Abstract

Kiran Khan, Nazia Jameel and Rehana Khalil*

ABSTRACT

Background: Overweight children and adolescents with family history of chronic diseases are at greater risk to develop health problems compared to their normal-weight counterparts. The aim of this study was to assess the obesity and family history of non-communicable diseases among adolescents living in city of Karachi, Pakistan. Methods: A descriptive cross sectional study was conducted among 171 conveniently selected school and college going students studying at educational institutes of Karachi, Pakistan. The data was collected by trained data collectors and the height and weight of each student was measured after completion of the questionnaire to calculate BMI. The data were entered and analysed using IBM SPSS VERSION for Windows 20.0 software. Results: The average age of the students in the sample was 14-19 years, including 68% school going and 32 % College students.Amongst them, 57.3 % were males while 42.7% were females. Sample students belonged to a diverse ethnic and socioeconomic background. Almost half (53.8%) of the respondents had normal BMI while 17.5% were overweight and 28.6% were underweight. The study revealed, more than half of the sample (56.7 %) had positive family history (FH) of hypertension, 54.4 % had FH of Diabetes, 43.9 % had FH of high cholesterol, while 12.9 % had FH of asthma and 4.7 % had FH of sleep apnoea. Conclusions: The study revealed 17.5% of Pakistani adolescents were overweight and almost half of the sample showed family history of non-communicable diseases including Hypertension, Diabetes and High Cholesterol. There is a need to create awareness regarding healthy lifestyle to address these modifiable risk factors among the adolescents and the community at large, which ultimately will result in total risk reduction of future non-communicable diseases among them.