Assessment of weight-related factors of adolescents by private practitioners

BMC Family Practice

Research Article

Sai Yin Ho¹  Tai Hing Lam¹  Rong Huang¹  Wing Sze Lo¹ 

[1] School of Public Health, The University of Hong Kong, 21 Sassoon Road, Pokfulam, Hong Kong;

关键词: Adolescent;    Assessment;    Body weight;    Private practitioners;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2296-14-141

 received in 2013-04-02, accepted in 2013-09-20,  发布年份 2013

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundFew studies have examined how common physicians assess various weight-related variables and patient characteristics that predict such assessments based on adolescents’ reports. We aimed to examine how common adolescents received weight-related physical measurements and lifestyle enquiries (dietary habits and physical activity) from private practitioners and to identify factors associated with these assessments.MethodsIn the Hong Kong Student Obesity Surveillance (HKSOS) project, 33692 students (44.9% boys; mean age 14.8, SD 1.9 years, age range 11–18) from 42 randomly selected schools completed an anonymous questionnaire. The students were asked “In the past 12 months, has any private practitioners (or their nurses) measured or asked about these items?” Response options included height, weight, waist circumference (WC), blood pressure (BP), BMI, diet, and physical activity. Weight status was based on self-reported weight and height. Logistic regression was used to identify student characteristics associated with each assessment. Analyses were conducted using STATA 10.0.ResultsAmong 13283 students who had doctor consultations in the past 12 months, 37.9% received physical measurements or lifestyle enquiries, with weight (20.8%), height (16.8%) and blood pressure (11.5%) being the most common, followed by diet (8.1%), BMI (6.3%), WC and physical activity (both 4.6%). In general, adolescents who were female, older, underweight or overweight/obese, had parents with higher education level, and had actively asked private practitioners for advice about weight were more likely to receive assessments of weight-related factors.ConclusionsWeight-related factors in adolescents were infrequently assessed by private practitioners in Hong Kong. Generally, unhealthy weight, higher parental education and advice-seeking by adolescents predicted these assessments.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Huang et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2013. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.