The prevalence of overweight and obesity in the city of floriano, piauí
International Journal of Development Research
The prevalence of overweight and obesity in the city of floriano, piauí
Received 28th July, 2018; Received in revised form 29th August, 2018; Accepted 17th September, 2018; Published online 29th October, 2018
Copyright © 2018, Raíza Campos Sousa et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Obesity is a chronic disease characterized by excess body mass in the individual who has no single cause and is not defined and is caused by several factors that acting together lead the individual to obesity and to develop numerous diseases that can lead the obese person to death . The research aimed to verify overweight and obesity in a population sample of 352 individuals in the city of Floriano, Piauí. Anthropometric measures were collected, such as height and weight for calculating BMI and abdominal circumference. The prevalence of overweight among those surveyed was 39.5%, and for obesity was 17%. There was a higher prevalence for males for both overweight (41.4%) and obesity (17.2%). The prevalence of overweight and obesity among women was 37.6% and 16.9%, respectively. Regarding abdominal circumference (AC), the female sex presented a higher prevalence for obesity, with 64.6%, while the male sex was only 24.1%. In the association between BMI and CA, it was observed that the female tended to be more obese, with 51.68% presenting values above normal, compared to only 23.56% of males with altered values. We found that the overweight of 39.5% of Floriano individuals was lower than the national standard. Already the prevalence of obesity was in the same level of the national standard of 17%. It is important to note that males presented a higher prevalence of both overweight and obesity, although they showed a lower pre-disposition to abdominal obesity.