Watching overweight: Monitoring in child health consultations

Abstract

Overweight and obesity in children is considered an epidemic but it can be prevented with one of the strategies, such as the monitoring of children in the child health consultations provided in the National Program for Children and Youth. Objectives: To identify the prevalence of overweight and obesity in children; Identify the number of child health consultations attended up to 18 months old; Verify if greater monitoring by the family health team up to 18 months is associated with the nutritional status of children. Methodology: Participants - 285 children aged 0 to 17 years. Instruments / Procedures: The percentile of body mass index (BMI) was used to determine nutritional status and the SClínico program was used to collect data of child health consultations. The BMI value used was related to the age of 5-6 years or in the case of children under this age was used the last value registered. Results: It was verified that 14.2% of the children were overweight and 12.3% were obese and that only 1.8% participated in all the consultations. There was a negative correlation between the number of consultations participated up to 18 months and the BMI of the children (- 0.123, p = 0.04), that is, as the number of consultations observed increases, BMI decreases. Conclusion: Since the birth of children, close and regular monitoring of the family health team is essential so that problems such as overweight and obesity can be prevented.