have shown that childhood obesity overall is on the decline among New York City (NYC) public school children, the prevalence of severe childhood obesity has not been studied. METHODS We used height and weight measurements of 947,765 NYC public school students aged 5 to 14 years in kindergarten through 8th grade (K-8), from school years 2006-07 through 2010-11. We...