Introduction: obesity is defined as a situation by which there is excess body fat leading to health impairment and waist circumference-to height ratio (WHtR) is a simple, easy, inexpensive, highly reproducible and accurate tool for prevention , control, and intervention against child hood obesity.
Aim of the Work: comparison between Waist circumference-to- Height Ratio (WHtR) and Body Mass Index (BMI) for prediction of overweight and obesity in school children aged 5 - 15 years.
Patients and Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted on a sample of 1000 students who attended government schools conducted in the village “Qai" which is a rural area in Beni-Suef governorate. , during the first and the second school trimester between December 2017 and May 2018. Both sexes were included.
Results: in the present study, 1000 students, consisted of 506 female(50.6%) and 494 male(49.4%) with mean age ± SD 9.58 ± 2.24 years (range 5.1 – 15 years) and the overall prevalence of overweight and obesity according to BMI percentile was 34.6%, The overall prevalence of overweight was 17.7% more in girls than boys (9.6 % girls and 8.1% boys) and that of obesity was 16.9% more in girls than boys (9.7 % girls and 7.2 % boys) and hyperlipidemia in obese children was 32% , 7.7% of them had combined Hyperlipidemia, 14.2 % had hypertriglyceridemia & 10.1% had Hypercholesterolemia . the WHtR & BMI were highly sensitive as an indicator of adiposity, but WHtR was highly sensitive than BMI as WHtR showed that (Area Under Curve (AUC) = 0.986, sensitivity =94.87%, & specificity = 93.64 %) according to the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve analysis for obese cases from normal with cut-off point > 0.47 for both sexes, and BMI showed that (AUC = 0.935, sensitivity = 85.13%, & specificity = 87.3%).
Conclusion: The prevalence of overweight and obesity is considerably high in Egyptian children and was more in girls than in boys and hyperlipidemia in obese children was found in 32% of obese children and WHtR & BMI are highly accurate indicators of adiposity in Egyptian school children . Our findings suggest that the WHtR is useful index for school screening and is particularly useful and superior on BMI and not dependent on Age & sex and is easier to use.
Recommendations: We believe that the WHtR should become a routine measurement in Egyptian school children to predict childhood adiposity to deal with it and further studies are required to validate cutoff values and the effectiveness of WHtR as anthropometric index to predict childhood adiposity.