Relationship between Prevalence of Overweight and Obesity in Adolescent Girls, and Socio-Economic Status of their Families: A case study in Tehran

Background: Obesity of adolescents is a complicated health problem which depends on several factors like obesity of parents, childhood era nutrition, socio-economic condition, and physical activity. Its main goal was to find the relationship between prevalence of overweight and obesity among adolescent girls in Northern and Southern of Tehran, and socio-economic status of their families. Materials & Methods: This study was a cross-sectional, descriptive and analytical. In this study, 105 high-school adolescent girls from Northern part (with high socio-economic status) and 105 from Southern part (with low socio-economic status) of Tehran were selected through simple-randomized, two-step cluster sampling. The socio-economic information including education level and employment status of the samples' parents were collected using a self-administration questionnaire. Weight and height of the samples were measured according to the standard method. For measuring “Body Mass Index” (BMI) of the samples, the reference of CDC (center for Disease Control and Prevention-CDC 2000; USA) was used. Results: Prevalence of over-weight and obesity was 15.2% and 26.7% among the adolescent girls of Northern and Southern parts of Tehran, respectively (P=0.04). The results showed that there was a significant statistical relationship between the mean of Northern part girls' BMI and education level of their mothers (P=0.04), and also between overweight and obesity of Southern part girls and education level of their mothers (P< 0.05).Therefore, paying more attention to adolescents in educational and interventional programs of nutrition and health status improvement is necessary.