Prevalence of Overweight Or Obesity and Obesity Related Diseases in Qingdao Region, China

Objective The aim of the present study is to describe the prevalence of overweight or obesity patterns and relevant characters among Qingdao residents aged 25~65 years to reveal the associations between hypertension, diabetes mellitus and dyslipidemia; and try to explore the etiology of epidemic of overweight or obesity worldwide, as well as in the local region. Methods Using the data come from the Qingdao Health and Nutrition Survey 2002, where 7 146 Qingdao residents aged 25~65 years were enrolled, male 2,946 accounting 41.2% and female 4,200 accounting for 58.8%, as subjects to calculate the prevalence of overweight and obesity and to detect the prevalence variations between urban and rural area. The comparisons between urban and rural prevalence were performed using chi-square test.BMI 24 and 28 was defined as cut-off point for overweight and obesity respectively according to the recommendation of the Working Group on Obesity in China 2001. SPSS software has been used to extract the case number of hypertension, diabetes and dyslipidemia in another medical examination database between overweight or obesity and normal body weight stratified by age and gender, regarding the overweight and obesity as explanatory variable, the abnormal conditions as outcomes variable, meanwhile the simple logistic regression was applied to achieve the OR and the 95%CI. Results The prevalence of overweight and obesity were 39.6% and 18.8% respectively among Qingdao adults, it was dramatically higher than the average level of China, the Chinese adults prevalence of overweight and obesity were 22.8% and 7.1% respectively, while in big city were 30.0% and 12.3% respectively, which were claimed in the report of China Health and Nutrition Survey 2002. The prevalence of overweight and obesity increased with the age group in both gender, the prevalence of overweight for male in urban area was 44.5% compared with 35.4% in rural,P<0.01, the increment was enlarged especially for the older. There as no significant difference between urban area and rural in female. The prevalence of obesity for male in urban areas was significantly higher than that in rural area, 20.1% versus 12.0%, P<0.00, for female only in the older age group. The simple logistic regression results illustrated that the overweight and obesity were more likely to be associated with the hypertension, diabetes mellitus and dyslipidemia compared with the normal body weight population, by the range of different diseases the ORs were 2.35, 3.09 and 2.04 for overweight males; 4.31, 3.05 and 2.04 for obesity males; 2.07, 2.31 and 2.01 for overweight females; 4.39, 2.23 and 2.30 for obesity females. Conclusions The results of the study indicated that the emergence of overweight and obesity epidemic is an alarming public health problem in Qingdao region. The prevalence of overweight and obesity were attributed to nutrition transition and lifestyle; it is closely associated with certain cardiovascular disease risk factors including hypertension, diabetes mellitus and dyslipidemia. Currently, in order to decrease the incidence of cardiovascular diseases, the effective strategies and programs for controlling the risk factors should be generated in the community level. Furthermore, measures for preventing excess nutrient intake and promoting physical activity should be carried out by Qingdao public health agencies.

• http://journal.9med.net/qikan/article.php?id=180805